OMNEA
The shift Kai needed to make wasn’ t just cultural. It needed to cover people, processes and systems at the same time.“ I have given them the right to say no, and I have taken the heat from the business. I said,‘ If you want to get an invoice paid, go to accounts payable. It’ s not procurement.’ It’ s great that you find us helpful, but we need to focus on procurement, not on offering help. I needed to turn this helping into strategic impact.”
Why the legacy solution wouldn’ t work For a business of The Adecco Group’ s size and complexity, the standard response to fragmented procurement is a monolithic, legacy Procure-to-Pay solution: one system, enforced centrally, replacing everything else. It is the conventional prescription for exactly the situation Kai had inherited.
He rejected it. It wasn’ t an ideological position: Adecco had already tried the P2P route, and the rollout had been halted after just four countries. The integration requirements across multiple ERPs and hundreds of legal entities were vast. The cost risked running into millions of dollars, and the timelines promised to stretch over a few years. And all of that investment would have gone into digitising the moment of purchase, the PO, the invoice, the payment, leaving the fundamental problem completely untouched:
54 September 2026