Zapier saves over 400 hours per year on procurement with Tropic

About Zapier

Zapier’s mission is to make automation work for everyone. In the past, automation was expensive, technical and reserved for enterprise companies with deep pockets and highly paid engineers, leaving many overlooked and underserved.

Their easy automation tools are used by more than one million users across nearly all business functions to help them move info between web apps automatically. While the company helps its users save time, Zapier itself was losing a significant amount of time on their internal procurement process.

The Challenge

Before Tropic, Zapier’s procurement process was disjointed and decentralized.

Business users with credit cards were buying products independently, and Zapier’s contracts lived in several different systems. This reality led to a large amount of shadow IT and unnecessary software costs. Missed auto-renewals and overlapping technologies were causing unnecessary overspend. Zapier’s VP of Finance, Ryan Roccon, was tasked with cleaning up the contract footprint, ending rogue purchases, and establishing Zapier’s first true procurement function.

Absent a software and contract management platform, reviewing each contract manually proved to be costly and time-consuming. On average, each contract was costing Zapier’s finance team and business users four hours in the review process.

The Solution

After an exhaustive RFP process, Zapier chose Tropic for its proven track record implementing cost-effective procurement processes inside organizations very similar to Zapier—particularly those that had not yet implemented a full procurement function.

Ryan and the Zapier team deployed Tropic with a focus on three major areas:

1. Time savings
2. Financial savings
3. Stakeholder delight

Time Savings

Tropic implemented a custom procurement process for Zapier. The new process has saved 75% of overall time spent on procurement, driving a total of 400 hours in time saved per year for Zapier.

This time savings has given Ryan the time he needs to focus on the more strategic demands of the finance org.

Financial Savings

Tropic has driven a 10x ROI in cost savings for Zapier—including 38% savings on a tricky communications API platform that was Zapier’s third largest contract.

Stakeholder Delight

Zapier’s contract owners were skeptical of the new process, but now they love handing all contract work off to Tropic.

“I don’t think our stakeholders realized how cumbersome and painful it was to research and buy all their own tools until we started using Tropic,” said Roccon. “Our contract owners are now eager to work with Tropic and get expert insights to help them get the right tools at the right price, every time.”

Building The Foundation For A Sustainable Procurement Process

These cost and time savings legitimized the need for procurement inside Zapier and led directly to Zapier’s first full-time procurement hire.

By outsourcing the procurement process to Tropic, Zapier has saved meaningful time and money, while justifying the need for procurement to the contract owners. For both immediate cost savings and long-term planning, it’s an all-around win for the Zapier finance team.