Adidas

Teaching a global analyst group to design data and insights — and communicate effectively.

Client: Adidas Function: Global Procurement Engagement: Training Workshops & Consultancy Scope: 7 workshops · 150+ participants · 4 continents · 3 weeks

The Problem With More Data

Adidas runs one of the world’s most complex global supply chains. Its procurement function spans hundreds of suppliers, billions in spend, and stakeholders at every level of the organization. The data was there. The dashboards existed. The numbers were accurate.

And yet something wasn’t working.

In many companies, procurement teams walk into executive meetings armed with comprehensive data — and walk out without the decisions they needed. Stakeholders are overwhelmed. And key insights and buried in volume. Often you get the sense that strategic recommendations are losing out to the noise of too many metrics being presented without a clear point of view.

So our Managing Director took on the learning and development engagement and set out to design the custom instructional designs needed.

A Training Program Built for Procurement — Not for Everyone

Generic presentation skills training wasn’t the answer. The challenge was specific: procurement professionals working with procurement data, presenting to procurement and executive stakeholders. The solution needed to match that specificity.

Datalabs designed a custom training program built around Adidas’s needs — a real procurement dataset, realistic scenarios, and a methodology grounded in one core principle: lead with the insight, not the data.

The program was imagined with two big audiences in mind:

Two Track Learning & Development — Senior managers and directors focus on strategic framing, stakeholder influence, and communicating recommendations with authority. Junior and mid-level analysts focus on visualization fundamentals, data selection, and translating raw procurement metrics into coherent narratives.

Both tracks shared the same underlying framework: audience-first thinking. Before building any chart or slide, participants were trained to ask — what does this specific audience need to do with this information?

Seven Workshops. Four Continents.

Delivery was global by design. Adidas’s procurement function is distributed, and the training needed to reach teams across Europe, the Americas, Asia, and the Middle East without losing consistency or quality across sessions.

Seven workshops were delivered over a three-week window — a logistically demanding schedule that required facilitating across multiple time zones, adapting to regional differences in communication style, and maintaining the same standard of engagement and customization in every session.

Each workshop included:

• Custom procurement dataset used for hands-on exercises — participants worked with data structures they recognized from their own roles
• Deliberate practice methodology — structured exercises with real-time feedback, not passive instruction
• Professional workbook — reference materials participants could apply immediately
• Role-specific coaching — tailored feedback within the same session framework

From Data Reporters to Strategic Advisors

The shift Adidas needed wasn’t technical — it was conceptual. Procurement teams were trained to think of themselves not just as data reporters, but as strategic advisors who use data to support a point of view.

By the end of the program, 150+ procurement professionals across four continents had worked through the same framework — creating a shared language for how Adidas’s procurement function communicates data internally and to executive leadership.

Project Credits

Client: Adidas Global Procurement Datalabs Lead: Otto Ottinger, Managing Director Services: Custom Curriculum Design · Workshop Facilitation · Data Storytelling Consultancy · Training Materials Tools: Microsoft PowerPoint · Excel · Illustrator · Learning Management System