Trend Report 2026: Time for Honesty

The procurement of technical parts in Europe faces immense pressure in 2026: rising costs, increasing geopolitical risks, an ever-tightening regulatory framework, and growing demands for transparency and sustainability. Those who continue to focus primarily on unit prices will lose out—on supply security, competitiveness, and ultimately credibility with internal stakeholders and end customers. The Trend Report 2026 outlines the most relevant developments and shows what procurement professionals need to prepare for now.

With CBAM, CSRD, CSDDD, and other EU initiatives, the regulatory framework has become a hard control instrument for procurement decisions. For technical parts, this means: carbon footprint, labor and environmental standards, and supply chain due diligence are increasingly having a direct impact on supplier selection and evaluation.

CBAM gradually makes CO₂-intensive raw materials and manufacturing steps from third countries more expensive. The CSRD forces many companies to disclose their sustainability performance in detail—including Scope 3 emissions from the supply chain. The CSDDD establishes supply chain due diligence obligations that can no longer be handled with a one-time supplier questionnaire. In parallel, the Digital Product Passport and other EU omnibus initiatives are driving the transparency agenda at the product level.

For procurement, this means: ESG criteria are moving from presentations and mission statements into concrete scorecards, contract clauses, and audit plans. Suppliers who cannot provide reliable evidence become a real risk—regardless of their price.

In 2026, the focus in technical parts procurement is shifting from traditional price negotiations to a holistic view of costs and risks.

TLC (Total Landed Cost) serves as an important entry model: it broadens the perspective to include transportation, customs duties, insurance, CO₂ costs, and administrative expenses—making it clear that "buying cheap" on paper often means "expensive in the overall process."

With the systematic expansion to TCO consideration (Total Cost of Ownership), the picture solidifies. Here, the TLC perspective widens to include quality costs, complaint rates, rework, setup times, internal inspection efforts, safety stocks, and the monetary evaluation of delivery delays, which are systematically recorded and assessed.

Procurement professionals are developing a significantly broader understanding of costs: moving away from individual orders toward viewing complete lifecycles of assemblies, series, and customer projects.

Digital platforms and e-sourcing solutions are fundamentally changing access to suppliers. Industrial marketplaces like Techpilot enable technical parts tenders to be placed broadly within a specialized manufacturing ecosystem, benchmark offers, and make potential visible in the European supplier network. For procurement professionals, comparability is becoming a standard requirement: prices, delivery times, certifications, machinery, industry focus, and ESG profiles can increasingly be compared in a structured manner.

In parallel, data spaces like Manufacturing-X and Factory-X are developing. The goal is a secure, standardized data basis across company boundaries—from CAD models and manufacturing parameters to quality and sustainability data. For procurement, this means: fewer media breaks, better data quality, fewer interpretation errors in drawings and specifications, and in the long term a significantly more stable foundation for automated analyses and AI-supported evaluations.

Artificial intelligence in procurement is no longer just a marketing topic: applications range from automated risk radar analyses through price and capacity forecasts to suggestions for alternative suppliers and sourcing scenarios. What matters is not the tool, but the data foundation—and here, platforms, e-procurement systems, and data spaces are the real leverage.

The requirements for CNC contract manufacturers are rising: alongside traditional quality and delivery performance, ESG criteria, documentation capability, and auditability are moving to the forefront. Certifications (such as ISO 9001, ISO 14001), evidence of labor and environmental standards, and willingness to be transparent about CO₂ data and material origin are increasingly becoming the entry ticket to demanding supply chains.

Procurement professionals face the task of integrating these diverse aspects into consistent supplier management. Scorecards that combine price, quality, delivery performance, ESG, and resilience criteria are becoming standard. Complaint data, inspection reports, and audit results are no longer just operational documentation, but raw material for strategic decisions: who stays in the portfolio, who is further developed, who is phased out.

The relationship with suppliers is shifting: away from pure price negotiation toward a partnership-based, data-driven development—at least for critical technical parts and key suppliers.

The described trends cannot be addressed with the existing role logic of "buyer with basic technical understanding." Technical parts procurement in 2026 requires different competencies: understanding of TLC/TCO models, confident handling of regulations (CBAM, CSRD, CSDDD), basic knowledge of ESG standards, sufficient data literacy in dealing with platforms and e-procurement systems, as well as the ability to bring together technical, commercial, and regulatory perspectives.

At the same time, pressure in day-to-day operations remains high—and the shortage of skilled workers in technical procurement is real. Those who do not actively address this gap will hardly be able to adequately meet the new requirements. Training, clear role profiles, and better integration with engineering, quality, controlling, and sustainability are becoming core questions of value creation development.

2026 forces technical parts procurement in Europe toward greater honesty: about real costs, about risks, about the reliability of supply chains, and about one's own data and competency foundation. Those who continue to chase unit prices and view regulation as a burdensome duty will be overwhelmed by developments. Those who consistently integrate TCO, TLC, resilience, ESG, and digital platforms can use the current situation as an opportunity: to make their own procurement model robust, future-proof, and significantly more strategic.