ADT transforms IT procurement and becomes the gold standard for other teams across the organization

Jose Cifuentes, Director, IT Strategic Supplier Management at ADT, recently joined Zip for a webinar on how IT procurement transformed with Zip as the orchestration tool providing new levels of visibility across all workflows.

The challenge

ADT’s security solutions empower people to protect their homes and small businesses, and employees need to be able support the company’s mission. Unfortunately, the process for employees to get critical software to perform their jobs used to be tedious and email-driven. “It was really chaotic,” Jose Cifuentes, Director, IT Strategic Supplier Management, says. “People didn’t know where the requests were in progress. Everything was manual — spreadsheets, emails, calls.”

ADT’s IT team was already equipped with a tech stack, including SAP Ariba for purchasing, DocuSign for contracts, and Okta for user management. What they lacked was any sort of integration across all those tools, or between the procurement team and the business stakeholders they served.

Every purchase request arrived by email, spreadsheet, or phone call. There was no standardized intake or required fields to fill out, and no way for a requester to see where their request stood without reaching out to the team. The absence of visibility caused frustration for both end users and the team having to continually provide updates.

The downstream consequences were significant. ADT’s sourcing team regularly had to shift focus away from strategic work to answer status questions, route documents between teams, and manually assign work. “We had sourcing managers trying to shepherd folks through the process,” Jose explains. “They were spending more than half of their time just trying to teach people and show them where they were in the process, what the next step is, and what they have to do to get a PO or a contract signed.” 

Contract renewals presented a parallel risk. With no centralized system to track notice periods, upcoming renewals, or contract terms, the team relied entirely on spreadsheets. Missed renewals meant either unwanted auto-renewals of unused software or, worse, unintentional service disruptions for important systems. Jose adds, “either you have an auto-renewal that you missed and you didn’t give notice for terminating the contract, or if you miss a renewal, maybe you’re shutting down a critical service without knowing it.”

The technology complexity was also accelerating. Increasing information security requirements, the emergence of AI governance reviews, and growing legal scrutiny of vendor agreements meant ADT’s procurement process needed to absorb more steps, stakeholders, and rigor without slowing down.

The solution

In mid-2022, Jose’s team decided to transform their approach. Rather than attempting an enterprise-wide transformation, they deliberately chose to start with IT only. “Being a small piece of the wider procurement organization… we were small enough to test new solutions in a controlled manner before rolling anything out enterprise-wide,” Jose shares.

ADT brought on Zip in October 2022 with the goal of going live January 1, 2023, so every IT purchase request from that date forward would flow through Zip and create a clean data baseline. “The reason for that was we wanted clean data,” Jose says. “We wanted to make sure that anything that started on January 1 went through Zip, that way, we can always refer back to the data and say, ‘yes, this went through Zip because it’s a 2023 order.’”

The platform’s low-code configuration meant the team could build and iterate on workflows themselves, without outside consultants. “It’s not like traditional systems where rolling out a change is complicated and you have to stop the process,” Jose explains. “You can make changes as you go.”

Initial integrations with Ariba for supplier data and Okta for employee identity allowed the team launch without manual data pulls from external systems. From there, workflow logic built itself outward: if-then rules automatically routed requests to the right team based on category, spend threshold, and complexity. Administrative tasks, such as vendor registration, document collection, PO entry, flowed to ADT’s offshore team through a structured queue. Strategic work stayed with the onshore sourcing managers. “Now everybody knows where to go to create requests for IT purchases,” Jose says. “I just send them the Zip link, and everything else is straightforward.”

A year in, ADT rolled out Ironclad for contract lifecycle management across the broader enterprise. Without Zip as an orchestration layer, the broader procurement organization had a much more difficult time adopting Ironclad, with the team having to manually enter contract data and requesters having to learn a complex new tool from scratch.

Because Zip was already the intake layer for IT procurement, adding Ironclad meant they could easily integrate it as a step in the existing workflow. “For our requesters, it was a relatively easy transition, they still just submitted a central intake through Zip,” Jose says. “All we did was integrate the CLM solution into one of the steps in the process. Now when you get to the contracting step, you can see the Ironclad status right inside Zip. They don’t have to go to any other system.”

The result

With intake, routing, and task assignment handled inside Zip, ADT’s sourcing managers stopped spending their days shepherding requests and started spending them on negotiations and supplier strategy. “Zip allowed us to split tasks into strategic and administrative,” Jose says. “Our category managers, our sourcing managers, can spend the majority of their time actually adding value rather than trying to shepherd the request through the process.” The offshore team, operating from a structured Zip queue, could now be fully utilized for administrative work without any manual orchestration. The ratio of strategic to tactical work shifted significantly without adding a single headcount.

Before Zip, measuring procurement performance was nearly impossible. “A lot of stuff was manual; you had calls, and emails, and you didn’t really know where the start or the end of the process were,” Jose says. Now the team has end-to-end visibility on every request. ADT’s average cycle time is 22 days across all request types, including complex MSA negotiations. That number has held steady even as the workflow absorbed significant new complexity. “We’ve added more steps to the process because our world of technology purchasing is becoming much more complex, including AI reviews and information security reviews that are lengthier,” Jose explains. “All of these things were added, but we didn’t really see an increase in cycle time because we had everything under control and could see where the delays were going to land.”

Renewal management, once a chronic blind spot, is now proactive. Zip’s renewal dashboard surfaces upcoming expirations and prompts requesters automatically when action is needed, giving the team time to renegotiate or terminate on their own schedule. When ADT’s new CIO joined and immediately asked for a view of the entire IT technology renewal landscape, Jose had an answer in minutes. “It was very easy for me to pull reports and show the renewals we have this year, and highlight the ones we should focus on, because we can’t impact things we already have contracts for,” he says. “That helped facilitate all phases of the procurement process.”

The most compelling validation came from outside Jose’s team entirely. ADT’s central indirect procurement organization — a separate, larger team that had been operating without Zip — ran their own vendor evaluation after watching IT’s results. They reviewed ADT’s implementation, assessed competing solutions, and reached their own conclusion. “Our central procurement team decided to also choose Zip, and they’re going live with the enterprise-wide rollout,” Jose says. “They even did their own evaluation, looked at other providers, and they built on what we had. They said Zip is definitely the way forward.”

Looking ahead, Jose’s team is focused on embedding AI more deeply into the workflow, using Zip’s AI capabilities to reduce redundant approvals, accelerate review cycles, and automate PO creation through a planned Ariba integration. “The next step is how do we embed AI into our process, and then how do we enable more integrations,” he says. For a team that built a best-in-class procurement function from scratch in under three years, Zip is the operating model guiding them into the future.