What is a procurement collaboration?
Companies have pooled purchasing for a century. What differs is how deep the collaboration goes — from sharing volume to sharing resources — and depth is what decides the result.
A procurement collaboration is a network of independent companies that pool their procurement volume and negotiate supplier agreements as one bloc. The members remain independent companies with their own strategy, suppliers of choice and balance sheets. What they share is negotiating weight — and, depending on the model, a good deal more.
The idea is old. Farmers’ cooperatives, hospital purchasing groups and retail buying groups have pooled volume for a century. What has changed is how far the collaboration can go: from a shared price list to a shared organisation, shared systems and shared data. The five levels below are ordered by depth, because depth is what decides the result.
Levels 1–3: pooling volume
Level 1 — non-binding cooperation. A number of companies agree to buy from the same suppliers and ask for a volume discount in return. There is no dedicated organisation; one member or a part-time secretariat coordinates. The discount is modest and quick to obtain, but nothing ensures that members actually buy on the agreement, and compliance erodes.
Level 2 — structured collaboration on defined categories. The members agree which categories to collaborate on and run joint negotiations in those. Still without a permanent organisation, and still without any obligation to buy. Better than level 1 in the chosen categories; otherwise the same weaknesses.
Level 3 — company-organised collaboration without obligation. A permanent organisation is established — a purchasing consortium or group purchasing organisation (GPO) — that negotiates framework agreements and makes them available to members. Negotiation becomes professional and the catalogue broad. But the agreements are typically negotiated as a percentage off the supplier’s list rather than on the members’ actual articles, the income often comes from supplier rebates, and members are free to buy elsewhere. Savings negotiated and savings realised drift apart.
Levels 4–5: pooling resources
From level 4 the collaboration changes character. It is no longer only about combining volume; it is about sharing resources that no single mid-sized company can build or justify alone.
Level 4 — company-organised binding collaboration. The members commit to buy on the awarded agreements, and the organisation operates a shared purchase-to-pay platform through which those agreements are used. Loyalty to the agreements becomes high, because ordering on them is the easy path. Suppliers see this and price accordingly. The platform also produces something the lighter models never have: complete, factual transaction data for the whole bloc.
Level 5 — strategic binding collaboration with deep cooperation on category and article management. The shared organisation becomes the members’ common procurement function for the categories in the bloc. It owns the category strategy, specifies tenders on actual requirements at article level, and re-tenders as agreements expire. The data from level 4 feeds every new round. Agreements and insight improve each cycle.
What shared resources make possible
A single company’s procurement team has the capacity to tender a handful of categories a year, and must then live with the result until there is time to return to it. A shared organisation has the capacity to run tender after tender, continuously, across the whole bloc. That alone changes the economics: the saving stops being a one-time event and becomes a compounding one.
The same logic applies beyond tenders. A purchase-to-pay platform, ERP integrations, supplier catalogue management, data and insight capability, ESG reporting, supplier due diligence under the Norwegian Transparency Act and equivalent legislation — each of these is expensive to build and staff for one company, and modest when shared across many. The collaboration turns fixed costs that every member would otherwise carry alone into a shared capability that all of them use.
Why depth matters
The five levels sit on one axis. The further along it a collaboration goes, the more of the saving reaches the member’s accounts. Levels 1–3 capture a discount. Level 4 ensures the discount is used. Level 5 improves it every cycle. The difference between savings negotiated and savings realised is largely a question of depth.
Depth also changes what procurement is for the member. At the lighter levels, procurement remains an administrative function that occasionally obtains a better price. At the deepest level it becomes a shared capability: category expertise, market knowledge and transaction facts that move procurement from cost control to competitive advantage.
Depth requires trust. Members share real volumes and real data only when the architecture guarantees that each member owns its data and that every member receives the same prices and terms.
Aitenda
Aitenda is a strategic procurement collaboration organised as Aitenda Group AS, based in Oslo. It operates at level 4 from day one — binding agreements, a shared purchase-to-pay platform (aitenda.net) and full data insight — with level 5 as the destination. Tenders are run on the members’ combined volume, category by category at article level. Members remain independent, own their own data, and receive the same product prices and terms on every supplier agreement, regardless of their own volume in the category.