Procurement
Modernise Procurement: building an in-house intake solution at Personio
July 19, 2024
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Martin Frérot
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5
min
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July 19, 2024
·
Martin Frérot
·
5
min
Brajan Gatys works at Personio as Procurement Manager and built the entire procurement stack from scratch with a complete no-code approach.
Our CEO Pauline had the chance to interview him with the final goal of sharing his expertise and experience on how to make a procurement team successful thanks to pragmatism, automations and a frictionless experience for internal requesters.
Brajan started his career at Trivago as an IT Procurement manager wanting to find a job mixing IT and Business. Then he moved to Personio 2 years ago with his leader to start the procurement team there!
When Brajan joined Personio, the procurement process was quite unorganized. He had to figure out the landscape: what resources did they have, how did employees make purchases, what were the major deals - in order to define how he could implement changes early on.
There were several problems initially, such as contracts being scattered all over the place. Typically, joining a procurement function often means finding a system and processes already in place that you need to learn and follow. At Personio, they had to build everything from scratch.
Typically, when you join a procurement function, you find a system and processes already in place that you need to learn and follow. However, we had to build everything from scratch.
Over the past two years, Personio's procurement team has made significant progress. One of their major accomplishments was building out the entire procurement system. There was an existing procurement solution, but they decided to customize it building an in-house tool to better fit their operational needs.
The procurement team now covers various areas and they have established a comprehensive freelancer process. Surprisingly, according to Brajan they faced no resistance in internal marketing; everyone was eager to work with them from the start.
A simple tip on the approach Personio procurement team took is that they make the experience easier, positioning themselves as enablers and not blockers for internal users doing purchases. Procurement teams want final users to spend time excelling in their expertise fields like marketing, engineering, HR or product but not managing purchases.
The aim is to create a full service procurement: vendor enrollment, legal check (contract, compliance), finance check (budget, payment). The procurement team takes care of everything so that internal users handle the bare minimum and get a seamless experience: not painful nor complex. Indeed they don’t care about some terms in the contract or the compliance or budget check; they just want to start working as soon as possible with an agency, a tool or a provider.
Once people realize “ok, it’s very easy to work with you, I can focus on my own topics” it’s a win for the procurement team.
If the process is bad and it is difficult to reach out to you, people won’t use your process or fill your tickets or forms in the right way. An obvious red flag is a heavy documentation (written pages or tutorials) meaning the procurement process is too complex for your final users.
Personio procurement team is doing a lot of automations to tackle the challenge of numerous requests to handle with only 3 full time employees and they estimate they would need 4 more people without their automations.
They tried to automate all recurring tasks and what we could called “monkey work” ones: creating a PO, creating a vendor, onboarding a vendor, sending out a NDA, saving a contract, … People are here only to control and check compliance and quality with simple steps.
For example for their freelancers process: internal users can make a request from Jira, then procurement team looks at it and automatically reach out to the freelancer if there are missing information, then it automatically drafts the contract and sends it. Data is all stored in one place to ensure compliance and the process is just a 2 to 3 clicks for procurement, 2 clicks for legal and all good!
They did a lot of benchmark with several vendors back in 2022 to assess if vendors would fit their needs and solve their pains. Nevertheless they didn’t find a fit because:
So, the Personio Procurement team decided to build an in-house solution to meet their procurement operations needs.
The goal was to have very specific processes tied to Personio ways of working and existing tools.
That’s why they assessed existing tools that internal users already knew to avoid onboarding and training them. Their tool Jira, Google Drive, DocuSign and all existing tools to make connections between them, create automations and leverage tools where people work and spend their days. The team focused on breaking Silos that were created by several tools and on avoiding double work when people have to write updates in 2 tools with the same information.
Adoption is then super higher as users know their tools or Jira. On the front end, internal users are familiar to the system and in the back end, procurement team relies on ClickUp, no-code integrations, connections and automations to ensure there is no additional work for them and flows are also smooth on their side.
Personio works with several freelancers and regularly onboard new ones so the goal was to make this process as smooth as possible: simple, fast. Procurement team wanted to make life easier for requesters and for freelancers to ensure a fast onboarding and a freelancer ready to work in minute.
Another focus at the beginning was to tackle contract renewal process and avoid challenging a provider 1 month before the end of the contract as it is too late to negotiate or to benchmark and choose other solutions.
The idea is to get in the middle of the contract so for example after 6 months for a 12-month contract, an automated notice arrives in Slack to get NPS of the tool or of the supplier to check how things are going and anticipate a change in the contract. They tried to make it appealing with funny gif too!
2 mains challenges that Personio Procurement Team is facing and would need to address soon:
Our next mission is to achieve a complete financial data cycle by linking procurement and accounting data.
A key value also for Procurement functions is generating clean and connected data to ERP for accounting purposes in order to manage and link invoices, vendors credit, pre-payments, final payments, etc.
Finance teams definitely need a link for example between Intakes and Purchase Orders. It can be thanks to tools, or a commun database but having siloed data will add manual work in the end and teams need to be careful about this.
The obvious and first usage is for efficiency or productivity: write emails, descriptions, Jira tickets and these use cases are for all functions in a company. Same for data check: enabling your to get insights and quick analyses of raw data when you send them to an AI tool.
For an advanced usage of AI within procurement team, here are 2 use cases:
Brajan is convinced procurement teams need a best of breed approach. And here are some “must-have” wishes to bring value and consider a tool over a in-house system:
The orchestration layer seems particularly central for Brajan to ensure a smooth and seamless flow of request from intake to contract to Purchase Order (PO) to Invoice to Payment. Here are some examples of Personio needs:
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To view all the short clips featured in this article and the entire interview with Brajan, please check out the full YouTube playlist just here.
To speak with a Payflows experts and understand how Payflows solution can help your Procurement team to save money, ensure adoption, gain time and reduce risks, book a demo here!