Marisol Buchanan, CEO of Premikati, Inc., had the pleasure to speak in NYC at SAP Ariba’s Business with a Purpose Summit – along with Step Up for Students (SUFS) COO, Anne White. The challenges faced by SUFS and and solutions of implementing SAP Ariba’s Guided Buying and SNAP! tools are highlighted below.
The Problem
At a high level, Premikati had been tasked with giving parents and guardians access to their children’s scholarship funds AND providing easy access to the things they are allowed to buy including tuition, provider services and school supplies.
If we asked to partner on this project a few years ago it would have been very difficult from a change management perspective and we would not have recommended Ariba due to the complexity and all of the massive capabilities of the software, which is a good thing for large corporations but rather confusing for a basic consumer who may not even know what the word “Procurement” or “advance ship notice means”.
The Solution
Now, through the innovations made by SAP Ariba to the user interface and adding Guided Buying, along with the simplicity of SAP Ariba SNAP!, the implementation end user training has been drastically simplified.
This is imperative considering the landscape of the situation:
We have:
- 100,000 families
- not using corporate devices with standard operating systems
- limited access to email
- low user experience with business support technology like WebEx for training
- multiple languages
- many families with multiple children
- 2000 schools which now are “Suppliers” who have limited experience with “e-Invoicing”
With this said, Premikati, Inc. has developed a robust and creative Change Management Strategy. In addition to standard business communication vehicles, we are leveraging social platforms such as text messaging, YouTube, Facebook and twitter to engage and interact with these families in a way that easy and common for them.
So, essentially, we are taking complex procurement technology and best in class business processes and applying them in a way to make a positive impact on families, because that is what really matters. That is truly procurement with purpose.
