Lattice Customer Story

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Lattice: Scaling the procurement process quickly with an efficient notification system

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Background Information

Spokesperson: Robert Scott, VP of Legal at Lattice

Industry: Human Resources, People Success

Company size: 600+

Headquarters: San Francisco, CA

‍Tech Stack: Airbase, Netsuite, Okta, Slack, Jira, Whistic, Productiv, Vendr, Ironclad

Result from Zip: Estimated 50% decrease in cycle times, decreased time spent on asynchronous communication, increased cost visibility

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Problem: An incomplete system with the pressures of scaling 

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The building of a foundation 

Prior to Zip, the team at Lattice needed a solid system to help them scale their legal function. 

As a world-class organization scaling at a rapid pace, the procurement team needed a trusted tool that would scale with them in support of the rest of the organization alongside a growing team. 

“We needed to go with something that we could implement quickly, that was going to be effective and operational and would scale with us as we built out and grew a procurement team alongside the growth of a rapidly growing legal function or rapidly growing IT and information security function.”

Not only was it not set up to scale, the former process was clunky for all and filled with inefficiencies, as the relevant information needed was not presented upfront in the process. 

“The prior process was roughly nonexistent and required a lot of asynchronous Q&A. People didn't know what sort of resources, materials, requirements they needed to provide to the various decision makers in order to make a procurement decision.”

In addition to needing all the information upfront in a streamlined manner, Lattice also needed a system that offered them visibility to get all stakeholders involved with minimal manual back and forth. 

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Avoiding a legal “black hole” 

“I think one of the biggest problems with a lot of other procurement systems is that the stakeholder who has  submitted the procurement request can't get status updates on a regular cadence.” 

As a seasoned Legal professional, Robert Scott knew what he needed and what to avoid in his approach to building the procurement process. 

With legacy systems, “the stakeholder doesn’t know what's going on behind the scenes so it seems like the procurement request has gone into a legal black hole or an IT black hole and the only thing they can do is to ask on Slack or email for a status update, which drives all those decision makers crazy.”

Scott remarks that “that level of volume of asynchronous communications is incredibly burdensome on the organization….but you can't blame them for wanting to know what's the status of something that they're counting on.”

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Solution: A status update when you need it 

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Organized, easy status updates

By onboarding Zip, the team at Lattice was able to build a strong, stable, scaling system that served all their needs. Upfront, everything is laid out in an organized fashion which eliminates the manual overhead of rigorous information collection. Scott remarks that “now that process is much simpler because everything's laid out ahead of time”

From the beginning of the information collection process through completion, the entire process is streamlined. Zip offers notifications that can alert stakeholders when there’s been a change, in addition to offering the visibility to receive a status update or check on progress without needing to track someone down. 

“Anytime I want to look at the status of any procurement request, I can go into Zip, easily navigate to it, see where it is, who's commented on it, what's the status of the IT approval process? What's the status of the legal approval process? What's the status of the red lines?” 

Being able to answer so many questions asynchronously and independently means company time is spent more efficiently while reducing the frustration of the lack of transparency. 

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Greater visibility leads to better communication

Additionally, if there is a question that needs to be answered that’s beyond a simple status update, this can all be organized through Zip in a centralized fashion, where it’s most relevant. 

“With a centralized ticketing system like Zip, the stakeholder can go view the status. They can ask a question, "Hey, it seems like this has been in IT for five days. I haven't heard anything, what's going on?" IT can respond right there if it's not already obvious to the stakeholder exactly what the status is.”

The ability to give people the information upfront and then let them ask questions leads to a more productive conversation internally, with visibility for all rather than communication stuck in silos. This organization and transparency is a better experience all around.  

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A good user experience 

The centralized system and easy updates has improved user experience while eliminating frustrations. Zip is simple and straightforward to use, offering all the right features the Lattice team needed to succeed, while also giving the stakeholders the right tools to work with the system easily. 

“What I like about Zip is the user experience: It is very intuitive. It's intended to be very intuitive and easy to use.”

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Result: A Best-in-Class Experience that Exceeds Expectations

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Peace of Mind 

The centralized nature of the Zip tool and the transparency that comes with it takes tremendous pressure off of a Legal and IT department. 

“The greatest benefit that I get out of using the Zip platform is peace of mind.”

Much of this peace of mind is attributed to the centralized nature of the product, which eliminates much manual overhead on a day to day basis and leads to a more streamlined work environment. Additionally, the high-level visibility ensures that nothing slips through the cracks and at any given moment there’s a clear answer to where something is in the process. 

“It's a centralized place. It's a simple place that I can access to see the status of every procurement ticket. I can see the status in the IT approval process, in the legal approval process. I can see whether or not legal has completed red line negotiation, and where that ticket may be, or [where] the procurement process may be hung up. I can see what the evaluation is looking like at any different point in time. And I can communicate that back to stakeholders if they request that.”

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Increasing Use Cases, Increased Efficiency

By using Zip, the Lattice team was able to find efficiencies beyond their initial expectations. The features of Zip are so widespread that the Lattice team could configure it for a wider variety of use cases.

“One of the things that's come up fairly quickly is that we're able to find efficiencies in areas that we didn't previously recognize. So using it for renewals, using workflows based on different triggers (like dollar amount or use case), or whichever department may be procuring a certain tool, we're able to create efficiencies beyond what our procurement process was before and beyond what a sort of more standardized procurement process would look like.” 

By bringing in Zip, the Lattice team built a world-class procurement process beyond expectation and beyond the average, standard process.

“We went with the best-in-class solution. The best-in-class was Zip, and we've been very happy with it”

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A system that scales (and automates) with you

The Lattice team also uses Zip to build a world-class procurement system that scales with their fast-growing team, including integrating with other systems that the company uses. 

“Lattice is in the stage of hypergrowth so we're roughly doubling employee headcount year over year. It's incredibly important to us that we'd be able to scale over a period of time and that means that we need to automate whatever we can. And so with Zip, we've also selected many other tools that are compatible with Zip, and we've automated every step of that process that I imagine at this point can be automated.”

Zip has become a foundational part of the Lattice company workflow, and a recipe for their strong foundation to scale gracefully and in lock-step with the rest of the organizational shifts: “If you pulled Zip away from my team today, then we'd be back to square one.”