+1,700 procedures managed for a value of €1.7 billion in tenders every year, with a supplier base of over 2,000: from reactive to predictive procurement
Milano, July 8, 2026 – Open Fiber, Italy’s leading FTTH operator and Europe’s first wholesale-only operator, has chosen to turn complexity into competitive advantage. At the heart of this transformation, since the company’s founding in 2017, is JAGGAER’s e-procurement platform.
With 17.4 million real estate units covered by FTTH fiber, 167,000 km of infrastructure built, over €11.5 billion already invested, and now 4 million active residential customers on the network, Open Fiber manages one of the country’s most complex infrastructures. To build the fiber network — through its own investments in metropolitan areas, for the over 6,000 rural municipalities under a twenty-year public concession, and for the nearly 3,900 municipalities in intermediate areas as part of the Italia 1 Giga Plan — it became necessary to structure a complex multi-year procurement plan, which has seen a continuous flow of procedures, each with its own deadlines, parties, compliance requirements, and regulations.
It is in this context that procurement has, from the outset, taken on a strategic role that goes well beyond the cost-saving factor of the past. Moreover, in recent years, starting in 2020, market volatility has had a direct and measurable impact on operating costs: industrial producer prices in Europe have risen more in just six years than in the previous twenty, with significant impacts on fiber cables, civil works, and energy costs. In a context where uncertainty and volatility have become structural, relying on traditional reactive procurement tools stopped being sufficient the moment risk began moving faster than decisions.
The journey with JAGGAER was built in layers, following the company’s dizzying growth. In the first phase, the priority was bringing the entire supplier base onto the system: onboarding, document collection, qualification. Foundational work, essential for everything that would come after. In the second phase, the platform became the operational hub for all public and private tender procedures and contracts, covering the entire Source-to-Contract (S2C) process with full ERP integration: data flows bidirectionally between the two systems, is validated and returned updated, supporting procurement decisions with accurate information. Structured data for risk construction and analysis feeds the control tower on all information relating to the supplier base — a hugely important asset for procurement, no longer just to manage procedures, but also to anticipate what happens in the markets before it translates into an impact on construction sites. The use of JAGGAER’s S2C platform has made it possible to have structured data that form the foundation of the current control tower and an essential prerequisite for the future adoption of AI in procurement.
In addition, the JAGGAER One solution makes it possible to manage purchasing under private, public, and hybrid regimes, guaranteeing the traceability required in public procedures and the flexibility needed in private ones, with a level of control that Open Fiber’s scale makes essential. The same principle applies to supplier management: in a market where production capacity, financial soundness, and delivery times can change rapidly, qualification is not a formal requirement but continuous oversight. The support of JAGGAER’s solutions has made it possible to make this process systematic, updatable, and comparable across hundreds of parties in parallel.
The most recent step has been the development of a Price Observatory: a system that doesn’t just collect historical data, but analyzes trends, builds forward-looking scenarios, and quantifies the impact of risk variables on the budget before they translate into extra costs. It is the shift from a procurement function that records to one that anticipates.
Added to this is the sustainability dimension. Open Fiber has adopted a formal Sustainable Procurement Policy that integrates ESG criteria throughout the entire procurement process, in line with the company’s broader strategy, which includes a Net Zero Plan targeting net-zero emissions by 2040, validated by the Science Based Targets initiative. Managing this policy at scale requires those criteria to be embedded in the procurement platform, and JAGGAER has made exactly that possible.
“When we started, the priority was to equip ourselves with a procurement solution capable of meeting our needs and scaling, so it could support us as we grew. But Open Fiber’s complexity grows along with the network, in parallel with the demand for intelligence. Today JAGGAER is the tool where market data, supplier signals, and procurement data converge to support decision-making.” – Giuseppe Bavota, Head of Procurement Governance & Vendor Management, Open Fiber.
“Open Fiber represents one of the most interesting cases we have worked on. The journey we built together shows how a procurement platform can evolve alongside a company, from operational foundations to becoming a system for reading the market ahead of time. This is what we mean when we talk about procurement as a strategic function.” – Sara Picco, Account Director, JAGGAER
