As a top bank-based financial services company, KeyBank’s procurement team plays a vital role in the organization’s continued growth and success. The team manages and negotiates high-risk and large-spend contracts and provides other KeyBank teams with self-service options for vendor catalogs, meeting and event coordination, corporate travel, and expense management.
Faced with challenges such as price volatility and a competitive business environment, the procurement team sought to find additional efficiencies with their source-to-pay process for the 2,000 vendors and more than 5,000 contracts they manage.
The team found the answer by consolidating its source-to-pay processes from a legacy procurement system into the Workday platform they were already using to manage HR, finance, and strategic sourcing operations.
“We standardized our source-to-pay processes to save money, be more efficient, and mitigate risks,” says Jacob Loos, SVP and Procurement Solutions Manager at KeyBank. “Adding this seat to the Workday table elevated our position by enhancing visibility into the entire source-to-pay process, including supplier contracts, invoices, and expenses.”
Increased visibility for stakeholders.
With all of source-to-pay a part of the Workday platform, Loos says stakeholders gained a more clear, holistic, and accurate picture into supplier and organizational spend.
“We now have automated feeds so stakeholders can see we signed a million-dollar contract, for example,” Loos says. “The monthly invoicing schedule is fixed or variable, and we can now project contracted spend for years instead of every November or December.”
Stakeholders can now:
- Review contract history reports and amendments
- Configure procurement and supplier accounts dashboards
- View company spend across key transactions
- Access supplier diversity data
- Gain buyer visibility into status and tasks
We increased visibility for our stakeholders, which is the number one reason we chose Workday.
SVP and Procurement Solutions Manager
Continuous spend insights.
The procurement team gains immediate insights into supplier contracts, leaving out the guesswork because they have answers to who and what they are for, when and where they were submitted, and why—all at their fingertips.
“That uniform experience for the end-users means we no longer see a high volume of rogue spend or out-of-compliance contracts," Loos says. “Cutting down on surprise invoices saves us time and money and the headache of processing unexpected end-of-year payments.”
Built-in message center and live-chat functions provide seamless and transparent communication with suppliers, freeing up time spent on back-and-forth emails. With employee and manager self-service, each person has visibility and rights based on their role and permissions.
E-signatures completed through DocuSign are now part of the same system as well. “We had a similar integration in the prior tool but now it’s even more seamless. We can work on a contract, negotiate it, and flip it over to DocuSign for signatures. That works really well.”
The entire source-to-pay process on a single platform improves efficiency.
SVP and Procurement Solutions Manager
The growing role of AI.
Loos continually seeks ways to improve the source-to-pay process and gain efficiencies by further leveraging Workday Illuminate™. The next generation of Workday AI, Illuminate is built on the world’s largest and cleanest HR and finance dataset.
Loos believes the natural language capabilities in Illuminate will optimize workflows and reduce inefficiencies. “Being able to say ‘Show me contracts that have these provisions in there.’ Or you open up a contract and ask, ‘What does this contract say about limits of liability or termination?’ That will save us so much time,” Loos says.
KeyBank expects to drive productivity gains and cost savings with Illuminate by:
- Accelerating everyday tasks and offering insights and automation tools such as anomaly detection, auto-filling, prompting, and document scanning
- Providing real-time guidance through complex processes so employees can focus on more strategic work
- Streamlining common business processes by providing users with AI agents to operate on behalf of others
“We’re really excited for what’s to come as Workday expands its AI offers and capabilities,” Loos says.