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Nearly 47% of procurement leaders don’t trust their supplier data, and only a small group of “Operational Elite” are able to achieve faster-than-average onboarding times and high data quality, according to Graphite Connect’s The 2026 Supplier Data Benchmark Report.
"Procurement teams face an artificial trade-off: do it fast or do it right," says Conrad Smith, CEO of Graphite Connect. “We’ve operated under that false assumption for decades. But some have cracked the code on how to do both, and the Operational Elite are turning that into a business advantage.”
Key takeaways:
- Increased risk exposure is the most common challenge posed by dirty data: 55% of procurement leaders said this is a core challenge.
- Procurement teams lose a massive chunk of their weekly capacity to manual data work, specifically averaging 8.14 hours on onboarding tasks alone and 8.89 hours fielding redundant supplier questions.
- Onboarding times can stretch up to 91-plus days. While the market baseline sits at an average onboarding time of 18.8 days, the structural gap between the fastest and slowest organizations spans from under 3 days to over 3 months.
- One in three suppliers complain about having to submit data multiple times.
- Procurement teams that said their data was “ready for AI” and those who use AI see faster onboarding on average,
