Vroozi

Before procurement teams can unlock the full value of AI, they need the right foundation in place: clean processes, connected systems, trusted data, and visibility across spend. In his latest Forbes piece, Shaz Khan shares why AI in procurement starts with getting the basics right. #Vroozi #Procurement #AI #ProcureToPay #SpendManagement

The AI pace is frenetic and dazzling all at once. Take a look at my latest article as an official member of Forbes Technology Council on getting your internal house in order before you launch a AI-powered procurement initiative. https://lnkd.in/guB8jjPt "Take your People Seriously" :) #Vroozi #SpendTech #ForbesTechCouncil

If your team is struggling with maverick spend, the usual response is to tighten the rules. Add more approval steps. Run more audits. Send another reminder about procurement policy. Here's the problem with that approach: it treats compliance as a discipline issue when it's actually a usability issue. Buyers go off-contract because the on-contract experience is frustrating. Fragmented catalogs, unclear pricing, and clunky interfaces push people toward whatever is fastest, not whatever is approved. Procurement leaders who understand this are solving it differently. Instead of adding friction to non-compliant purchasing, they're removing friction from compliant purchasing. A catalog marketplace does exactly that. Centralized supplier content. Contract pricing visible at the point of search. Preferred vendors configured to appear first. Compliance built into the flow, not bolted on at the end. The result is a procurement experience people actually want to use, which turns out to be the most effective compliance strategy of all. More on how this works. 🔗 https://lnkd.in/g2aY5Nqh What's been the biggest driver of off-contract spend on your team? #Procurement #SupplyChain #ProcureToPay #MaverickSpend #ProcurementLeadership #Vroozi

Here's a question worth sitting with: if you posted your procurement team's job description today, would the required skills match what the role actually demands in 2025? For a lot of organizations, there's a gap. Modern procurement isn't just about managing purchase orders and negotiating prices. It's about reading spend data in real time, building supplier relationships based on performance and ESG alignment, implementing automation without breaking existing workflows, and communicating across finance, IT, and operations with shared visibility. These aren't nice-to-haves. They're increasingly the baseline. The teams that recognize this early are the ones building procurement functions that genuinely move the needle for their organizations, not just keep the lights on. We put together a breakdown of the six skills defining the modern procurement professional, and how the right tools help teams build them faster. 🔗 https://lnkd.in/gCfyjf6X Are these skills reflected in how your team is structured today? #Procurement #SupplyChain #ProcurementSkills #FutureOfWork #DataDrivenProcurement #Vroozi

You can't save money you can't see. That's the core problem with how most organizations manage procurement spend today. Purchasing data lives in disconnected systems, spreadsheets, and department silos. By the time the reporting catches up, the overspending has already happened. Nearly 40% of purchasing goes unmanaged. That's not a people problem. That's a visibility problem. The procurement teams closing that gap aren't working harder. They're working with better data: 📊 Real-time spend visibility across every category and department 📊 Supplier performance benchmarks that inform stronger contract negotiations 📊 Live budget alerts that flag overspending before it becomes a problem 📊 Category analytics that expose cost leaks hiding in plain sight 📊 Predictive indicators that reveal savings opportunities before the market moves Reactive cost management is no longer a competitive option. The organizations pulling ahead are the ones treating procurement analytics as a strategic function, not an afterthought. We broke down exactly how analytics drives immediate cost savings. 🔗 https://lnkd.in/gn5Ce7jt #Procurement #SpendManagement #ProcureToPay #Analytics #FinanceLeadership #Vroozi

Traditional e-procurement was built for administrators. Not for the people actually doing the buying. That design gap has real consequences: fragmented catalogs, maverick spending, compliance failures, and budget overruns that procurement leaders are left to clean up. A marketplace-first model addresses this at the root. Here is what that looks like in practice: Centralized catalogs: All supplier content, internal, punch-out, and hosted, consolidated into a single interface. Buyers find compliant products without the guesswork. Guided buying: Preferred, policy-compliant options surface first. Compliance becomes the default, not the exception. End-to-end automation: From requisition creation to invoice matching, manual touchpoints are removed and processing delays are reduced. Real-time analytics: Spend visibility, vendor performance, and contract compliance tracked continuously, not after the fact. Seamless ERP integration: Snap-on architecture connects with SAP, Oracle, and NetSuite without disrupting core financial systems. The result is a procurement function that works for every stakeholder, from the buyer placing an order to the CFO monitoring spend. We broke down all five advantages in detail. 🔗 https://lnkd.in/gwDkxy5i #Procurement #eProcurement #ProcureToPay #SupplyChain #DigitalTransformation

For every 10,000 keystrokes, human operators average up to 400 errors. Automated systems? Just one. And yet, procurement teams across industries are still manually entering line-item details, account codes, and supplier data every single day. This isn't a people problem. It's a process architecture problem. The organizations winning in procurement right now have stopped treating automation as a "nice to have" and started treating it as a competitive baseline. Real-time approval routing. Auto-populated catalog data. Compliance embedded at the point of purchase, not enforced after the fact. The shift isn't complex. But it does require leaders willing to challenge how things have always been done. Are you still accepting manual overhead as the cost of doing business? 🔗 Discover the 5 bottlenecks we see killing procurement efficiency right now: https://lnkd.in/gd-rZvj7 #Procurement #SupplyChain #AP #ProcureToPay #DigitalTransformation #Vroozi

ERP replacement projects are among the most expensive IT undertakings an organization can take on. They often run for years, demand heavy resources, and carry significant risk of breaking existing financial controls. So why do so many procurement conversations still default to "we need to replace SAP"? In most cases, the smarter path is extension, not replacement. Here's the difference in practice: Replace SAP: Years of deployment, massive IT lift, risk to financial controls, and a steep learning curve for every user across the organization. Extend SAP: Add a modern procurement layer via secure APIs, preserve all of SAP's financial logic, upgrade the buyer experience without disrupting operations. The extension approach keeps SAP doing what it does best while solving the actual problems: poor usability, off-contract spending, and lack of real-time visibility. Organizations that get this right are achieving up to 100% spend under management and 50% faster processing times, without a single line of SAP core code being touched. We wrote about exactly how this works. 🔗 link in comments below Are you extending or replacing? And if you've done either, what was the deciding factor? #SAP #Procurement #ERPStrategy #ProcureToPay #EnterpriseIT #Vroozi

When a city cuts supplier catalog setup time by 86%, from 120 days to 17, that's not a tweak. That's a different way of operating. Grateful to Michael Keating for digging into how AI is reshaping procurement oversight, and for spotlighting the results our customers like the City of San Antonio and the Government of Yukon are seeing with Vroozi SpendTech. Worth a read for any procurement, AP, or finance leader thinking about where to start with AI. Shaz Khan lays out the practical advice too: start with well-defined processes, invest in clean data, and don't rush the implementation. https://lnkd.in/gWaTj22m

The best procurement insights don't always happen on the conference floor. Sometimes they happen over drinks and eats overlooking the Brooklyn Bridge. Last week during DPW, we hosted a happy hour at Harriett's Lounge and the conversations did not disappoint. Customers from NBCUniversal, Cushman & Wakefield, and Versant Media joined along with our technology partners to dig into where procurement is headed, how teams are actually putting AI to work, and what it takes to keep pace with the speed of change. One takeaway was clear: the appetite for smarter, more intuitive procurement technology has never been stronger. Thank you to everyone who came out. These are the conversations that keep us building. 🙌 #DPW2026 #ProcurementTech #AIinProcurement #DigitalProcurement #Vroozi