Scaling procurement at Miro with Zip AI

The challenge

Miro’s visual workspace for innovation helps distributed teams dream, design, and build the future together. Today, more than 70 million users and 200,000 customer organizations depend on Miro to improve product development collaboration, speed time to market, and ensure new products and services deliver on customer needs. But after a phase of explosive growth in 2021, Miro faced a complex challenge of its own.

“As the company grew, the real challenge for procurement was to keep up with the pace of growth,” said Peter Bloom, Miro’s Head of Strategic Sourcing and Procurement. “Pushing back on vendor terms, benchmarking, and doing RFPs fell by the wayside.”

On top of that, disjointed processes and scattered information created inefficient, manual work when it came to auditing and compliance. “There wasn't really one source of truth where we could nail down what happened on which day or create an audit trail. We were having to piece things together,” said Grace Larrea, Miro’s Global Procurement Manager.

As a company built to support innovation, Miro knew there was a way to solve the problem. Their search led them to Zip’s AI-powered procurement platform.

The solution

Zip immediately stood out for its ability to streamline workflows and its transparent, user-friendly interface.

“We were looking for something that had a ton of transparency and above all else was super easy for users and approvers,” said Grace. “With Zip it’s just very simple for someone to hop on the computer, look at the UI, and say ‘Oh, I know exactly what I should do now.’”
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But beyond the intuitive user experience, Zip’s deep AI capabilities enabled the team to begin operating on a new level.
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“Zip AI has automated processes that used to take a lot of manual effort, helping us avoid human error and ultimately allowing us to focus on more strategic value-added activities,” said Peter.
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And by connecting information scattered across various documents and systems, Zip delivered the reliable source of truth Miro was missing before.
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"Zip is used by every department within Miro and it's created a single source of truth for all things vendor- and contract-related,” said Peter.

The Zip insights dashboard allows us to see our cost savings, cycle time, and renewal calendar for any category within the business. I can share information with stakeholders in real time.”

The result

At Miro, Zip has ushered in a new era of operational efficiency.
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"As a procurement leader, I'm looking for any opportunities to apply AI that will help us operate more efficiently. Since rolling out Zip, we've processed thousands of requests and we've been able to reduce our cycle time by 33%,” said Peter.

The accessible, searchable, single source of truth Zip provides has been invaluable as well. As Grace describes it, “Zip has really helped mature our procurement process. We have the right data to build OKRs and see what results should look like three months from now, six months from now, a year from now.”

With Zip’s partnership, Miro created a procurement function that will allow the company to maximize the value of new tools and technology for years to come.