NYPL chose Suplari to add Advanced Spend Management to its deployment of Workday Financial Management
Our team at Suplari welcomes The New York Public Library (NYPL) as a newly subscribed customer. The NYPL, which is the nation’s largest public library system, will retain Suplari in the Procurement department in order to gain better visibility into its true spend and supplier activity across multiple systems and, in turn, drive ongoing optimization of operational costs and purchasing compliance.
I had the opportunity to talk to Bryan Rhee, Director of Strategic Procurement & Risk at the New York Public Library. Here are some fascinating facts about their organization and their decision to choose Suplari. I’ve also included passages from our CEO, Nikesh Parekh, highlighting the spirit of innovation and discovery, common to both Suplari and The NYPL. Brad DePew, SVP of Sales at Suplari, also chimes in with his take on how we’ve been able to help other Workday customers to achieve better reporting, spend visibility and financial performance.
Managing spend, cost savings and purchasing compliance – the proactive way
“We did our due diligence comparing Suplari to many of the traditional providers and emerging innovative platforms” said Bryan Rhee, Director of Strategic Procurement & Risk at the New York Public Library. “The introduction of NYPL being a Suplari customer came from our relationship with Workday, which we use both for finance and human resources management. We chose Suplari above the competition because of two primary reasons: the intuitive user experience that makes it really simple for our team to analyze and disseminate the data; and its application of artificial intelligence (AI) to automate the monitoring and identification of cost savings and purchasing compliance opportunities.”
Founded in 1895, NYPL is the nation’s largest public library system, featuring a unique combination of 88 neighborhood branches and four scholarly research centers holding more than 55 million items. The New York Public Library serves nearly 17 million patrons who come through its doors annually and millions more around the globe who use its resources at nypl.org. With such scale of patrons, locations, digital footprint, services and operations, NYPL holds relationships with thousands of suppliers. The Procurement & Risk teams needed better visibility of their indirect spend, the departmental purchasing activity and the opportunities to establish or renegotiate contracts. The end goal: to better control spend under management and to more proactively optimize costs and compliance.
The NYPL journey with Suplari starts with the customer success team, applying AI and machine learning to cleanse and normalize spend data from multiple systems – mainly the spend transactions captured in their Workday system and other source systems such as contract repositories, travel and expenses as well as corporate and P-card transactions. With the data unified and enabled, NYPL users can access and disseminate their own analysis and user-discovered opportunities to optimize costs. More importantly, Suplari’s AI algorithms persistently monitor the data to automatically detect opportunities and issues – like early contract renewal, suspicious transactions, maverick spend, approval violations and purchasing bypass. From within the Suplari system, users can also mark the opportunities and issues for further investigation and resolution, to actually capture the savings value revealed in those user-driven and AI-assisted opportunities.
“It is special for us to welcome The New York Public Library as a new customer,” said Nikesh Parekh, Co-founder and CEO at Suplari. “Their collections hold such historical treasures as Columbus’s 1493 letter announcing his discovery of the New World. The NYPL themselves are innovators, constantly discovering new ways to provide services, information and education. We are privileged to work with NYPL as Suplari’s newest customer. By helping them improve supplier relationships and cost management, we contribute to their accountable and efficient use of funding towards modernizing operations and fulfilling their mission.”
About Suplari
Suplari is the pioneering Intelligent Spend Management, indispensable for enterprise procurement and finance to optimize the cost-risk-compliance trifecta. CFOs, COOs, CPOs and business leaders alike rely on Suplari to gain better spend visibility and operational agility in order to optimize costs, assure compliance and reduce both risk and fraud. People using Suplari are delighted with their modern and fluid user experience, advanced analytics, and AI-assisted insights algorithms to consolidate vendors, aggregate demand, negotiate contracts and manage supplier performance. Customers from large Fortune 500 to mid-size enterprises have worked with our dedicated success team to get up and running quickly – from connecting their fragmented data to capturing cost savings. With Suplari, category managers, buyers, auditors, financial analysts and anyone with budget responsibility become catalysts of value creation in the spend-accountable enterprise. Learn more Suplari at www.suplari.com.
About The New York Public Library (NYPL)
The New York Public Library (www.nypl.org) is a provider of education and information for the people of New York and beyond. With 92 locations—including research and branch libraries—throughout the Bronx, Manhattan, and Staten Island, the Library offers free materials, computer access, classes, exhibitions, programming, and more to everyone from toddlers to scholars, and has seen record numbers of attendance and circulation in recent years. The New York Public Library serves nearly 17 million patrons who come through its doors annually and millions more around the globe who use its resources at nypl.org. To offer this wide array of free programming, the New York Public Library relies on both public and private funding. Learn more about how to support the Library at nypl.org/support.
