How Tropic Built Its Own World-Class Procurement Process

When a company makes its name helping other companies optimize their spend management, its own operations are held to a higher standard.

So when Russell Lester stepped into his role as Tropic's CFO, he saw not only a chance to lead financial strategy, but to also walk the talk. "Because our solution is built for and helps empower the House of Finance, I wanted our use of our own product to be world-class," Lester said.

The Challenge

Revamp procurement processes to match needs 

As Tropic scaled, its internal processes hadn’t kept pace: approvals were inflexible, metadata was incomplete, and procurement lacked the precision expected of a company selling best-in-class procurement technology. They understood the power of the Tropic solution but the process surrounding it was beginning to be overbuilt.

A single, inflexible approval flow treated every request the same, regardless of amount or type. This led to missing contract data like owners, budgets, or renewal dates. The same problems that Tropic customers faced, Tropic had, too.  

"Tropic shows reports of contracts or suppliers that are missing information," Lester explained. "I noticed some opportunities to further enhance our use of our data and reinvigorate our use of our own solution."

That opportunity became even more urgent when Michael Shields, Tropic VP of Procurement, tried to purchase a basic microphone and found himself triggering 14 layers of approval.

"If I was buying software that was several hundred thousand dollars, I can see why those layers of approval would be required, but in this case, it didn't apply," Shields added. "That was kind of that catalyst to say, 'Okay, let's relook at this.'"

The Solution

Modernizing procurement for scale

Lester partnered with Katie Africk, Tropic Director of Professional Services, to fundamentally rethink how the company used its own platform.

This wasn’t just a short adjustment to workflows: it was a full consultative reset led by experts who had seen hundreds of implementations at scale. 

"We've seen this movie hundreds of times over, so we know how to offer advice and show you the best type of process to build out based on your organization's readiness," she noted. 

Africk interviewed stakeholders across finance, procurement, and operations to understand what was causing friction and what could be improved to make purchasing easier and more powerful.

"It was like sitting on the counselor’s couch and being cathartic about what is your envisioned future state of the spend management cycle," Lester said. 

"What are the right process steps? How much control is too much control? Which types of requests do we want to go through the process faster? What are the guardrails you want to put in place? Katie, with her expertise, knew the right questions to ask."

Why reactive procurement is risky procurement

The optimization focused on three major pillars:

• Cross-functional alignment: Ensuring finance, procurement, legal, security, and operations were aligned on their roles (and benefits) by following the new process.
• Improving data hygiene: Cleaning up contract records and ensuring all necessary metadata (owners, anticipated spend, renewal dates) was accurate.
• Context-aware workflows: Redesigning the intake process to ask only relevant questions and routing approvals based on spend level and risk.

A critical insight the team found was the importance of moving from reactive to proactive procurement – and how much risk they faced if they didn’t.

"Spend is like water: It's going to find that path of least resistance,” Shields explained. “If a company is having compliance problems, a very good likely reason is because the intake and the approval process isn't transparent, isn't clean, or isn't a good user experience, because spend will find a way around it."

The Outcome

Data integrity that fuels forecasting and control

After the changes, Tropic was able to move toward truly proactive management: seeing renewal risks earlier, surfacing sourcing opportunities, and eliminating the last-minute chaos.

"Now we’re looking at the charts this morning and we're basically one quarter out where we've already addressed the upcoming renewals for the next several months,” Lester added. "That's where you want to be, not reacting where people are scrambling."

Shields said the better process results in fewer urgent requests, which can lead to better negotiation outcomes – adding that, “ as we have that better visibility, as we have that better data, we're able to proactively leverage the tool to encourage people to get those requests in earlier.” 

Measurable compliance and risk mitigation

Data hygiene around contracts is much cleaner. The team reduced the metadata errors by 96% within a few weeks of optimizing Tropic, which gives the finance team crucial strategic hours back in their day. 

"Rather than spending time chasing down that data, we're just spending time focusing on [identifying] our savings opportunities, where we have overlap, which contracts are not in compliance, and what's coming up down the pipeline," Lester said. 

Low-risk requests now move swiftly, while high-impact deals get the scrutiny they deserve, giving both finance and procurement teams confidence and control.

"It significantly decreases the risk profile for Tropic because the right approvers are approving the right things," Shields added. "It's also limiting the time requirements for other things that don't require that kind of oversight."

Concrete savings from centralized contracts

Africk added that the intentional focus on optimizing the platform has created long-term benefits for procurement and spend management. 

"The second you get this cleaned up, you start to feel the benefits of a self-maintaining machine, and that's when the real magic happens," she said. “You have really concrete and tangible outcomes such as savings, the ability to track shadow spend, or feeling really confident in your contract source of truth."

Whether you're optimizing your process to give your team back time or wanting to transform procurement into a strategic function, Tropic’s own journey proves the value of getting it right, from the inside out.

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