Futura Solutions is realigning itself: Procurement intelligence is the next stage of development

From SAP-native sourcing to supporting intelligent procurement decisions: Futura Solutions further develops its strategic direction. Going forward, the focus will be on procurement intelligence – built on existing SAP-native processes and solutions.

Digitalizing purchasing processes has long been a key focus of procurement transformation. Structuring requests, making quotations comparable, documenting award decisions, and avoiding media discontinuity: FUTURA has been developing SAP-native solutions for precisely these purposes for many years.

With the capabilities of modern AI, the question has shifted. Nearly 70 percent of procurement managers at European medium-sized companies are using AI, testing it, or planning to implement it — 6 percent rate the maturity level of this implementation as high (Mittelstandsbarometer 2026). The real challenge lies between these two figures: How can companies move from digitized procurement processes to better procurement decisions?

From the purchasing process to the purchasing decision

Futura Solutions is taking the existing SAP-native procurement platform a step further to develop procurement intelligence. The existing processes and solutions serve as the foundation for this. The new element is the intelligence layer built on top of them.

“Procurement intelligence comes into play at the point where specific decisions are made: Analyzing information, identifying connections, supporting evaluations, and creating a transparent basis for decision-making. Our mission is thus shifting from supporting procurement processes to supporting procurement decisions,” says Hartmut Schwadtke, CEO of Futura Solutions, describing the new direction.

Procurement intelligence combines context, procurement expertise, and AI

The information needed to make a purchasing decision is usually available in companies: In SAP, requests, quotations, contracts, supplier information, and past transactions. The key is to understand this information within the proper business context and combine it with specialized procurement expertise.

FUTURA makes this expertise available as reusable capabilities: Understanding requirements, matching and comparing quotations, validating prices, verifying evidence, or preparing evaluations. AI can be used for this, as well as rules, calculations, and other intelligence services.

SAP nativeness is still the prerequisite – for context and implementation

The new direction does not change a core principle of FUTURA: SAP remains the leading system and an essential foundation for procurement.

In SAP, requirements, purchase orders, suppliers, terms and conditions, and historical transactions are not stored as individual data items. They are the results of real business processes and are therefore already embedded in a business context. It is precisely this context that is relevant to procurement intelligence. Rather than creating a new, parallel data environment for AI, the business context required for a specific task should be provided in a targeted manner from the relevant systems.

The same applies to implementation. An evaluation produced in the SAP process can also take effect there — as a document, with the approvals, roles, and verification steps that apply anyway. This brings automation in purchasing within reach. In the future, AI can take over tasks in the procurement process on this basis.

What will change for users

FUTURA Smart and FUTURA Engineering remain central components of the platform. This is where procurement processes take place and where a significant portion of the business context that procurement intelligence draws upon is generated.

Procurement Intelligence is not a separate tool used alongside purchasing. It links the relevant context with the necessary  capabilities immediately during the procurement process. Information from SAP, quotations, documents, or supplier data no longer need to be manually compiled and organized first.

This also changes the role of the purchaser. When intelligence is available where decisions are made, the purchaser’s work shifts from gathering and manually processing information to evaluating, monitoring, and making decisions. The purchaser does not begin by searching for information, but rather by evaluating it.

The first use cases are already being developed in collaboration with existing customers and validated based on real procurement scenarios.

Learn more about the new direction in the latest blog post: A short interview with Hartmut Schwadtke on purchasing decisions in the age of AI.

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