Vroozi: A Powerful and Comprehensive Business Shopping Platform

Steve Olds, CEO

Today, procurement professionals need to track savings, scrutinize supply risk, support category management, and leverage ecosystem knowledge. In such a scenario, IBM extensively focuses on empowering procurement professionals with robust solutions, but the bulk of the employee base spends a small fraction of time, purchasing goods for their job. Organizations are constantly looking for a single solution that connects customers and suppliers electronically to give excellent shopping experience, drive user adoption, and procurement compliance. Vroozi, a CA-based company builds innovative, mobile-optimized procure-to-pay solutions to drive procurement productivity for employees, increase adoption, and reduce costs for organizations. “We focus on bringing value to procurement professionals and suppliers through intuitive shopping experience, intelligent process embedded technology, and accessibility via any device,” says Steve Olds, Vroozi, CEO.

Founded in 2011, the company’s initial catalog solution—a supplier relationship and content management platform—gives employees a better shopping experience, while leveraging the complete procurement features of IBM Maximo systems. With their growing success, Vroozi decided to bridge just a catalog solution to offer a procure-to-pay Web responsive framework solution that can be accessed from any device.

The company integrates with IBM in two areas. Vroozi’s catalog solution assimilates with IBM Maximo through an IBM-built Web adapter. The product helps enterprises to give users an intuitive shopping experience and spend analytics. “Enterprises have multiple back-end systems, such as IBM Maximo, SAP, Oracle. Leveraging the Vroozi catalog solution, customers can connect to a single universal cloud-based marketplace,” says Olds. “Through our system, organizations can synchronize spending data with multiple systems with an option to create a universal marketplace that integrates to different backend and ERP systems.”

Our platform is built to give the best shopping experience in the B2B space on any screen size

The company’s service team assists firms with the set-up and system integration, and guides through the initial supplier on-boarding process. A recent Fortune 100 Entertainment customer has been using Maximo to manage all their assets. The customer leveraged Vroozi’s catalog solution to connect to their SAP systems for two years and captured a higher-adoption rate. The customer saw the benefits of adding this catalog capability to their Maximo instances to give that ease of use and thus were able to capture better spend data. With this universal marketplace installed for the past two years, the customer has synchronized financial and material information in real-time with their systems with easy content management and better spend analysis.

On the IBM Commerce side, Vroozi partners with Emptoris and IBM Payments Gateway to offer enterprises a complete Source-to-Pay solution. This combination provides procurement teams powerful sourcing and contract management capabilities of Emptoris while giving users 100 percent mobile-enabled functions. “Sourcing teams of large enterprises utilize Emptoris to do complex contract negotiation, and signing documents,” adds Olds. “From the signed contract, all negotiated items are stored in Vroozi marketplace. Employees can then leverage Vroozi’s procure-to-invoice solution to search, request, approve, order, and pay on any device. We partner with IBM Payment Gateway because it has a global approach with connections to multiple banks around the world.”

Driven by innovation, Vroozi is relentlessly focused on delivering a procurement user experience that employees can use on any framework without any complexity. “Our platform is built to give the best shopping experience in the B2B space on any screen size,” says Olds. “We see the strength of IBM solutions. We integrate with them to assist IBM customers to drive even more usage out of Maximo and Emptoris in a very cost-effective way. Customers see ROI within months, and most importantly, the employees are happy using it.” Forging ahead, the company is planning to grow organically and spread their footprint worldwide. “As part of our innovation lab and partnering with IBM we look forward to employing the latest multifaceted technical and functional innovations to help customers everywhere,” concludes Olds.