MasterCard International

MasterCard International and Clarus Corporation have a lot in common: Both companies are dedicated to making purchasing more convenient for their customers.
Perhaps that shared commitment has something to do with the reason that Clarus, a Microsoft Certified Solution Provider, has been so effective in helping MasterCard automate its procurement process. With Clarus' help, MasterCard is rolling out an enterprise corporate-purchasing solution based on Clarus E-Procurement and Microsoft BackOffice technologies that has already slashed the average time required to fill purchase orders by some 70 percent and cut the cost of processing purchase orders by approximately 68 percent.
Thinking StrategicallyJim Cullinan, MasterCard's vice president of Global Purchasing, has been the driving force behind the electronic procurement project. "When I came in three years ago, everything was manual," Cullinan recalls. "Filing, processing, everything was a piece of paper that needed to be moved around."
Cullinan saw that by eliminating all of that paperwork and automating the purchasing workflow, a corporate-purchasing application would not only reduce expenses and speed delivery, but leave buyers more time for studying purchasing patterns, evaluating suppliers, and exploring new ideas.
"The goal was to move away from being a procurement group that is transaction-based to one that is more strategically oriented," explains Cullinan. "If you can set up an electronic process where the catalog is on the desktop, it really keeps the buyer out of the transaction itself and positions them to play a more strategic role."