‍H&Z Management Consulting and akirolabs have announced a partnership to support procurement organizations in building more dynamic, collaborative, and digitally enabled category management capabilities.

Procurement teams are under growing pressure to make faster strategic decisions while navigating increasingly complex supply markets. Volatility, geopolitical uncertainty, disruption, and rising expectations around resilience are making it clear that category strategies can no longer remain static. They need to be continuously updated, aligned with business priorities, and supported by structured decision-making.

Through this partnership, H&Z Management Consulting and akirolabs bring together consulting expertise and digital enablement to help procurement organizations across the DACH region move toward NextGen Category Management.

What the partnership brings together

H&Z supports organizations in transforming procurement functions, strengthening category management capabilities, and driving sustainable value creation. The firm’s procurement consulting approach combines strategy, digital enablement, and operational excellence to help organizations strengthen performance across their supply base. H&Z publicly describes procurement as one of the strongest value drivers in any organization.

akirolabs provides the AI-powered digital foundation for designing, managing, and evolving category strategies across the lifecycle. The platform supports procurement teams in moving beyond static planning and fragmented workflows toward a more connected, collaborative, and forward-looking approach to category management.

Together, H&Z and akirolabs aim to support procurement teams in:

• structuring category strategies more consistently
• improving collaboration across stakeholders
• making faster and better-informed strategic decisions
• adapting strategies as supply markets evolve
• strengthening category management maturity
• unlocking greater value from spend

Procurement is entering a new phase of transformation.

For years, procurement digitalization focused heavily on operational efficiency: automating processes, improving visibility, and reducing manual effort. These capabilities remain important, but today’s procurement challenges require more strategic, adaptive, and business-aligned ways of working. Category management sits at the center of this shift. It is where procurement teams define priorities, assess markets, align stakeholders, evaluate risk, and connect supplier decisions to broader business outcomes. Yet in many organizations, category strategies are still managed through static documents, disconnected tools, and manual processes. This makes it harder for procurement teams to stay on top of changing market conditions, respond effectively to disruption, and continuously align strategies with business needs.

Enabling NextGen Category Management

NextGen Category Management requires more than a one-time strategy exercise. It requires a continuous way of working that combines procurement expertise, stakeholder alignment, market intelligence, structured decision-making, and digital enablement. This is the shared focus of the partnership between H&Z and akirolabs. H&Z brings deep experience in procurement transformation and category management. akirolabs brings a platform designed to help procurement teams structure strategies, collaborate across functions, and continuously adapt category plans as conditions change.

Now is the time to rethink procurement.

In a world defined by volatility, disruption, and increasing complexity, procurement organizations need to move faster, think more strategically, and stay continuously aligned with their categories and spend. The partnership between H&Z Management Consulting and akirolabs is designed to support this shift by combining proven transformation expertise with AI-powered category management technology.

Together, the companies aim to help procurement organizations across the DACH region build the next generation of strategic procurement.

About H&Z Management Consulting

H&Z Management Consulting is a management consulting firm with a strong focus on procurement, transformation, strategy, digital enablement, operational excellence, and sustainable value creation. H&Z supports organizations in rethinking how procurement works, strengthening performance across the supply base, and delivering measurable impact in increasingly complex business environments.  

About akirolabs

akirolabs is an AI-powered strategic procurement platform focused on category management, collaboration, and decision-making. The platform helps enterprise procurement teams develop, align, and continuously steer category strategies in a structured and business-aligned way. akirolabs supports organizations in modernizing strategic procurement by combining AI-driven enablement, procurement methodology, and collaborative workflows.

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