About akirolabs:

akirolabs is a leading ProcureTech company delivering innovative solutions for strategic procurement. Trusted by leading enterprises across industries, the akirolabs Category Strategy Platform empowers procurement teams to transform category management — unlocking up to 5x greater business value and up to 50% higher efficiency. Powered by proprietary AI and a groundbreaking methodology, akirolabs enables teams to develop smarter, faster, and more business-aligned strategies — all within a single, collaborative, AI-augmented workspace. Headquartered in Berlin, akirolabs was founded in 2021 by a team of procurement veterans and experts, and is backed by top-tier investors and innovation grants. To learn more, follow akirolabs on LinkedIn.

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Category management was designed to be strategic. Yet in many organizations, what passes for strategy has flatlined — or worse, lingers on as a **“zombie strategy”**: technically alive and in use, but lifeless, valueless in practice.

Procurement aspires to drive innovation, resilience, and sustainability while unlocking measurable business value. But the reality is that too many strategies:

*   are built once, in isolation, then shelved,
*   obsess over cost while sidelining broader value levers,
*   rely on outdated frameworks and siloed manual tools,
*   and fail to evolve as business and market conditions change.

The result? Strategies that look good on paper but deliver little impact — disconnected from the enterprise agenda, ignored by business partners, and abandoned when disruption strikes.

This session conducts the autopsy. We’ll examine:

*   **The brain** → outdated thinking rooted in 1980s cost-power models.
*   **The heart** → diseased by a fixation on savings at the expense of real business goals.
*   **The lungs** → suffocating under PowerPoint, Excel, and disconnected processes.

But this is not just about what died. It’s about what survives.

Category management can, and must, evolve into a **living and Next Gen discipline**: continuously refreshed, digitally enabled, co-created with the business, and aligned to enterprise value drivers.

Join **Sabrina, Michael, and Robert** as they dissect the past, expose the warning signs of “dead” category strategies, and prescribe the practices that will bring category management back to life, but as a true driver of growth, resilience, and competitive advantage.

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**Zombie Strategy**

> A Zombie Strategy is a procurement or category strategy that continues to exist in name, documentation or actual practice but lacks real vitality, alignment, or impact. Like its namesake, it is outdated, mechanical, and mindlessly repeated —appearing active in use by procurement while delivering little to no business value. Zombie Strategies are typically cost-obsessed, siloed, and reactive, leaving organizations vulnerable to disruption, value leakage, and strategic irrelevance.
