VISA International

VISA International thrives on making purchases easy to pay for. Long recognized as a global leader in the payment card industry, it is not surprising to find VISA at the forefront of what Forbes Magazine calls "the last frontier" of business automation, Internet, and intranet-based electronic purchasing.
In fact, using the BackOffice family and Ariba Operating Resource Management System (Ariba ORMS), from Ariba, Inc., VISA is moving beyond simple electronic purchasing to Operating Resource Management (ORM). Its sophisticated new ORM solution is not only a natural fit with VISA's Purchasing card program and other payment services, but a significant source of savings as well.
Crying for EfficiencyFrom computers to cubicle partitions, most companies today use manual methods to buy nearly all of their operating resources. For these organizations, acquiring goods and services is a cumbersome and costly process that's "crying for efficiency," according to William Schoch, director of VISA Purchasing.
"In a paper-based environment, purchasing is time-consuming, frustrating, mistake-prone, and expensive," Schoch says. "If a requisition gets hung up somewhere in the approval or ordering cycle, the person who initiated the request is in the dark and has no way of knowing where the problem is." ORM takes advantage of the Internet and corporate intranets to consolidate and automate traditional methods of acquiring operating resources, from selecting items, obtaining necessary approvals, and placing orders to generating payments and receiving the ordered goods