A Leading Steel Manufacturer Unifies Procurement Operations
About the company
A multi-site steel manufacturer buying direct, indirect and project goods, with roughly ₹1,200 crore of annual MRO spend. Procurement ran through SAP plus separate portals for letters of credit, payments and reverse auctions.
- Industry
- Manufacturing
- Scale
- Multi-site manufacturer handling 6,000+ purchase requisition lines a month
- Scope
- Intake, classification and routing, guided buying, contracts and supplier governance
At a glance
Before Proconomy
- Four systems, four logins
- More than 6,000 lines a month
- Adoption was the real risk
- No single contract position
- Supplier data would not support analysis
After Proconomy
- One place to work
- Triage stops being a job
- The process got easier to follow
- Renewals and obligations are visible
- Supplier standing reaches the decision
Key products
- Intake & orchestration
- Autonomous agents
- Contract lifecycle management
- Supplier management
The challenge
The manufacturer buys direct, indirect and project goods across several sites, against roughly ₹1,200 crore of annual MRO spend. SAP held the core, but letters of credit, payments and reverse auctions each lived in a portal of their own. Every handoff between them was a person, and the same supplier existed more than once because nothing reconciled the master data.
More than 6,000 requisition lines arrive every month, and that number was set to grow. The handoffs were not going to scale with it.
Four systems, four logins
SAP held the core while letters of credit, payments and reverse auctions each ran in a separate portal, and the handoffs between them were manual.
More than 6,000 lines a month
Requisition volume was already past 6,000 lines a month and rising with capacity, and each line needed somebody to decide where it should go.
Adoption was the real risk
Established teams had working habits. A system that demanded new ones would have been filled in badly or gone around entirely.
No single contract position
Approvals, obligations and renewals were tracked in whatever place the contract happened to be handled.
Supplier data would not support analysis
Quality, risk and duplicate supplier records meant any analysis started with cleaning up, and often ended there.
What the manufacturer actually asked for
Five things, and the first four were really one thing: stop making people the integration layer.
- One entry point for a procurement request, whatever kind it is.
- Requests routed to the right workflow without a buyer triaging each one.
- Intake simple enough that established teams would actually use it.
- Approvals, obligations and renewals held in one contract record.
- Supplier quality, risk and performance in one place, without duplicates.
What we built
One intake and orchestration entry point, classification and routing on arrival, guided buying in plain language, contract lifecycle management and Supplier 360.
Intake and orchestration
One entry point captures every procurement request, whatever type it is and whichever system will eventually execute it.
Classification and routing
Each request is classified on arrival and sent down the buying workflow that matches it, rather than queueing for a buyer to triage.
Guided buying in plain language
Intake asks in ordinary words and fills in the rest itself, reading WBS, MRP and policy context behind the form.
Contract lifecycle management
One record carries approvals, obligations and renewals, linked to the orders that draw on each contract.
Supplier 360
Quality, compliance, performance and risk resolve to one record per supplier, so the data holds still long enough to be used.
The result
Requests route themselves, renewals and obligations surface against the contract, and the team works in one place instead of four.
One place to work
Teams raise and track a request without switching portals to find out where it got to.
Triage stops being a job
Routing happens on arrival, so the manual sorting and the follow-up that came with it drop out of the day.
The process got easier to follow
Guided steps made buying consistent across teams without asking any of them to learn a new vocabulary first.
Renewals and obligations are visible
Expiries, commitments and exceptions surface against the contract rather than being remembered by whoever negotiated it.
Supplier standing reaches the decision
Buyers see quality, compliance and risk while the award is being decided, not in a review afterwards.
See this running on your own numbers — fifteen minutes, no slides.
Request a workflow demonstrationThis will sound familiar. If any of these are you.
- Your ERP is the system of record and three other portals are where the work happens.
- Requisition volume is growing and triage is still a person reading each line.
- A new system has failed here before because the teams went around it.
- The same supplier exists several times, and nobody is quite sure which record is right.
The questions we get asked.
No. SAP stayed the system of record and Proconomy connected to it. What moved was the work that had been happening outside it — intake, routing, the auction portal, the contract folder — which is the part that was costing handoffs.
The routing is a decision with a rule behind it and a person who can overturn it, not a black box. Classifications are visible on the request, exceptions route to a named buyer, and categories where the cost of being wrong is high can be set to require confirmation. Accuracy improves with your own history, so the early weeks are the ones to watch.
By not asking them to change vocabulary. Intake takes a request in plain language and does the WBS, MRP and policy lookups behind the form, so the person raising it describes what they need rather than learning how the system files it. Adoption is usually a translation problem rather than a training problem.
Supplier 360 resolves records to one supplier so quality, compliance, performance and risk aggregate correctly. The duplicates in the source systems are a separate clean-up, and we scope it honestly — a unified view built on unreconciled data is a prettier version of the same problem.
The same problem, at your scale
Every group that runs more than one operating company arrives at the same place: policy that exists on paper, applied differently in every plant, evidenced by whoever happens to remember. Bring us the workflow where that costs you the most, and we will run it against your rules.
Someone from client success replies, not a sales sequence. If we are not a fit we will say so on the first call.
Not ready to talk to anyone?
Fair enough. Both of these work without giving us your email.