Structure Therapeutics transforms Procure-to-Pay with Zip

Challenge

Structure Therapeutics is a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company with over 200 employees across the U.S. and China. Their mission is ultimately, as Associate Director of Procurement Robert Kolek shares, is "helping a patient live longer, stronger, and better." Being in a heavily regulated industry,  procurement and finance’s mission is focused on financial accountability, financial best practices, and helping the business make the right decisions at the right cost.

Unfortunately, achieving that mission was a struggle as the procurement and finance teams lacked a centralized tool to manage spend. "It was extraordinarily challenging," Robert says. "It was a set of very manual touchpoints, spinning up a manual request and chasing after the right project code or entity, and then trying to find the right contract."

The manual processes created frustration across the organization. "The ‘Before’ was a lot of confusion around how to even create a request," Robert shares. "Tons of emails that I just had to generate because the system wasn't working for us. I had to work for the system and it was a very exhausting high-touchpoint system that was disconnected and unscalable."

The downstream impacts were significant. "You had requesters that just didn't want to go through the process, and vendors that were frustrated because they weren’t getting paid on time, which impacted the relationship." The transparency was missing for where requests stood, including payments. "You had significant vendor stress happening every week."

Solution

Structure Therapeutics selected Zip to transform their procurement operations, deciding to go all-in on Intake-to-Pay from Day One. "The game changer was the workflow and the customizable ability to work with what Structure needed," says Robert.

What made Zip stand out was its ability to connect the entire P2P process in one platform. "For Zip and Structure it was the workflow design and how it could connect to the different processes and keep it down to one intake request,” Robert shares. “It will connect to the IT system, to legal, and then all the way to procurement again for final approval."

The visibility extends all the way through to payment. "On the invoicing side, there's no blackhole," Robert explains. "You can see if there's a pending payment. I can see what stage it’s in, whether it's pending approval, approved, pending for payment, processing, or payment released to the vendor."

Adoption was swift. "When we launched we had a crawl, walk, run approach. We opened it up and the first 40 intake requests were done by China and they adopted Zip instantly overnight,” Robert said. Today, stakeholders range "from the CEO to the newest hire."

The platform also helped Structure pass critical compliance milestones. "Our SOX team was extremely happy with how Zip had the audit trail and the ability to further control the permissions... it was crucial for Structure at that time to really pass successfully as a public company and Zip helped us do that."

Results

The quantitative impact has been dramatic. "At launch it really reduced the amount of creating the request by three weeks," Robert shares. "The approvals could take a month or two just to get the PO approved. Now we're down to about nine days overall from start to finish. The approval of the PO has improved by 75%. The creation process has improved by 50% if not higher. So we've gone from extraordinarily slow to extraordinarily fast."

The transformation has also changed how procurement and finance show up internally and externally. "With Zip, you have a happy AP manager, and you have happy vendors getting paid on time."

The effects also extend across the organization. "The requesters are extremely happy to use the tool. We have really a seamless and far better relationship with our vendor base overall, including our critical strategic vendors, because we're paying on time."

For Robert, Zip has delivered on its promise to bring Structure's teams together: "Zip really brought teams together to be more connected, more visible, and more seamless."