Canal Barge is a marine transportation company headquartered in New Orleans, Louisiana. As one of the most diverse marine transportation companies in the United States, Canal Barge moves highly valuable cargo to every single region in the world.
The challenges
Canal Barge’s cargo today is more prized than ever, comprising goods from Fortune 500 chemical and oil companies, refineries, engineering companies, government, and beyond. With clientele demand increasing and purchase order volume scaling to the thousands, they knew they needed more sustainable procurement processes to remain competitive and dominant in their market.
-
Paperwork overload: After an arduous and paper-based process just for approvals and quotes, the repetitive inputs and spreadsheet organization would reappear to haunt their purchase orders.
-
Manual, error-prone work: To place an order, vessels needed to issue physical POs, which involved tedious and error-prone work such as coding line items and organizing by account code.
-
Slow processing times: Before Procurify, Canal Barge was 30 days behind on orders. A needlessly menial purchasing process with duplicate inputs and unpredictable wait times for different approvals was sinking costs and precious time.
The solution
Canal Barge partnered with Procurify to inject more automation and standardization into their purchasing processes. After a smooth onboarding process, they quickly found that less manual work freed up precious time to analyze spend data and uncover insights to drive strategic decisions.
-
Spend insights: With consolidated vendor and order information, Canal Barge can now compare quotes and prices and negotiate better rates with vendors.
-
Increased visibility and control: Canal Barge can now keep vessels informed of their spend with real-time budget dashboards, promoting budget discipline and proactively curbing rogue spend.
-
Integrations and automation: Procurify’s Amazon PunchOut accelerates Canal Barge’s requesting workflow while eliminating data entry errors.
Takeaways
Today, Canal Barge no longer needs to worry about manual, error-prone processes; they can instead direct their focus to buyer relationships and evaluating the effectiveness of their products and services in real time. Procurify has also primed Canal Barge for growth: as they expand their reporting through the entirety of their operations in New Orleans, they’re also looking to implement Procurify strategically within their Chicago-based division.
Learn how Procurify can help your organization scale purchasing processes sustainably and:
-
Automate time-intensive and error-prone manual processes to speed up purchasing cycle times
-
Leverage data to negotiate with preferred vendors and unlock savings
-
Accelerate data flows between disparate systems with key integrations
