Outokumpu Transforms Global Raw Material Sourcing with Metalshub

Outokumpu plays a central role in the global stainless steel value chain, serving industries that demand high levels of traceability, quality, and sustainability. The procurement of raw materials such as stainless scrap, ferroalloys, and specialty metals represents a major performance lever for cost, quality, and ESG control.

As market volatility, regulatory scrutiny, and supply chain complexity increased, Outokumpu launched a group-wide initiative to modernise its sourcing operations. The company sought to create a more efficient, transparent, and data-driven procurement organisation capable of scaling across all material categories.

The transformation was presented jointly by Outokumpu and Metalshub at the International Stainless & Special Steel Conference 2025 by SMR Events in Istanbul, Turkey, outlining how one of the world’s leading stainless steel producers has digitalised its source-to-contract processes using Metalshub’s Procurement Solution.

Outokumpu’s global procurement organisation managed a wide variety of raw materials and contract types across multiple plants and regions. Despite having highly experienced procurement professionals, the company faced several challenges common to industrial procurement:

• Inconsistent sourcing processes between sites and categories
• Heavy reliance on Outlook and Excel for core workflows
• Limited visibility and governance across the source-to-contract lifecycle
• Manual reconciliation and offer comparison creating an administrative burden
• Difficulties in scaling and ensuring knowledge transfer

These inefficiencies meant that procurement teams spent more time managing exceptions and manual reporting than identifying market opportunities. Outokumpu’s goal was to establish a harmonised, transparent, and data-centric sourcing process that would enable experts to focus on strategy and supplier value creation.

Outokumpu defined its transformation along three key pillars: People, Processes, and Tools.
To achieve balance between these, the company set out to:

1. Empower experts to focus on value-adding tasks rather than administrative work.
2. Standardise workflows across demand planning, sourcing, and procure-to-pay.
3. Select a digital platform to connect systems end-to-end and ensure governance and auditability.

The result was a structured roadmap for a connected procurement environment:

• A unified data layer for master data and reporting
• Harmonised process templates across all sourcing flows
• Full integration between the sourcing platform and SAP ERP

Outokumpu selected Metalshub as the platform to enable this end-to-end digitalisation.

Outokumpu evaluated various software providers against rigorous requirements: capability to handle all transaction types (contract call-offs and spot tenders), compatibility with existing systems, and ability to bring transparency and compliance.

Outokumpu licensed the Metalshub platform to digitise sourcing activities and embedded it into their ERP, giving them the connective tissue between planning, sourcing, and execution.

The implementation began with mapping the full flows:

• Flow #1 — Long-term contract call-offs: How plant requests, call-off confirmations, and delivery are handled from existing long-term agreements
• Flow #2 — Spot tenders: How invites, offer collection, normalisation, and award decisioning occur

Christian Reuss, Account Executive at Metalshub, showed two concrete innovations in this joint solution:

 

1. Digital Call-Off Execution Under Long-Term Contracts

Outokumpu manages complex long-term supply agreements for materials such as molybdenum, each involving numerous optionalities: Different product forms, origins, volumes, packaging, and plant destinations.

Metalshub provides a centralised contract repository capturing all these parameters. When a plant initiates a call-off, the system automatically ensures consistency with the contract terms:

• Remaining quantities are verified against contract balances
• The requester specifies product form, packaging, delivery site, and date window
• The supplier receives a digital call-off for confirmation or adjustment
• Once confirmed, all data is transmitted to SAP to automatically generate the purchase order

This digital workflow replaces manual coordination and fragmented spreadsheets, ensuring full traceability and governance from contract to execution.

 

2. Automated Offer Normalisation and Comparison for Spot Tenders

In spot sourcing, comparing supplier offers has traditionally been one of the most time-consuming steps. Metalshub’s normalisation engine automates this process by:

• Highlighting deviations from preferred terms (Incoterms, payment terms, currencies, etc.)
• Converting all offers into a unified total landing price (for example, DDP to a target plant), accounting for freight, insurance, financing cost, and currency conversion
• Enabling true “apples-to-apples” comparison and direct award decisioning

With all offers displayed and normalised within Metalshub, procurement teams gain faster decision cycles, reduced manual effort, and complete audit trails for every tender.

Although the transformation is ongoing, the gains are already tangible:

• Efficiency & Focus: Procurement experts now spend far less time on administrative cleanup, reconciliation, or managing parallel spreadsheets. Instead, they focus energy on market intelligence, supplier negotiations, and strategic decisions.
• Consistency & Governance: All sourcing flows—contract call-offs and spot tenders—now follow harmonised, standardised processes. The system maintains transparency, compliance, and auditability across the full source-to-contract lifecycle.
• Transparency & Reporting: By embedding a data layer and live dashboards, Outokumpu’s leadership gains visibility into sourcing performance, supplier adherence, and category behaviour. Real-time metrics replace retrospective manual reporting.
• Scalability & Future-Proofing: The solution is designed not only for major categories like stainless scrap, molybdenum, or ferrochrome, but also scalable to secondary and smaller material classes. The architecture supports growth without proportional increases in manual effort.
• Talent & Organisational Appeal: With consistent processes and good tools, the procurement function becomes more attractive to new talent. As Julian Gatzweiler from Outukumpu put it: “We’re not doing anything differently. We’re just doing it more efficiently.” Christian echoed that from the tech side: “We build software to empower experts so they can spend time on what really matters.”

Outokumpu plans to deepen its partnership with Metalshub along several vectors:

• Expand usage across all raw material categories.
• Embed sustainability and ESG criteria into sourcing decisions and tie in the total cost of ownership (TCO) or CO₂ impact into the normalisation logic.
• Enhance analytics and predictive sourcing: Supply risk alerts, market opportunity detection, scenario modelling.
• Continuous evolution of governance and control layers, with the ability to audit and steer sourcing behaviour.

This journey sets a benchmark in the stainless and metals procurement sector: combining structured processes, digital tools, and domain expertise to unlock scalable, high‑performance sourcing.