Good partnerships don’t just happen.
For a key strategic alliance to work long-term, there must be mutual benefit, trust and both the desire to think differently combined with the willingness to do the hard yards.
Fortunately, Axiom and Roche have found exactly those attributes in one another.
In January 2023, Axiom and global pharmaceutical leader Roche launched OneMarketplace which is a cutting-edge enterprise MarketPlace platform that represented a transformative leap in catalog procurement. The platform not only fully digitises Roche’s global catalog content, but also revolutionises the buying process and experience, delivering real-time savings. Developed through deep collaboration over the previous two years, this groundbreaking procurement technology solution empowers organisations to establish, and seamlessly manage, their MarketPlace for any catalog content and related tail spend. It empowers touchless workflows across all content-based suppliers whilst simply connecting to the organisation’s S2P, ERP or increasingly orchestration layer, and as a result creates a seamless experience for users.
Speaking exclusively to CPOstrategy at DPW Amsterdam 2025 is Alistair Cane, Co-Founder and Director of Axiom since its creation in December 2020. Axiom is a next-generation procuretech innovation which allows enterprise organisations to automate catalog sourcing, free text orders and tail spend, whilst transforming the experience for buyers, suppliers and procurement. Its platform enables procurement to set up, manage and control a closed and automated MarketPlace environment for all content-based categories (both products and services) across the organisation.
Sitting alongside Cane is Patrick Foelck, Head of Strategy & Solutions Procurement at Roche. Indeed, DPW means a great deal to both organisations as it was actually as a result of a DPW Scout Lab project that the two organisations first started working together in 2021. Roche wanted to completely re-engineer its catalog solution and sought to generate efficiency through automation which subsequently led them to Axiom who were more than able to help.
The Axiom/Roche factor
“It was interesting because when we first saw the Scout Lab opportunity, we were questioning whether it was right for us at that particular time,” Cane tells us. “We started Axiom to bring a data science based approach to transactional procurement. We looked closely at the opportunity and when we read between the lines, we felt we were actually a very good fit for what Roche was looking for. Then we applied for the competition and went through a detailed process of talking extensively with the Roche team about how we could best meet their needs. This was the start of us shaping the solution jointly. The interesting feedback we were given after we won the remit was that one of the reasons that we were selected was because we listened to the problem and talked about how we could create something bespoke to solve it, rather than simply trying to shoehorn their problem into our platform.”
Foelck agrees with Cane and affirms that Roche didn’t simply need something that would do the job, the company required something ‘revolutionary.’ “The existing technologies and approaches to solve this challenging area weren’t great so we needed something more radical,” adds Foelck. “Axiom’s willingness to co-create and to invest as a small startup into a big corporate’s dream was exceptional. That created a baseline for this marriage and this success of the product and the solution.”
Cane explains that the other piece of the puzzle to get right was to ensure a level of understanding of the audiences that the platform represents. “Quite often when you think about buying channels, you are thinking about connecting buyers with suppliers,” he says. “We took a step back and said, ‘Okay, there are three parties involved in this. What does the buyer need? What do the suppliers need? But most importantly, what does procurement need to drive automation and improvement?’ We then looked at those three perspectives and built something completely unique because there are other solutions that might offer that basic connection between a buyer and supplier, but that often leave procurement in the dark. Being able to drive automation and control from a procurement perspective was really the north star from which we started.”
Whilst Roche was Axiom’s founding client, the platform today is rapidly scaling across many global enterprise organisations, within a variety of industry sectors, and has a global reach across the Americas, EMEA, APAC and beyond.
Future focused
With the future in mind, the next step for Axiom is one of growth. Cane advises that as of early next year, a new module called MarketPay will be launched that will allow organisations to search across all suppliers on the platform thus making Axiom the vendor of record for those suppliers. “This will be really interesting because they don’t have to onboard to the client’s source-to-pay system,” he tells us. “The buyers can search the content from these suppliers on the platform and buy from them through Axiom. That’s the next iteration.”
Foelck believes there are even greater things in store for not only the future of the partnership but the procurement function itself. “I truly think for procurement to be a valuable and strategic function in the future, it truly needs to reinvent itself,” reveals Foelck. “Are there other things we can do? What problems within the business can we solve? What corporate priorities can we address beyond the pure financial and compliance topics? To invest as a function into the future, we need to be excellent at ‘lowest cost’ for what we do, and that’s where the MarketPlace platform will play the biggest role. We really believe in this product and the roadmap. The more items we are thinking about adding to the platform, the more value we can drive and lower the cost from a processing perspective, whilst enabling us to focus on more strategic activities and reinvest resources. The future is enabled by the platform in many aspects – I think the platform is a foundational piece of our success in the future and sits at the core of our future procurement model.”
Pushing procurement forwards
Cane believes that in the modern procurement world there should be no place for tail spend as it’s defined today. According to Axiom, the mantra is to eliminate unmanaged completely. “It would be very sad if we’re here in a couple of years at DPW still talking about tail spend because tail spend needs to go and it needs to become a strategic managed platform-based channel instead.”
Foelck believes the best sourcing is the sourcing that is avoided but still delivers the outcomes. “Because sourcing to us as a procurement function as well as to the business is time consuming,” he explains. “However, we now have tools to do sourcing differently and still deliver the value, which frees us up to invest elsewhere. We need to think about the problem very differently and that’s where technology and platforms like this come in.”
Cane adds that where companies like Axiom really shine is in the ability to empower procurement to drive value in the C-suite. “Procurement is no longer an entity that’s doing procurement for procurement’s sake – it’s becoming a value tool to the business,” he explains. “There are traditional elements of procurement that now are very easy to automate and allow procurement professionals to be the value business partner that procurement really needs to be. I truly believe technology like ours is a part of driving that transition.”
Check out the article in the DPW Amsterdam Takeover Edition here.
Find out more about Axiom here.