Canal Barge is a marine transportation company headquartered in New Orleans, Louisiana. As one of the most diverse marine transportation companies in the United States, Canal Barge moves highly valuable cargo to every single region in the world.
The challenges
Canal Barge’s cargo today is more prized than ever, comprising goods from Fortune 500 chemical and oil companies, refineries, engineering companies, government, and beyond. With clientele demand increasing and purchase order volume scaling to the thousands, they knew they needed more sustainable procurement processes to remain competitive and dominant in their market.
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Paperwork overload: After going through an arduous and paper-based process just for approvals and quotes, the repetitive inputs and spreadsheet organization would reappear to haunt their purchase orders.
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Manual, error-prone work: Placing an order required vessels to issue physical POs, which involved a non-trivial amount of manual, labor-intensive work (coding line items, organizing by accounting codes, breaking up orders by accounting code for vendors).
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Slow processing times: Before partnering with Procurify, Canal Barge was 30 days behind on orders. A monotonous and repetitive purchasing process with duplicate inputs and unpredictable wait times for different approvals was sinking costs and precious time.
The solution
Canal Barge partnered with Procurify to inject more automation and standardization into their purchasing processes. After a smooth onboarding process, they quickly found that less manual work freed up precious time to analyze spend data and uncover insights to drive strategic decisions.
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Unlocking strategic insights: With more time and easy access to all vendor and order information from one consolidated platform, Canal Barge could compare quotes and prices and push their vendors’ bottom lines.
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Increased visibility and control: Canal Barge keeps vessels informed of their spend with real-time reporting features. Stakeholders across the organization are now able to locate and mitigate rogue spend.
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Integrations and automation: Procurify’s Amazon PunchOut accelerates Canal Barge’s requesting workflow while eliminating data entry errors.
Takeaways
Today, Canal Barge no longer needs to worry about manual, error-prone processes; they can instead direct their focus to buyer relationships and evaluating the effectiveness of their products and services in real time. Procurify has also primed Canal Barge for growth: as they expand their reporting through the entirety of their operations in New Orleans, they’re also looking to implement Procurify strategically within their Chicago-based division.
Learn how Procurify can help your organization scale purchasing processes sustainably and:
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Automate time-intensive and error-prone manual processes to speed up purchasing cycle times
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Leverage data to negotiate with preferred vendors and unlock savings
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Accelerate data flows between disparate systems with key integrations and APIs
