Fixing the Business Spend Management Problem Starts With an Online Catalog

Businesses have a buying problem, and fixing it requires a different way of managing their spend.

Zach Garippa, CEO and co-founder of Order (formerly Negotiatus), said that shifting customer expectations are creating a ripple effect that touches even workaday concerns about how firms purchase the office supplies that keep their businesses humming.

Simply put, “we’ve been spoiled on the B2C landscape,” he said. “If you’re at home and you want to buy a pen as a consumer, you just do it, and you don’t think twice about it.”

That pen buying problem is a perfect illustration of the frictions inherent within procurement. There are so many concurrent workflows, many employees within an enterprise simply don’t know where to start. Procurement professionals must wade through several considerations, including whether they’re ordering from an approved or unapproved vendor, whether the pens need a requisition form, whether multiple lines of approval are warranted, and just what needs to be included on the purchase order.

“This cascade of workflows is confusing, and it is chaotic,” Garippa said.

In a nutshell, procurement needs innovation. Order’s technology merges strategic sourcing, managing vendors and invoicing into one platform. In terms of functionality, Order enables companies to place orders, control spend and remit payment across a single platform.

Start With the Catalog

Simplifying business purchasing must start somewhere.

The first order of business to streamline those workflows, he said, has been creating an online product catalog that everyone can access — and then building controls into that catalog, including permissioning and curation.

Garippa said that the construction of the catalog represents one of the toughest tasks to tackle in B2B. It requires a lot of data and a significant number of stock-keeping units (SKUs), vendors, price points and payment methods.

The platform model, with that critical catalog component and the downstream unification of purchasing, billing and payments built in, gives visibility before the buying commences — although Garippa was quick to point out that the company’s goal is not to take over every single B2B workflow, but to proceed through a logical hierarchy.

The gross-merchandise value of pens, for example, may be atrocious, but the frequency is high, Garippa said. If platforms like Order can capture the end users from a value perspective, it becomes easier to layer on other services later, adding on new levels of spend management.

Order, by way of contrast, has chosen (aided by its catalog) to start with buyer intentionality — examining whether buyers want a particular SKU with a particular brand, or whether they might be brand-agnostic. The end users targeted are the chief financial officers, procurement officers and, specifically, middle-market companies.

An Urgent Order of Business

Corporate spend and control of that spend are becoming increasingly critical amid the pandemic, as workforces become decentralized and stay that way.

The role of the CFO has also changed, Garippa said, as they are being tasked with handling a greater degree of financial control and onboarding and implementing new supplier relationships. They need weekly forecasts and granular detail into everyday spend where they might have previously gotten reports at the end of every month, and spend management is becoming more tactical.

For the professionals who order supplies and other goods daily, the platform helps ensure that users get what they need when they need it — sidestepping the frustration and pain point of going online to a vendor’s site and finding out that a product is out of stock.

“We can drill down into the minutiae and fix these problems for you in real time,” he said.

The platform gives the end user the chance to express their intentionality — i.e., if they want a specific vendor, a specific pen or a variation of that pen — and they can get it all paid for and delivered, with certainty, within a two-day window.

After the Rebranding

Earlier this month, Negotiatus rebranded itself as Order after completing a $30 million Series B funding round.

Read more: B2B Marketplace Negotiatus Rebrands After $30M Series B

Garippa told Webster that with the funding in hand, Order needs to be judicious about its next steps.

“Startups don’t die of starvation,” he said. “They die of indigestion. We’re sharpening our pencil at the mid-market.”

The company will continue to target medical practices, health and wellness firms and retail — where purchasing is frequent and still marked with friction.

“We want a world where when you log online to order, it’s just exactly what you need at your fingertips,” Garippa told Webster.