The global chemical manufacturing company highlighted in this case study, referred to as Company CM, operates several of the world’s largest chemical processing facilities and produces the plastics, fabrics, fibers, and chemicals used to make safer vehicles, cleaner energy, better medical devices, smarter appliances, and longer-lasting apparel and consumer goods.
Company CM struggled with the inability to easily implement modern technology into the organization’s processes, which resulted in a lack of effectiveness and missed opportunities. By implementing TealBook, they achieved increased commodity savings, better visibility to industry disruptors, and additional supplier discovery across various commodities.
The Challenge of Traditional Sourcing Processes
After six decades of operation, Company CM was in the midst of a significant organizational transformation. With a focus on improving quality of life and inspiring a better tomorrow, they stand by their values of existing for their customers, working together as an organization to keep an eye toward the future, operating with safety, and investing in people and processes. It was imperative their transformation was holistic and optimized internal operations and organizational structure while staying true to their values.
For Company CM, one of their most critical initiatives was to optimize and standardize their procurement and sourcing processes to align with best practices. Historically, Company CM had relied on the same few existing suppliers based on existing and decades old relationships. This resulted in inefficiencies, missed savings, and lack of opportunities.
The ability to discover new suppliers would not only create competition within their supply chain and help drive innovation, but it would also help identify companies who could benefit from Company CM’s latest invention. Their state-of-the-art fabric showed true potential as a breakthrough solution to end the fight against COVID-19. TealBook’s supplier data made it possible to provide this fabric to the companies who needed it most.
It was critical that they select a solution that could easily integrate with existing systems without the need for additional resources. Company CM’s ever changing processes required an agile solution that could grow and adapt as the company evolved.
Why Company CM Chose TealBook
After evaluating multiple solutions, all of which required manual data collection and management, Company CM was intrigued by TealBook’s machine learning and AI. TealBook’s supplier data platform, a robust, dynamic aggregation of supplier data that continues to improve over time, was exactly the solution Company CM needed.
Company CM needed a way for their teams to do their jobs easier and drive adoption through the tools they were using. TealBook’s usability and adaptability enabled their teams to find relevant suppliers. Since TealBook is cloud-based, this was able to be done without the need for additional team members or advanced technology integrations.
The Results
TealBook provided Company CM with a supplier data platform that enabled better discovery and evaluation of new suppliers and increased spend visibility. They were able to do all of this without the use of additional personnel, which helped them quickly achieve substantially higher savings across multiple commodities.
Upon implementing TealBook, Company CM saw a substantial increase in commodity savings from 11% to 22% across various categories. Company CM was also able to identify 15 additional suppliers per category, and gain increased visibility to industry disruptors.
They were also able to use TealBook’s supplier discovery tools to find up to 15 additional suppliers per commodity as well as increase visibility to industry disruptors. Not only were they able to find new suppliers, they were also able to find new buyers for their new product., thereby increasing diversification and revenue.
By using TealBook to quickly create supplier searches instead of using outdated, manual methods, Company CM saved $190,000 and 238 workdays, all while achieving a 14% reduction in unique suppliers. Overall, the team was able to decrease spend, increase savings, and drive innovation once they began using TealBook as their supplier data foundation.