Centralizing Supplier Management After Substantial Growth

Overview

A global hospitality management company experienced rapid expansion, growing from approximately 40 properties to more than 500 in just a few years. To support this growth and reduce operational risk, the organization undertook a digital transformation of its supplier management program. This initiative focused on centralizing processes, improving supplier data quality, and introducing automation to enable efficient scaling while strengthening controls.

Challenge

As the enterprise grew through mergers and acquisitions, its supplier management processes became fragmented and heavily manual. Teams faced duplicate work, inconsistent communication, and unclear approval workflows due to the lack of a centralized supplier management process. With nearly 80,000 duplicate supplier records, supplier data quality declined. This resulted in incomplete information, duplicate payments, and increased operational risk. Manual onboarding and validation processes were slowing down the business and straining internal resources.

Solution

Recognizing that technology alone wouldn’t solve the challenge, the Senior Director of Supplier Management and Optimization led a strategic planning effort to align teams, processes, and stakeholders ahead of selecting and implementing a software solution.

The hospitality leader chose apexanalytix to streamline supplier management, automate onboarding and validation, and strengthen governance across the supplier lifecycle.

They decided to partner with apexanalytix, which provided:

• A single, whitelabeled, global supplier onboarding portal that replaced fragmented, manual processes
• Built-in global and local compliance checks, including tax ID, sanction and blacklist checks
• Banking validations removed manual verification that had been straining our treasury department and
  increasing onboarding time
• Streamlined data capture through a self-service portal, eliminating the hours of manual data entry and improving vendor master data quality and compliance
• Configurable workflows and business rules that adapt to evolving regulatory and business requirements
• Bi-directional integration with P2P systems

Results

• Faster supplier onboarding
• 100% of supplier data is centralized and validated in the company’s portal using apexanalytix’s configurable platform.
• 90% of suppliers onboard through the company’s self-service portal; 10% are uploaded into the ERP and automatically fed to apexanalytix for validation through bi-directional integration.
• Zero fraud cases reported since deployment of the portal.
• Reduced voided and reissued payments due to invalid supplier information.
• Supplier ticket requests reduced from approximately 200 a month to 70.