Vow is a biotechnology organization on a mission to make sustainable food both irresistible and available to billions of people. Today, Vow is focused on entering the consumer market, launching cultured meat products to the world.
With the help of Ellen Dinsmoor, Head of Operations, and Maddie Williams, Office Manager, the fast-growing organization continues to scale their purchasing processes as quickly as they’ve been able to scale innovation in their industry.
The challenges
When Ellen Dinsmoor joined Vow, the team was experiencing exponential growth, both in terms of headcount and number of R&D activities in flight at any point in time. Dinsmoor knew that Vow’s operational processes needed to match the speed at which the R&D team was innovating. Having the equipment and supplies the scientists needed, and having them at their office at the right time, was essential to the success of their experiments.
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Maintaining purchasing visibility on a fast-growing team: Vow’s original purchasing processes worked well when there were a handful of scientists, but the fast-growing team began to put pressure on Vow’s procurement methods. Scientists needed to look across multiple systems and reach out to the operations team to simply find out the status of their purchase requests.
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Disparate systems and burdensome processes: Having requests, approvals, and purchase orders managed across different systems can create lag time between requesting and receiving critical items. When it came time to create a purchase order, collecting the critical information was a burden. Although the Office Manager was responsible for collecting requisitions, Dinsmoor was the only one with access to the accounting system where the purchase orders were generated.
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An opportunity for stronger vendor relationships: Williams’ role as Office Manager consisted of building and maintaining relationships with Vow’s vendors. Without a central system to manage purchase requests, Williams found herself and the team spending extra time and money in areas that she knew they could cut down on.
The solution
Vow was looking for a system that was trusted in the biotechnology industry and could grow with their organization. After collecting feedback from team members and review sites, Dinsmoor chose Procurify.
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Increased purchasing visibility: With Procurify, Vow now has a central source of truth for all purchasing information. The operations team can quickly view necessary information before creating a purchase order by opening the original requisitions within the system. Scientists, engineers, and “food inventors” are able to log into Procurify’s web or mobile application to easily see if their request has been approved, purchased, and received. They can also leave comments directly in Procurify if they have questions about their specific request, keeping all context centralized.
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Purchasing approved items in less than four hours: In the past, it could take up to 24 hours to get a purchase order created after the item was approved. With Procurify, Vow’s operations team has managed to create purchase orders the same day the item is requested with an impressive request-to-purchase order creation time of just over three and a half hours. What’s more, having requests managed within Procurify allows Williams to easily find the information she needs to create a purchase order, speeding up the purchasing process.
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Building strong vendor relationships: With Procurify, Vow has been able to maintain an impressive purchasing metric, having 80 percent of their spend go through less than 10 percent of their vendors. The ability to see your spend per vendor in real time allows purchasing professionals to negotiate better rates and discounts with their vendors. Vendor insights drive strategic discussions during monthly purchasing syncs, enabling the Vow team to see real-time trends in their spending so they can be more thoughtful.
Takeaways
The team at Vow has developed internal processes that allow them to quickly scale their team, maintain impressive purchasing metrics, and enter new markets without sacrificing speed or innovation. As Dinsmoor put it, “Procurify has given us a structure without limiting our speed. It’s given us more visibility into our purchasing so we can be thoughtful in our decisions while having controls in place.”
This delicate balance of speed and control is key to helping Vow fulfill their mission of feeding billions of people with more sustainable food. In Dinsmoor’s words: “We have to be smarter and quicker than anybody else out there to be able to overcome the challenges associated with our industry. If we get blocked, we can’t support this growth and learning.”
Learn how Procurify can help your organization innovate more quickly, without having to sacrifice control.
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Predictable workflows and centralized communication help improve the quality and speed of deployment for the products and services you need.
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Leverage data to negotiate with preferred vendors and unlock savings.
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Access real-time spend insights that help you optimize resource allocation and empower managers to understand the “why” behind every request.
