Introducing Zip Sourcing: Use AI to source more to save more

From our founding, Zip’s mission has been to help businesses procure with the fastest process, least risk, and at the lowest price. With Zip Intake-to-Procure and Intake-to-Pay, we’ve helped hundreds of companies do just that, increasing adoption of spend controls and automating the procure-to-pay process for customers including Snowflake, Northwestern Mutual, Databricks, and Business Insider. Our rapid success has given Zip customers pre-contract visibility into 95% of their spend, helping them deliver more than $1 billion in savings. 

But our customers have even bigger ambitions. They want to use the visibility and influence unlocked by Zip to drive even more savings and proactively surface risks with vendors. 

That’s why today we are proud to announce the launch of Zip Sourcing. Built with our top customers, including Grafana, Figma, and N26, Zip Sourcing provides a streamlined, transparent RFx experience for all participants, guaranteeing your business will fully adopt sourcing so you can source more, save more, and grow your team’s influence. 

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Zip Sourcing: Never Missing a Sourcing Opportunity Again

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Using technology to automate sourcing events is a widely accepted practice. But let's face it, sourcing tools have their struggles, too. Our customers have consistently emphasized that their current solutions are too cumbersome for everyone to use — for everyone involved.

Requesters face confusion when trying to initiate sourcing requests and collaborating on vendor evaluations. Sourcing leads complain that building RFx events is tedious compared with established templates in Excel. Vendors hate logging into tools that require excessive manual work to participate and offer limited visibility into the process.

Zip Sourcing tackles these problems by offering the first truly modern RFx experience that starts with intake. 

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How Zip is Modernizing Sourcing

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Zip Sourcing is designed to radically simplify collaboration between requesters, procurement, and vendors. To support this, we built Zip Sourcing with three guiding principles: 

• Guarantee high adoption by stakeholders and vendors
• Automate as much as possible so customers can run more events
• Create full visibility and auditability into the sourcing process

Guaranteed Adoption: Intuitive Sourcing Intake

Chasing down stakeholders for sourcing requirements and coordinating with vendors is a tedious, time-consuming process for many. Zip Sourcing streamlines every aspect of sourcing, facilitating easy initiation of sourcing requests from intake or quick conversion of a purchase request to an RFx with just one click. Customers using Zip Sourcing experience a seamless process collecting RFP submissions, with over 85% of vendors independently completing their tasks.

Autonomous Sourcing: AI-powered RFx

When we asked our customers how they were running sourcing events today, the answer was clear: spreadsheets and email were still very much a part of the process. If they wanted to deliver more savings, they needed to be able to run more types of sourcing events more often, and they needed to be able to do it with their existing teams. 

Zip Sourcing introduces AI-driven event creation, transforming this manual process by instantly importing and generating RFx content. This capability not only accelerates the entire sourcing process but also enhances the quality of RFPs, maximizing both time and resources.

Full Visibility: Collaborative Sourcing

Sourcing events often suffer from a perceived lack of transparency, causing stakeholders to avoid the process and leaving executives in the dark about sourcing effectiveness and outcomes. Zip Sourcing flips this experience into a collaborative and transparent process. Requesters, approvers, and sourcing teams get central visibility into each stage and task required, with integrated commenting that reflects the Zip experience for purchase requests. 

By providing stakeholders with guided scoring, side-by-side vendor evaluations, and complete workflow visibility, Zip Sourcing ensures everyone is informed and engaged at every step. For CFOs and procurement leaders, Zip offers comprehensive views of the sourcing pipeline and savings, a linked trail from sourcing to contract, and centralized vendor communications. This provides a clear, auditable paper trail for the entire strategic sourcing operation, helping demonstrate the value procurement teams deliver from these efforts. 

See How You Can Do More with Zip Sourcing

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Offering a guided, AI-enhanced process to set up, run, and award events in one centralized platform, Zip Sourcing enables finance and procurement teams to easily spot opportunities to save, run more RFx events, and track their progress towards savings goals.

For those looking to add a sourcing solution to your tool belt, join our webinar on 12 December 2023 at 10am to learn more. And if you’re a current customer, we’d love to show you how Zip Sourcing can extend the ROI of your intake and procurement orchestration strategy; sign up for a demo today to see how.