Signify Didn’t Fix Procurement by Chasing Green. They Fixed It by Hunting Red.
Procurement is the only function in a company that sees everything at once – cost, cash, risk, supply continuity, product roadmap. No other function has that view. And yet most procurement teams are still measuring the wrong things, digitizing the wrong processes, and walking into the wrong conversations.
Luc Broussaud, CPO of Signify, has spent 30 years building procurement into a strategic lever at some of the world’s most complex manufacturers – GE, Nokia, and now Signify, where he manages €3.5 billion in spend across 20,000 suppliers. In this video, he shares what that experience actually taught him, and what most CPOs are still getting wrong.
From Deployment to Performance: What JAGGAER Actually Changed
His starting point: lasting value does not come from negotiation. It comes from a strong baseline. And you cannot have a baseline without digitization. Not digitization as a data exercise, but digitization as simplification. His rule, learned at GE, is unambiguous – lean first, then digitize. A bad process digitized is still a bad process. A lean process digitized is a competitive advantage.
That philosophy shaped what he looked for in JAGGAER. Not features. Outcomes. He needed a platform that could handle real complexity at scale, built by people who understood how a CPO thinks. What evolved over time was a shift from deployment to performance – from “did we go live” to “what did this actually change in our results.” His team went from spending 30 to 40 percent of their time on administrative tasks to running 550 e-auctions in a single year, processing thousands of RFQs, and managing all 20,000 suppliers on one platform. That volume is not possible without the right infrastructure.
JAGGAER gave us the infrastructure to have the data available immediately. Not after three weeks of Excel work.
Luc Broussaud, CPO at Signify
Stop Measuring What’s Comfortable. Start Measuring What Hurts.
On performance measurement, Luc is direct: most teams measure what the system gives them. Savings realized. Contract coverage. On-time delivery. Clean numbers, comfortable to present – and largely based on forecast, not actuals. What those numbers do not tell you is whether your supply base can survive a disruption, whether your lead times are competitive, or whether your organization is getting more efficient or just bigger.
His preferred alternative: metrics that hurt, in a good way. Active dual sourcing rate with live volume allocation. Lead time versus theoretical minimum, priced per day in euros. Procurement cost as a percentage of revenue, tracked annually. These three create conversations that savings reports never create – with engineering, with the CFO, with the CEO.
And then there is the all-green scorecard problem. If everything is green, one of two things is true: targets are too low, or the team has learned to manage the measurement instead of the performance. A procurement scorecard should create tension. No tension means no ambition. The CPOs Luc respects always have at least two red KPIs – not because they are failing, but because they are honest.
If your board sees your scorecard and has no question, no challenge, nothing to push back on – that is not a good sign. That is a problem.
Luc Broussaud, CPO at Signify
The Metric That Forces a Decision
His most provocative metric: missed opportunity. Not what was saved, but what was left on the table. At GE, he once sent an email to the SVP of Operations with a single subject line: “Please confirm you don’t want $4.2M.” The decision was made in 24 hours. Most procurement reports inform. Missed opportunity forces a decision. That is a different dynamic entirely.
The seat at the table, he says, is never given. Engineering does not respect procurement opinions. It respects procurement facts. When you walk in with a should-cost model, a supplier risk profile, and a lead time benchmark – backed by data available immediately, not after three weeks of Excel work – the conversation changes. That is what JAGGAER gave his team: the infrastructure to show up with facts, every time.
His advice to any CPO evaluating procurement technology today is simple. Start with one question: does this platform help me have a better conversation with my CFO, or does it help my buyers raise purchase orders faster? Those are not the same thing. Know which one you are buying.
The seat at the table is not about politics. It is about whether you can answer the hard question in the room without saying “let me come back to you on that”.
Luc Broussaud, CPO at Signify
Watch the full conversation above.
