Procurement professionals are busy people. There are always RFQs to send, terms to negotiate, and services to source.
So it’s never a surprise when we hear skepticism about the learning curve associated when we outline what how much companies can save with a tail spend management solution. Procurement managers are smart to question whether or not their teams—who almost always have too much on their plate already—have the bandwidth to learn a new software.
To the skeptical manager, we would say:
"Fairmarkit was created to make tail spend management easier. We designed it to be as easy to adopt as possible so you and your team can be as productive as possible. This is our value proposition, and we’re committed delivering software that solves procurement problems without creating new ones."
But talk is cheap (even if we mean it). To help balance our talk with a healthy dose of walk, here’s how we’ve optimized our adoption process to save you time and money from the start:
Getting Up and Running Takes Less than a Week. This past year, we helped a Fortune 500 procurement department implement Fairmarkit in less than a week. For smaller departments, it can take even less time.
What about training? How many valuable work hours need to go into getting employees up to speed? Good questions. We’ve found that training takes about an hour. We know that clunky interfaces and unclear functionality all zap productivity, so we’ve made ours as intuitive as possible. Gartner found that procurement teams best integrate new technology when they can celebrate quick wins. With Fairmarkit, you’ll get wins early and often. We find many customers have an ROI on their purchase in less than a month.
Fairmarkit can integrate with any procure-to-pay or source-to-pay provider. We like to think of ourselves as ERP and P2P agnostic. We know that modern procurement departments use a variety of digital tools to streamline every stage of the procurement cycle. That’s why Fairmarkit is designed to work in conjunction with your existing tools. Whether you use Coupa, SAP, Oracle, Workday, or other platforms, Fairmarkit seamlessly and effortlessly integrates into your IT ecosystem. It’s symbiotic, not parasitic.
There are multiple integration options to match your needs. Not every procurement department has the same suite of technologies, so not all integration efforts will be the same. That’s why we’ve made it possible to integrate Fairmarkit in two different ways.Most customers elect the plug-and-play method. In other words, they lease Fairmarkit’s cloud-based software without integrating it within their broader systems. Though technically an indirect form of integration, this method still enables real-time data flow on transaction history, approved vendors, and active buyers and shoppers. It still communicates with S2P and P2P systems to prevent double keying. And it’s painless: for this method of adoption, no technical teams need to get involved.
Others choose to integrate Fairmarkit into their existing systems. To do this, we collaborate with your technical team to place Fairmarkit behind your firewall and tie the platform directly into your APIs. If this sounds like a lot of work for a little benefit, it really isn’t. After a brief security audit, we can still have a full department up and running in less than a week. The benefit of this method is that Fairmarkit is directly integrated within a S2P or P2P and can accommodate the static and dynamic catalogues already hosted in a system.
Designed to be low-touch. Once Fairmarkit is up and running, that’s it. It’s already storing data, finding trends and installing updates. Your team will have more time to do what they do best: strategically source the goods and services your business needs to be its most effective.
And if you do run into problems along the way, we have a best-in-class customer service suite that can get you the answers you need without aggravating delays.
