Zip describes itself as “the leading ingestion and procurement orchestration platform and ingestion-to-pay suite.” It doesn't seem like the most exciting space for a startup, but if you've ever worked at a large company, you know how complicated the process of purchasing even the most basic things can be. This is a hassle for employees and difficult to manage for procurement, finance, and legal teams who have to juggle various applications that barely communicate with each other.
To make all of this easier, Zip today announced a new set of enterprise features, Zip Premier, and a new low-code feature that lets users build their own integrations and take advantage of services that Zip itself doesn't support. Announcing an integrated platform. Use an existing connector. To make onboarding new customers easier, Zip is also releasing a set of 100 pre-built workflow templates today. These include templates for working with contractors, managing automatic updates, offboarding vendors, and more.
At the core of Zip is unifying disparate procurement processes into one platform, allowing businesses to manage everything from original purchase requests, to managing purchasing policies, to approvals from finance, legal, and security teams, to budget management. It's about being able to manage everything. , new vendor onboarding, purchase order creation, and invoice processing. For companies that already use third-party tools for any of these steps, Zip allows them to continue using those tools and aggregate all of this data to manage the entire workflow.
Image credit: Zip
“This problem of employees needing to buy something to do their job is very common in any industry, so this problem is very horizontal and ubiquitous,” Zaparde said. He emphasized that the larger the company, the more serious the problem, and the more serious the problem. For companies in regulated industries.
New features the company is launching today for enterprises include more granular permissions and new tools to maintain an audit trail of requests, permissions, and vendors to ensure enterprises are audit-ready. included. Zip is also adding new tools to monitor the health of its integrations with third-party services and real-time alerts if things go awry.
Image credit: Zip
New low-code integration platforms are interesting. Mr. Zaparde acknowledged that it is unlikely, for example, that companies will want permanent employees to build integration into their financial systems. However, he believes this will help his IT team build and maintain these connectors. These connectors often end up connecting to legacy or bespoke systems that Zip itself could not support.
Zip competes with several other procurement platforms such as Coupa, SAP, and Workday. But Zaparde argues that the advantage of Zip is that it can tie all these systems together.
“Traditional procurement solutions do not meet the complex needs of modern enterprises, which face a complex web of disjointed procurement processes that span many business teams and systems,” he said. “Developed with our largest enterprise customers, our new capabilities streamline the entire spend process and deliver enterprise-grade performance with consumer-grade flexibility so our customers can drive compliance. , allowing us to scale quickly.”