Technology | Workato

For us, it was more around embracing and executing a mindset shift that focused on growth with efficiency, rather than ‘growth at all costs’.

At this time, inevitably, there is more scrutiny of investments – how we spend money, how new technology is actually influencing operations, and how new adoptions are optimising work across lots of different categories.

So, where did you start?

Procurement is a specialised field that plays a crucial role in delivering tangible value, supporting growth, promoting innovation, and building resiliency for governments and organisations. We proceeded under the strategy of enacting a responsible procurement transformation. I’ve been in the procurement space for a long time and have worked through similar challenges and transformations in the past, but every organisation is different and requirements can be quite specific and unique.

We knew that we had to address two distinct fronts as we built out our core procurement infrastructure: move decision-making upstream, via a centralised procurement intake system; and across the approvals and finance processes through a dedicated procure-to-pay (P2P) solution.

First, we needed a structure around this end-to-end concept. In the absence of a core procurement infrastructure, it’s difficult to navigate the space. Absence of a centralised procurement intake workflow causes teams to rely on emails for legal, business technology and security approvals; or indeed on spreadsheets and ad-hoc storage of contracts. Both increase the likelihood of something falling through the cracks while also increasing administrative work. So, really, the starting point was putting a structure and framework in place around the whole procurement process. Our team knew we had the innovation in-house to help with that.

So, you looked internally to kickstart the process?

There is extra pressure around any form of digital transformation, because we ourselves are a facilitator of innovation –we have to be seen to be getting this right. Workato is an integration and automation platform that allows companies to automate processes through recipes, tasks and connectors rather than having a specialist sit down and build those connections or to make integrations work.

In turn, the platform allows more people within their organisation to become experts in their fields, creating a trickle effect of efficiency and interconnectivity, through automation.

That’s what we did – we have deployed our own automation solutions to connect the platforms and solutions brought into Workato’s ecosystem. Rather than building an integration to multiple point solutions, we are leveraging Workato which allows these best-in-class solutions to talk to each other and make information flow seamless, without the need to engage IT resources to build those integrations.

You’ve mentioned the importance of structure, and how some of your own tools could fit within it. But how did you go about beginning to fill the gaps within this idea of a structure?

It mostly revolved around a need to put some guardrails up around how we spend, so that when we assess ROI, there is a clearer rationale and path behind our decisions, and what they resulted in.

For context, when I arrived in January 2022, the tool of choice in the market for putting a P2P platform in place was Coupa – the undisputed leader in the space. I’m saying this as a customer of several years and also as a former Director of Strategic Sourcing & Procurement Operations at Coupa. No other platform can deliver what it can from a procurement perspective, and I had familiarity with it.

And if that’s what we’re offering to our clients, why not practice what we preach and deploy our own solutions to improve our procurement function, too?

Immediately, through this addition, we achieved that structure around P2P, implicating operations like invoicing and expense management. What it also did was bring governance and control around spending and investments.