Savings, Efficiency, and Reporting

Used now by 750 people, Clarus E-Procurement will eventually be rolled out to 2,300 users at MasterCard. It's already proving to be a big hit. "The users love it," says Cullinan. "We were such a manual operation before. Now, if a person goes on Clarus by 3 o'clock in the afternoon, they will have that item on their desktop by noon the next day. You can't really get any better than that."
MasterCard's suppliers are fans of the new system as well. "The vendors who are on it absolutely love it," reports Cullinan. "This makes the transaction on their end much easier." In addition, Clarus E-Procurement reduces the number of incomplete or incorrect orders that suppliers receive while simultaneously increasing their overall order volume by reducing "maverick" buying.
To date, Clarus E-Procurement has allowed MasterCard to slash the average time required to fill a purchase order from 3.98 days to 1.24, and to cut the average cost of processing a purchase order from $125 to $40. And there are bigger savings to come: the company was already saving an estimated $10,000 per month on office supplies, computer hardware, and computer software alone during an early pilot phase with just 250 users.
"It's certainly saving us a lot of time, and that equals manpower," says Cullinan. "It really allows the user groups to work on their job, and allows my group to be more strategic and aggressive. It's giving us a much smoother flow of requisition to order to vendor, so we've become much more efficient and have been able to process a whole lot more without adding staff."
Such efficiencies add up. "My guess, based on how it has reduced processing time, ended maverick purchasing, and allowed us to negotiate better with our vendors, is that it has probably lowered costs somewhere around 15%."
Meanwhile, in addition to all those savings, Clarus E-Procurement is also delivering a wealth of valuable reporting data to MasterCard's managers.
"They are really getting much more information than ever before," says Cullinan. "For example, looking at office supplies, what does the average person spend a month on office supplies? How does that vary from department to department? We can drill down all different kinds of ways, and the users can go in and get this information whenever they want. We're learning a lot."