Zip looks to modernize corporate procurement

Zip describes itself as “the leading procurement and procurement orchestration platform and procure-to-pay suite.” As a startup, this doesn’t sound like the most exciting area to be in, but if you’ve ever worked for a large company, you know how complicated the process of purchasing even the most basic of things can be. This is annoying for employees and difficult to manage for procurement, finance and legal teams, who have to deal with disparate applications that can barely communicate with each other.

To make this easier, Zip today announced Zip Premier, a new set of enterprise features, as well as a new low-code integration platform that allows users to build their own integrations to take advantage of services that Zip does not natively support and their existing connector. To make it easier to attract new customers, Zip is also launching a set of 100 pre-built workflow templates today. For example, these include templates for working with contractors, managing automatic renewals, and supplier rollouts.

At its core, Zip brings disparate procurement processes together into one platform, enabling businesses to manage everything from the initial purchase request, to managing procurement policies and obtaining sign-off from finance, legal and security teams, all the way to managing budgets, onboarding new supplies suppliers, create purchase orders and process invoices. Companies that already use third-party tools to perform any of these steps can continue to use these tools, and Zip then aggregates all this data and manages the entire workflow.

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“This problem is very cross-sectional and pervasive because the problem of employees needing to buy things to do their jobs is common across industries,” Zappard said. He also stressed that the larger a company gets, the more painful these problems become, Even more serious. When it is a business in a regulated industry.

New features the company is launching for enterprises today include more granular permissions and new tools for maintaining audit trails of requests, permissions and vendors to ensure companies remain audit-ready. Zip has also added new tools to monitor the health of its integrations with third-party services and add real-time alerts if issues arise.

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The new low-code integration platform is an interesting way to play. For example, Zappard acknowledged that companies are unlikely to want their regular employees to integrate it into their financial systems. But he does believe it will help IT teams build and maintain these connectors, which are often tied to legacy or custom systems that Zip itself can’t support.

Zip is competing with several other procurement platforms such as Coupa, SAP, Workday and others. But Zaparde believes Zip’s advantage is that it can connect all these systems together.

“Traditional procurement solutions fail to meet the complex needs of modern businesses, which face an intricate web of fragmented procurement processes across multiple business teams and systems,” he said. “Developed alongside our largest enterprise customers, our new capabilities streamline the entire spend process, delivering enterprise-grade performance and consumer-grade flexibility so our customers can quickly drive compliance and scale.”