A Smarter Way to Capture Real Value

Gartner’s Procurement Chessboard has long served as a foundational tool in the procurement world—offering a structured way to apply classic sourcing levers and strategies across four quadrants. While its contribution is undeniable, today’s procurement challenges require more than strategic postures and traditional levers. They demand operational agility, cross-functional alignment, and insight-driven action.

That’s why we’ve developed the 3D Sourcing Dashboards—a next-generation framework that builds on the legacy of the Procurement Chessboard, but takes it further, deeper, and more dynamically into today’s reality.

Instead of a static quadrant, we work with six interactive dashboards, each designed to help procurement teams not only strategize but execute across the full spectrum of value creation:

1. Cost Efficiency Dashboard – sharpen your sourcing levers to reduce spend.
2. Digital Readiness Dashboard – assess your technology landscape and data integration maturity.
3. ESG Optimization Dashboard – align sourcing with sustainability, compliance, and ethical goals.
4. Risk Assurance Dashboard – map supplier and market risks, and prepare mitigation strategies.
5. Innovation Dashboard – identify opportunities for innovation, speed, or quality.
6. Operations & Execution Dashboard – define and refine operational sourcing strategies, manage transactional excellence, and support production-critical procurement needs.

Where the original chessboard offered strategic direction, the 3D Dashboards offer direction and depth. They interact, enabling you to trace a line from a digital maturity gap (Dashboard 2) to operational inefficiencies (Dashboard 6) or ESG blind spots (Dashboard 3). You can dynamically zoom in on each dashboard to identify the most relevant lever and deploy the right method—all based on your current maturity, urgency, and performance goals.

How Is This Different?

Unlike traditional quadrant models:
– The 3D Sourcing Dashboards are modular and interconnected, not static.
– They guide both strategic planning and tactical execution.
– They are built to handle cross-domain decisions, integrating digital, ESG, risk, and operational complexity.
– They allow dynamic prioritization: users can zoom in on methods that deliver measurable value based on current business conditions.

So, how do you know which dashboard to start with and which method to focus on?

That’s where the Chessboard logic comes in. Each quadrant and lever helps you define your strategic intent—are you aiming to optimize, innovate, mitigate risk, or transform? Each lever is supported by a set of proven methods—from consignment warehousing and category consolidation to predictive analytics and supplier innovation programs. Based on your business goals, current maturity, and urgency for impact, we guide you to the right quadrant, lever, and method.

What value can you expect?

With the right focus, the value is tangible:

• 5–12% cost reduction through optimized sourcing, bundling, and digital auctions.
• 30–50% cycle time improvements via digital contracting and automated data flows.
• Risk exposure reductions of 20–40%, especially in volatile supply markets.
• Increased ESG performance and compliance transparency.
• Organizational uplift, through better capability mapping and role clarity.

You’ll identify exactly where the value is hidden—in maverick spend, poor contract coverage, outdated data, underused supplier capacity, or unmeasured ESG risks—and we’ll help you quantify it, prioritize it, and go after it methodically.

Whether you’re transforming your organization into a value engine, preparing for a digital leap, or simply trying to get more from your current capabilities—this platform will show you how to move, where to play, and what to win.

Ready for your download of the 3D Chessboard? Click on the link to get it for free and please provide feedback once you have started to use it!

Note: Gartner’s Procurement Chessboard is a well-established strategic framework for procurement levers. The 3D Sourcing Dashboards presented here are an independently developed model that extends the procurement decision-making landscape with new dimensions focused on operational execution, digital maturity, ESG integration, and cross-dashboard interaction.