By Insight Editor / 29 Jul 2020 / Topics: Procurement Hybrid workforce
Facts at a glance
Client industry:
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems
Size of company:
49,000 employees
Challenge:
Before COVID-19 hit, this client was leveraging a centralized purchasing process that required employees to be in the office to receive new technology equipment. But once offices across North America were forced to close, this model simply didn’t work anymore.
Solution:
Insight, the client’s longstanding IT partner, created a custom portal on our procurement platform that enables employees to purchase pre-approved technology quickly and easily.
Results:
- Over 2,000 employees supported in North America
- Seamless online ordering
- Quick fulfillment shipped direct to employee homes
Solution area:
Insight’s Supply Chain Optimization solutions simplify the process of procuring, maintaining and replacing the technology clients invest in to run their business.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, companies were scrambling to enable remote work on a larger scale than they had ever tried before.
A large Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system provider was stuck with a pre-pandemic era purchasing model that didn’t work with the new normal. Before, the company leveraged a centralized purchasing model in the U.S. and Canada to fulfill device orders such as laptops, keyboards and accessories. It ordered items in bulk from Insight, which were then shipped to company headquarters and dispersed to the end users from there.
Before COVID-19 hit, the vast majority of employees were working in these central offices, so this purchasing model worked just fine for the company. Remote employees could either come into the office to pick up equipment or put in a request for the company ship it to their homes.
However, once quarantines were put into place across North America and offices were forced to close, this system simply didn’t work anymore.
The company needed to come up with a way for employees to get the IT products they needed while maintaining strict social distancing. Even though the client was occasionally shipping products to remote workers, it couldn’t handle that process at scale. The extra administrative burden that would be put on the internal IT team would be too much.
The solution was to employ a more automated, streamlined, online purchasing platform.
Insight had a longstanding, positive relationship with this particular client, so the company’s IT decision-makers already looked to us as a major source of IT support. They knew from experience that we could be counted on to fix this problem.
In close collaboration with the client’s internal team, we customized an e-procurement portal on insight.com. The goal was to provide employees an intuitive buying experience that was also easy on the client’s procurement and IT teammates. The solution had to be as automated as possible, scalable to support thousands of users and completed in a short timeframe.
Insight.com is a powerful procurement tool that helps our clients not only get the technology they need, but also purchase with as little hassle as possible. That’s why we’ve made the platform completely customizable, with features that simplify ordering, speed up approvals and easily track IT spend.
For this client, we customized a portal that streamlined the purchasing process for its end users so that they can get what they needed, where they needed it — without adding work for the IT team.
We collborated with the client to develop a list of pre-approved items in the portal so that employees knew exactly what products they were allowed to purchase. This eliminated the need for a lengthy approval process.
Now, employees can seamlessly order the products they need and have them shipped directly to their homes, helping them stay connected while we all practice social distancing. All they have to do create an account within their employer’s portal, add products to their cart, put in their preferred address and credit card number, and they’re done.
As of today, over 2,000 of the client’s U.S. employees have used the new portal, which accounts for roughly 10% of the company’s footprint. And we know that we can scale this solution as much as the client needs us to in the future.
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