Overview
Taboola helps people discover what’s interesting and new. The company’s platform and suite of products, powered by deep learning and the largest dataset of content consumption patterns on the open web, is used by over 20,000 companies to reach over 1.4 billion people each month. Advertisers use Taboola to reach their target audience when they’re most receptive to new messages, products and services. Digital properties, including publishers, mobile carriers and handset manufacturers, use Taboola to drive audience monetization and engagement.
Challenge
With more than 1,400 employees, Taboola has people from every area of the company making purchases on a regular basis. These purchases include everything from office supplies to vendors for a variety of business needs.
Taboola grew to such a large operation fast. Before they knew it, their purchasing and procurement operations had become rather complex. While they had an ERP solution in place, they sought additional technology specifically for procurement that would enable them to achieve streamlined, budget-aware purchasing processes company-wide. With people in different departments managing purchasing processes via emails and locally saved spreadsheets, it was crucial to find a solution that would enable the organization to track, optimize and scale their procurement activities.
Other challenges Taboola faced were:
- The procurement process spanned across multiple systems. Different aspects of the procurement process relied on different systems, including Finance systems and homegrown solutions.
- The company needed to streamline communication. Communicating fast and from the very beginning of the sourcing cycle was essential for the procurement team to ensure that purchases were being made with the most favorable terms.
- Finance needed real-time visibility into budgets. It was crucial for Taboola that purchasing was done in a manner that was informed by real-time budgets.
- Users needed an easy-to-adopt solution. The new system would need to be intuitive, and easy for anyone in the company to embrace in order to avoid delays in day-to-day operations.
With these challenges in mind, Taboola sought to embrace a comprehensive solution that would enable every department in the company to easily work hand-in-hand with the procurement team on user-friendly procurement processes, while also meeting the needs of the finance team. In addition, with speed being one of Taboola’s central values, it was crucial that procurement processes would be able to move forward quickly and efficiently.
“We looked forward to optimizing our procurement processes and enabling any employee to make informed purchasing decisions.”
Yehuda Metzger, Procurement at Taboola.
Beyond the aim to achieve more efficient procurement processes company-wide, Taboola also sought a solution that would easily integrate with their ERP for syncing budgets and vendor information.
The procurement technology would also need to provide:
- A quick implementation with easy adoption throughout the organization
- A way for employees company-wide to understand what vendors Taboola is already working with
- The ability to easily set up standardized PR and PO processes to streamline the end-to-end procurement cycle
- Visibility and control over company expenditures for both the finance and procurement teams
- Flexible and transparent approval workflows for requestors, budget owners and vendors
Solution
After exploring different purchasing technologies and procurement solutions, Taboola concluded that Approve.com offered the ideal solution for their procurement needs. With Approve.com, Taboola gained an intuitive interface for procurement processes and vendor onboarding that was easy for employees to adopt. The enriched vendor database gave every employee in Taboola much-needed visibility into which vendors the company is working with, eliminating costly and time-consuming onboarding processes for new vendors that weren’t truly necessary. Additionally, Approve.com’s integration with Taboola’s ERP system enables the company’s finance team to maintain the company’s existing processes while also gaining the value of procurement and purchasing activities that are informed by real-time budgets.
Using Approve.com, Taboola was able to automate the entire PR to PO process based on the company’s unique organization chart and matching budget items. Furthermore, the entire vendor onboarding process became automated—enabling an efficient, transparent process. Approve.com’s vendor portal centralized all of Taboola’s vendor communications, enabling significantly more streamlined onboarding processes and vendor management.
With Approve.com, all financial data pertaining to purchases is automatically synced with Taboola’s ERP data, such that the finance team’s operations can move forward without interruption despite the addition of the new system.
“These types of transformations to more effective, modern processes are exactly what we’re committed to delivering.”
Bar Winkler, CEO at Approve.com
Results
By using Approve.com to streamline the procurement process company-wide and unify all procurement- and vendor-related data, Taboola was able to accelerate operations and achieve much-needed visibility into every stage of every procurement process. The finance team gained the ability to create an accurate budget forecast at any time, giving the company a strong handle over their spending activities. Budget owners across departments gained access to real-time budget information that enabled them to make smarter, more informed decisions. At the same time, the procurement and finance teams gained the ability to keep critical control over purchasing processes.
“With Approve, we successfully optimized the way we were handling procurement.”
Yehuda Metzger, Procurement at Taboola.
