Controllers Council recently held a webcast discussion on Establishing Procurement: Controller’s Guide to Unlocking Strategic Value, sponsored by Zip.
Zip is the world’s leading procurement orchestration platform, providing an intuitive starting point for any employee to initiate a purchase or vendor request. Zip helps businesses gain clear and timely visibility across all business spend and consolidates all the steps and tools used across finance and procurement processes. Learn
Our expert panelists included Joel Hull, Kevin Chen and Senad Mustafic. Joel is an Enterprise Solutions Manager at Zip and has 10+ years in procurement, including starting the procurement function at Airbnb and Robinhood. Kevin is a Controller at Zip with 13+ years of experience and previously was a Senior Director of Accounting at Opendoor, where Kevin was a Zip customer. Senad is a Seasoned Chief Accounting Officer with 15+ years of accounting expertise and has previously worked for Smartsheet, Concur, and Deloitte.
Following are key takeaways to this discussion. If you are interested in learning more, view the full webinar archive video here.
Benefits of Procurement
An early focus on procurement unlocks a strategic value for your business. Here are a few benefits of introducing procurement:
- Optimizing spend: Finance wants a peace of mind that precious dollars are being spent for impact and within budget.
- Reducing risk: Legal, privacy, security and other compliance teams need a stake in how your vendors are selected, onboarded and managed.
- Operational efficiency: Teams and leaders want to be as efficient as possible with the resources available.
The procurement function starts with that thoughtful process, that will really lead to adoption and having that be the focus, which will then lead to that cross-functional collaboration, which will then lead to that true visibility, predictability, control that everyone is after. And obviously starting sooner and embedding that into the behavior and the culture in the company is critical.
Thoughtful Process Design Steps
- Starts simple for the user’s sake and crowdsources ideas to design something that is relevant for a specific environment
- Leverages mapped current state to identify bottlenecks and design improvements. Tracks changes over time and communicate successes.
- Layer emotional mapping exercise into process mapping to ensure an adoptable process. Installs support options alongside process changes.
Adoption
Adoption is the most important metric of value when building a procurement program. You can design a perfect process, an extremely thoughtful process. You can bring in a fantastic tool, and if no one’s using it, it doesn’t matter.
Senad: Adoption is obviously super important. That was the easy question. And I mean, some things that we would always think about are making sure that the procurement leader goes on a little bit of a tour within the company explaining that procurement is being established, what its purpose is, what the expectations around it should be, and how it will all work. That is very important and that sets the right tone, which is super helpful. If you can get buy-in from other people in your organization, CFO, maybe even CEO, to get visibility company-wide that this is being rolled out or being worked on, that’s also super helpful. But in the end, I think the most important thing for adoption is making things easy. Having employees sit through a demo where you’re going to explain how it’s all going to work. You’re going to hear as employee that this is going to be important. Great, you get a little bit excited. But then if you go into the tool and you encounter a clunky process that is disincentivizing you from engagement. So, to me, the most important thing is how you set up your process and that very entry point when you log in as a user and you want to say, hey, I need to buy a software service of some kind for the next year. Can I go into the tool? Can I easily navigate to a place where I need to tell the company that I need a software tool? Is it easy for me to type up or select from a dropdown what I need? And is it going to be out of my mind?
Five Step Change Management Plan
Many companies love this five-step change management plan to improve the adoption process. The five steps include:
- Define the what – What is changing? How will it impact me and my team?
- Establish the why – What’s in it for me? How does this help the company?
- Design adoption plan – Kickoff, executive support, follow-up.
- Execute with “hypercare” – Carefully execute with deep technical and emotional support.
- Continuous improvement – Repeat the cycle of identifying and fixing bottlenecks.
Cross-Functional Collaboration is Key
Senad: Finance, legal, security, IT all need to be involved in the process itself and realizing that early on and having conversations with them in terms of how they expect to be involved in the process, how they expect to resolve cross dependencies. Do they feel that there needs to be sequencing of reviews or do they feel they can review in parallel? All those things should be considered as you’re setting up the procurement process and you want to make sure all those people are happy with the way that the process is set up eventually. It did get us closer eventually and cross-functionally for sure because we got to work on this together and figure out the path that works for everybody. We had to make tweaks along the way. It wasn’t like the first time we started up, but we stuck with it forever. But having early conversations with those people is very good and it does help cross collaboration for this project and then for anything else that comes later because you get to solve this big puzzle with them together.
Kevin: I think anytime you’re in a kind of consensus building project, you just want to make it digestible. So, try to put your problems or workflows into buckets and see if you could just narrow in on one bucket at a time to make it a little bit easier to work through where you’re not trying to tackle the whole thing all at once.
Benchling’s Procurement Journey
To learn about this journey and view the complete webcast, view full webinar here.
ABOUT THE SPONSOR:
Zip is the world’s leading procurement orchestration platform, providing an intuitive starting point for any employee to initiate a purchase or vendor request. Zip helps businesses gain clear and timely visibility across all business spend and consolidates all the steps and tools used across finance and procurement processes. Learn more at https://ziphq.com.
