Supply chain disruptions cost industrial companies an average of 15 days of downtime per year – a 4% capacity reduction that adds up to $44 billion in lost output globally. That's a normal year. The more important question is whether your company can see where the risk sits before it becomes a disruption.

Most can't. The risk exists – but critical raw materials (CRM) don't arrive by name in a purchase order. They arrive embedded in components – in the magnets inside motors, in the coatings on circuit boards – sourced through suppliers who often don't have full visibility themselves. The exposure is real; it's just invisible to any standard procurement system or risk register.

That's exactly the challenge addressed at Procurement Summit 2026 in Hamburg. A large European manufacturer in a regulated industry depends on a range of critical raw materials – not directly, but embedded in the parts and assemblies it sources. Together with Dr. Moritz Nill from ctrl+s, Rainer Roßmüller from Siemens Healthineers walked through how they built visibility: starting from existing procurement spend data, mapping it against a material flow model, and producing a complete CRM exposure map across every tier, every supplier, and all 33 EU-critical raw materials.

Three Things From the Session Worth Taking Back:

• Your direct suppliers probably can't tell you either. This challenge isn't unusual: Tier 1 suppliers often don't have visibility into what their own supply chains contain. Waiting for that information to surface means waiting until something stops. The best place to start is mapping it from your own data first.
• You don't need to start from scratch. The methodology ctrl+s uses begins with the spend cube – what you buy, from whom, and how much. Mapping that against a product group model produces a complete CRM exposure picture across all suppliers and tiers, without launching a separate supplier data collection program.
• The map tells you where to focus, not where to stop. Once the hotspots are visible – by material, supplier, and category – teams can decide where to investigate further, where to diversify sourcing, and where supplier conversations need to happen. The map helps narrow the hard analytical work to the real pockets of risk.