Northwestern Mutual unifies intake, purchasing, and spend controls

The challenge

Founded in 1857, Northwestern Mutual offers a full portfolio of financial services, including life and disability insurance, wealth management, and retirement and business planning. The company ranks in the top 25% of Fortune 500 companies and serves more than five million customers. Managing a billion dollars of spend in a heavily regulated financial services industry is exactly as complicated as it sounds—and Northwestern Mutual's fragmented control over vendor spend was making a big challenge bigger.

The procurement team had invested in Coupa for procure-to-pay functionality, but found themselves wrestling with significant limitations. "Our requirements aren't cut and dry," says Christopher Kee, Vice President of Sourcing and Procurement. "It's more of an art than a science." But Coupa's rigid workflows couldn't accommodate that nuance, and making changes required significant effort, often internal engineering, or even Coupa’s, involvement. "The lift to do things... you need to bring an engineer in," the team noted. "It's a constant care and feeding type of thing."

Without a unified intake layer, requests came through email, Slack, phone calls, and SharePoint. "People were responding to requests through too many channels," says Kee. "Someone who started a request would have no idea what was happening with it." The Coupa CLM module offered little help. It was used only as a document repository, with no workflow integration or linkage between contract values and purchase orders. The result was that requests were difficult to track, documentation was left disconnected, and visibility into reviews was limited."One person would say it takes ten steps to get something done and someone else would say it would take two," Kee explains. Often, both were wrong, with two-steppers skipping critical due diligence and ten-steppers creating unnecessary roadblocks.

The solution

Northwestern Mutual adopted Zip first for Intake-to-Procure, establishing a single front door for all procurement requests. The impact was immediate: visibility, consistency, collaboration, and control that had been missing for years. Every request now runs through Zip. "Even when we do a disbursement, we still tell people you have to come to Zip first," the team explained. This captured requests that previously went unrecorded and routed them through appropriate privacy, security, and risk assessment processes.

"We can fully attest that everything is going through the appropriate privacy, security, third-party risk assessment process," says Kee. "And we can answer questions with more data than we've ever had before."

With the intake layer working, Northwestern Mutual made the decision to replace Coupa entirely, extending Zip to cover Procure-to-Pay. This unified requests, vendor agreements, POs, and invoices into a seamless intake-to-pay workflow, eliminating the disconnects that had plagued the team. Unlike Coupa, Zip allowed the team to configure workflows themselves. "It truly is a system we can configure the majority of the time," the team noted. Direct API connections to PeopleSoft and ServiceNow replaced fragmented processes, reducing manual data entry and improving data quality.

Zip's ease of implementation was a pleasant surprise. "We were a little concerned about connecting to our existing infrastructure, but Zip's low-code and no-code APIs were very helpful," says Kee. "And compared with our old system, it's night and day in terms of experience and ease of use. Employees love the transparency and visibility—especially our cross-functional teams."

“We need to perform the right amount of risk review on third-party requests as they come in. Before Zip, there were inconsistencies that created significant liabilities.”

The result

Zip gave Northwestern Mutual a more controlled and complete way to manage vendor spend across intake, approvals, and downstream workflows. Requests that once came in through disconnected channels are now captured in one place and routed through the right privacy, security, and third-party risk processes. That consistency has improved visibility into spend and given leaders more confidence in how requests move through the business.

"There's one front door," Kee says. "All those one-off requests are captured and sent through the right processes. We estimate we've saved up to 18% over the last year and increased our spend under management by as much as 20%." Leadership is no longer working from an incomplete picture of spending. "Senior leaders can finally have procurement conversations with a strong level of confidence," Kee says.

By consolidating their procurement tech stack, moving from Coupa plus workarounds to Zip as a unified platform, Northwestern Mutual gained a holistic view of spend that drives both savings and better compliance. The regulatory component, Kee notes, is huge: "Before Zip, there were inconsistencies that created significant liabilities." With less time required for implementation and system maintenance, the team can focus on strategic work, including category strategy, supplier consolidation, and driving value, rather than managing disconnected systems.