When I joined Zip as Head of the Enterprise Transformation Office, I was eager to learn how large enterprises currently manage their procurement processes—and how they envision transforming them for the future.

After more than 100 client conversations, some clear themes have emerged, offering valuable insights into shared challenges and opportunities.

Before diving into these themes, let me provide a bit of context.

For five years prior to joining Zip, I served as the Senior Director of Procurement Operations at Discover Financial Services. My role was created to address a ‘broken’ procurement process—one that spanned sourcing, third-party risk, software governance, contracting, purchasing, and numerous teams, all supported by disparate systems that didn’t communicate.

It was an exceedingly complex process, made even more challenging by the demands of operating in a highly regulated environment.

Through a combination of people, process, and technology—yes, everyone’s favorite buzzwords—we made remarkable strides: slashing cycle times by over 50% and boosting CSAT scores by nearly 70%.

The technology piece? That was Zip. I led its enterprise-wide implementation, rolling it out to over 20,000 employees in July 2023. I was involved at every stage—from pitching Zip to the CFO to managing the deployment and overseeing more than 10,000 requests in the first year. This experience gave me a firsthand understanding of the challenges and opportunities in this space, and it’s one I’m excited to share as I work with other companies on similar intake and procurement orchestration transformation journeys.

With that out of the way, let’s explore the key observations I’ve made since joining Zip.

1. No single point of intake. These companies rely on manual, non-tech enabled processes. There’s a high reliance on institutional knowledge, often referring to policies and procedures to get requests completed. Intakes are scattered across multiple systems, leading to inefficient redundancies and a lack of transparency for every team involved.

2. Single point of intake, but not purpose-built. These types of companies are attempting to centralize intake using systems like Jira, Salesforce, ServiceNow, or their existing P2P system for intake. However, these systems all suffer from a lack of flexibility in their intake forms or workflows—if they even have workflow functionality—leaving much of the remaining work, from process decisioning and updates, to the procurement or sourcing professional to manage. This is entirely too manual and prone to error.

In both cases, companies acknowledge that there is tremendous opportunity in improving the way they’re managing this complex, cross-functional process. Both groups see opportunities to reduce the “help desk” -type service of procurement, to instead focus on higher value-add services to their business partners.

The procurement function hasn’t ever had the right toolset to tackle this—until very recently. The question has now transformed into how and when. This leads to the next observation.

How do you solve this problem? Every company is trying to limit the proliferation of software titles in their environment. The correct questions to ask when a problem requires a technical solution is: “Do we already have the software needed to solve this problem?”

This is a question I was asked at Discover. Of course, when we did the due diligence to determine the answer to the question, it was clear the answer was: “No, we don’t have the right solution.” What we needed was a purpose-built solution to create a materially better process and end-user experience.

Here’s my perspective.

What I find in these types of discussions is that the stakeholders pushing an existing system to solve the problem are doing so without a complete understanding of the complexity involved in the procurement process, and the capabilities needed to solve it. This isn’t meant to be a knock on my partners in IT either!

This is a process that can be described as ‘simplex’ —one that looks simple from the outside, but is exceedingly complex when you dig deeper. Larger enterprises manage a process wherepeople buy everything from pencils to mainframes, AI software, and tools that manage PII. It’s complex!

Transforming this process requires a solution with a deep set of capabilities, but dead-simple for everyone to use and understand. As a procurement professional, I’m certain you understand this!

Unfortunately, what I often see are companies that jump from Category 1 (no intake) to Category 2 (centralized intake but no true tech-enablement). You may achieve some modest improvements, but you’ll fall short of your broader aspirational objectives and still be stuck with a very manual process, and dissatisfied stakeholders. It’s kicking the proverbial can down the road, and I’m sure you’ll end up revisiting that decision in the future.

It feels like every company I speak to is in the midst of some form of digital transformation. They’re either currently, or planning to implement a CLM, a new TPRM solution, or migrating to a different Source-to-Pay suite—or all of these things at once!

Here’s my perspective. For Procure-to-Pay, I’ve now seen every conceivable permutation of movement between the major P2P providers. For example, one company I spoke to recently is moving from Ariba to Oracle, while another is moving from Oracle to Ariba.

Doesn’t this strike you as odd? These companies are moving from a system they didn’t like, to a system someone else didn’t like, and expecting to achieve a better outcome than what the other company was able to achieve. This comes at enormous cost to the organization, both financially and from a change management perspective.

P2P systems are an essential component of your tech stack. The key is to optimize your investment to achieve your objectives. When those objectives are not seemingly met by your existing provider, the default approach—and historically the only approach—was to change providers.

But now there’s a new approach available, which optimizes your existing P2P system rather than changing providers, while solving for lots of your other procurement process pain points in the process! (Say THAT 10x fast!)

Zip complements your existing suite, plugging a lot of the operational gaps you have in your system. Further, as ‘best-of-breed’ solutions continue to proliferate across your tech stack, Zip can help integrate these systems into your broader process in a way that feels seamless to your end users. Before you think about swapping out your P2P suite, think about what problems you’re trying to solve, and whether there’s a different—and easier—solution to the problem.

The other thing companies are working through is the sequencing and timing of when to implement a solution like Zip. Should it be before these new systems go live? In parallel? Afterwards?

My take on this is that Zip can minimize a lot of the change management challenges from rolling out other systems, so consider doing this either before, or in parallel with your other implementations. `

The reason for this is that your requestors will primarily interface with Zip in the procurement process, shielding them from needing to learn how to use these new systems, thereby reducing the change management challenges when you swap these systems out.

After years of being a procurement practitioner, it’s interesting now finding myself on the supplier-side. In my prior role, I rarely responded to cold emails or LinkedIn outreach, figuring I’d get sucked into some sales vortex impossible to claw my way out of.

Now that I’m on the supplier-side, I have a new perspective.

There’s tremendous amounts of insight to be gleaned from suppliers built to solve a problem you’re experiencing, and who are speaking to other companies literally every day about the same problem you have. We can be a great ‘connective tissue’ across companies, and drive really meaningful improvements based on those insights, and connect companies trying to solve the very same challenges.

As Head of Zip’s Enterprise Transformation Office, what I’m enjoying most about this role is the freedom to work directly with clients in a consultative capacity.

The best calls I’m on are those where we’re able to work with someone to really understand their current state, show them exactly how Zip can help them transform it, and collaborate on an approach to get their project sold internally. It’s a lot of fun to see these conversations progress from a limited understanding of what intake and procurement orchestration is to the Aha Moment where clients understand the true art of the possible.I’m a firm believer that technology is a game changer for procurement, and I am happy to play a role in driving this transformation.

Learn more about Zip at ziphq.com