Procurement case studies: What these 8 companies did to move the needle

Procurement case studies document what happened when a real team changed how they source, approve, and pay for goods and services. The cases here cover eight companies who moved specific procurement metrics, from cutting cycle time to putting AI agents into production.

Procurement case study results at a glance

Enforcing PO-backed spend and eliminating rogue purchases

The first job of a procurement program is to make sure spend goes through the process it's supposed to. Three Ramp customers arrived at the same conclusion from different directions. If a purchase can move without a PO, the compliance layer doesn't hold. What separates the stories is how each team built the mechanism that made the rule stick.

AIRCO: Every purchase PO-backed, from a gas cylinder to a marketing partner

When Michael Natsch joined AIRCO to oversee procurement, he inherited a common problem for an industrial services business at scale. AIRCO was buying everything from industrial gases and machine parts to software subscriptions across multiple purchasing channels, and no single tool covered all of them. Cards handled some purchases, invoices came in for others, and expenses handled a third category. Nothing forced any of it through a purchase order, which meant Natsch couldn't answer basic questions about who bought what, from whom, or under what terms.

The problem was that the spread of purchasing across disparate tools made real procurement discipline difficult. A "no PO" rule wouldn't work if a rule-averse employee could charge the same purchase to a card. And a single one-size-fits-all intake form wouldn't work either. The process of buying a gas cylinder for a job site is fundamentally different from onboarding a marketing partner, and forcing both through the same review would either overwhelm the small purchase or under-scrutinize the large one.

What made Ramp work was building custom intake forms for each of AIRCO's major purchase categories rather than a single generic one. When an employee needs something, they open the intake form for that category, fill in the specifics, and Ramp routes the request to the right approver automatically. When the request clears approval, Ramp generates the PO from the intake without anyone re-keying the data. The category-specific approach is what makes the rule sustainable. Employees encounter the right-sized process for what they're buying, so they use it.

The reason 90% of AIRCO's spend ended up PO-backed comes down to that fit. Cards, bill pay, and T&E also run on Ramp, which closed off the adjacent channels that would otherwise let someone route around procurement entirely.

Key results:

• 90% of AIRCO's spend became PO-backed after rollout
• 22.7 hours of average time saved monthly on AP processing time
• 33.3 hours of average time saved on month-end close

Read more about AIRCO’s success story with Ramp.

SAM Construction Group: "No PO, no payment" across 11 entities and 4,200+ purchase orders

"Everything was done verbally or by email, which made me very uncomfortable." That's how James Hardy, SAM Construction's CFO, described the pre-Ramp state. The CEO personally approved every purchase order regardless of dollar value, but those approvals lived in his private email inbox with no timestamps and no audit trail. Invoices got missed because AP didn't know they were coming. Payments were routinely 2 weeks late. And reconciling corporate card spend could stretch across 2 full months because employees submitted Excel files sporadically and accounting had to chase down the rest.

SAM had grown from 20 to over 215 employees in a couple of years, and the financial infrastructure hadn't kept pace. Across 11 entities, Hardy was blind to what was being spent and what vendors were charging.

What Hardy built on Ramp addressed the root cause. He moved the CEO's approval out of email and into the workflow attached directly to the PO itself. When approval is attached to the PO, it becomes part of the record of the transaction rather than a separate string of emails. The CEO still approves every PO, but now he approves inside Ramp, everyone downstream can see when the approval happened, and whether a PO was approved has an answer in the system instead of an argument in email.

Ramp's Bill Pay captures invoices automatically, routes them, and three-way matches them against the PO and receipt before payment. Project managers create the POs, and the on-site equipment manager confirms delivery and documents receipt, which produces a clean audit trail without anyone doing extra work.

The reason SAM recovered more than $800,000 a year isn't just faster three-way matching. The payment discipline that came with the PO workflow changed how vendors treated SAM. Once vendors saw payments arrive on time consistently, they started offering early-payment discounts.

Key results:

• PO approval time dropped by 12.5 days on average
• $800,000+ recovered annually from three-way matching and early-payment discounts
• Over 72% of AP spend now routes through Ramp

Read more about Sam Construction Group’s success story with Ramp.

Foursquare: From 60% to nearly 100% spend under management, zero rogue contracts

Michael Bohn walked into Foursquare's finance function and found what he later called a Frankenstein system. Fifteen-plus years of growth, mergers, and accumulated tech debt had produced a procurement stack that spanned five disparate tools. PO creation required a 20-page guide. Contracts bypassed procurement entirely. Only 60% of spend had any oversight.

Employees weren't trying to hide purchases. But when PO creation needs a 20-page reference document, employees start making choices about how to buy things. Those choices systematically route them toward whichever channel is easiest, not whichever channel procurement is watching. Rogue contracts surfaced at renewal because nobody realized the renewals were coming, and business justifications stayed thin because filling them out was too much work relative to the odds anyone would read them.

What Ramp did was consolidate every spend request into one intake regardless of type or amount. That eliminated the class of failure where an employee has to decide whether a purchase goes through procurement or straight to finance. In Ramp, there's no decision to make. Every request goes through the same front door, and the workflow adapts to what the request is. Simple purchases clear with one click. Six-figure enterprise contracts trigger multi-team workflows. Anyone in the company can check the status of a request without pinging finance.

Spend under management jumped from 60% to nearly 100% because Foursquare stopped asking employees to navigate the procurement process and started routing them through it automatically. Bohn tied the tool consolidation to the same principle: "We chose Ramp because it replaced several disparate tools with one platform our teams actually use. If it's not in Ramp, it's not getting paid."

Key results:

• Zero rouge contracts with nearly 100% of spend under management
• PO creation and invoice processing 4x faster
• Software vendor stack cut by more than 30% through consolidation

Read more about Foursquare’s success story with Ramp.

Faster procurement cycles from intake to approved PO

Three Ramp customers cut their procurement cycles materially, and the mechanism in each case wasn't faster approvers. It was less friction between the intake and the decision.

Advisor360°: Approval turnaround from 10 to 5.5 days, 4x ROI in under a year

For Advisor360°'s approvers, a single procurement decision required a research project. To sign off on a request, they needed to know how much the company had paid the vendor before, when the most recent invoice landed, and what the existing contract terms were. That context lived in three separate systems. Approvers were cross-referencing across those systems before every decision, and the 10-day average approval turnaround was the direct result. Department heads eventually stopped submitting requests because the friction wasn't worth it.

The trigger to change was mundane. The prior procurement tool's contract came up for renewal. Ramp already ran corporate cards and expense management at Advisor360°, so Ryan Williams, the Manager of Contract and Vendor Management, tested whether Ramp could handle procurement too.

What made Ramp work was that the vendor record showed up inside the request itself. When an approver opens a request, every prior transaction, invoice, and contract with that vendor is visible in the same view. The context that used to require cross-referencing three systems is right there. Approvers stopped chasing information because the information came to them.

"With Ramp, everything lives in one place. You can click into a vendor and see every transaction, invoice, and contract. That didn't exist in our previous system. It's made approvals much faster because decision-makers aren't chasing down information." — Ryan Williams

4.5 days of cycle time came back because approvers had less work to do before they could approve.

Key results:

• Intake-to-pay cycle cut by 50%
• 4x ROI achieved in under a year
• $80,000 cost savings with cashback and software consolidation

Read more about Advisor360°’s success story with Ramp.

Skin Pharm: Approvals compressed from weeks to 48 hours

Kaela, coming from an audit background, named Skin Pharm's procurement problem plainly: "Coming from an audit background, knowing that everything was done in Slack and Google Sheets gave me some anxiety." Every clinic ran its own Google Sheet for supply ordering. Practice managers manually logged the vendor, the required supplies, the quantity, and the amount. Purchase order approvals happened in Slack messages. And when managers didn't approve requests promptly, teams got blocked on supplies they needed.

The multi-clinic model was the root cause. When each clinic tracks purchasing in its own spreadsheet, there's no unified queue, no way to see which requests are stalled, and no way to spot a clinic that's over-ordering. Anna Huval, the accounting manager, put it this way: "If managers wouldn't approve orders in time, it would set teams back on things they needed to purchase."

Ramp replaced both layers at once. Skin Pharm built a spend program for inventory transfers with automatic activity tracking, so when a transfer goes out, Ramp marks it as sent, and when the clinic receives it, status updates automatically. POs and transfers filter by owner and by requester, which is what makes multi-clinic operations manageable. The finance team can slice by clinic to see what a specific location is buying, or slice by requester to see who's waiting on what.

Month-end close also moved from 25 days to 10-15, because procurement data is clean and current by the time close starts.

Key results:

• Approval cycle compressed from weeks to about 48 hours
• Month-end close reduced from 25 days to 10-15 days
• 2x faster procurement process

Read more about Skin Pharm’s success story with Ramp.

Precision Neuroscience: OCR-driven intake, 50%+ faster PO routing on 20-30 POs per week

Brian, Precision Neuroscience's Financial Controller, described the pre-Ramp procurement process as one of his biggest pain points. "We'd put purchase orders into a spreadsheet, which then went through another software program. Once it got approved, I would take that Excel sheet and transfer it into a formalized purchase order. It was a very clunky process." At 20 to 30 POs per week for a company developing medical devices, that meant Brian spent an entire day doing data entry on POs.

The problem wasn't approval speed. The problem was that Brian was retyping data that already existed on the vendor's quote PDF. Every quote came in with the same fields, and Brian was manually copying those fields from the PDF into a spreadsheet, then into a software program, then into a formal PO.

The OCR eliminated the entire retype step. When someone needs to purchase items, they upload the vendor quote into Ramp, adjust any line items, and submit the PO for approval. The OCR pulls all the data automatically.

"Ramp's OCR has been so useful on the procurement side. It automatically takes all the information from the quote and saves all the data entry that we would have otherwise had to type into a purchase order." said Brian.

The second mechanism worth calling out is duplicate invoice detection. When a vendor sends the same invoice twice, Brian forwards it to Ramp and it flags as a duplicate immediately.

Key results:

• 50%+ faster PO submission on 20-30 POs per week
• 1-2 days saved on month-end close
• Four tools consolidated into one platform

Read more about Precision Neuroscience’s success story with Ramp.

AI procurement agents doing autonomous work

Two Ramp customers describe what implementing AI into procurement workflows looks like.

Daxko: Procurement Agent gate blocked $25,000 in out-of-policy requests in 6 months

Daxko originally activated Ramp's approval-tracking capability for one narrow use case, handling invoices from their India entity without posting them to the main general ledger. But as more spend moved onto Ramp, that narrow workaround grew into a full procurement platform, and the team activated the Procurement Agent to run compliance checks at the moment of submission rather than after the fact.

When a request comes in, the agent evaluates it against policy at intake and either approves, escalates, or declines before money moves. Requests that fall outside the rules never make it to spend. Requests that clear the check go through to human approval with compliance verification already done, so the human is deciding on strategy rather than checking whether the request should exist. Three-way matching runs against every purchase order, receipt, and bill before the transaction reaches NetSuite, keeping the compliance layer active through the full workflow.

The $25,000 the agent declined in 6 months is spend that never happened. Control moved upstream, before the money moved.

Key results:

• 11 purchase-order programs running on Ramp
• 668 procurement requests processed, 591 POs approved in 6 months
• Nearly $25,000 in requests declined by the Procurement Agent before payment
• Three-way matching against PO, receipt, and bill before transactions reach NetSuite

Read more about Daxko’s success story with Ramp.

Browserbase: Procurement Agent automates 26 hours of procurement work per month

Browserbase went looking for shadow spend and found more than $80,000 in duplicate licenses and auto-renewals that nobody had caught. Beatriz Go, Browserbase's finance lead, called out the pattern: "Every duplicate subscription, every auto-renewal nobody caught: it adds up before you see it coming. It's not a failure of any one person on the team. It's a failure of the process."

The specific process failure was that vendor security reviews were taking days each. A single review meant downloading documentation, checking SOC 2 compliance, and reviewing privacy policies against internal standards, then looping in the right approver. As Beatriz put it: "By the time a request cleared, the person who filed it had usually found a workaround. That's how duplicate subscriptions accumulate."

Ramp's Procurement Agent collapses the multi-day security review into seconds. When a teammate submits a purchase request, the agent visits the vendor's website, pulls trust and compliance documentation, checks SOC 2 certification, and routes the request to approval with pre-screened findings attached. Renewal tracking works the same way, with 90-day advance alerts arriving with usage data and market pricing already loaded.

For example, a teammate submitted a request for video recording software. Within seconds, the agent had visited the vendor's website, pulled the documentation, checked it against Browserbase's security requirements, and found that the tool wasn't SOC 2 compliant, so the request was denied. The entire review happened before the teammate had time to switch tabs.

Key results:

• 26 hours per month of procurement work automated, 100+ hours platform-wide
• $80,000+ in duplicate licenses and auto-renewals eliminated
• 50+ purchase requests processed through the Procurement Agent
• 90-day advance renewal alerts with usage data and market pricing pre-loaded

Read more about Browserbase’s success story with Ramp.

How Ramp's AI purchasing software delivered these outcomes

Every case study here runs on the same core capabilities. Ramp brings intake, approval routing, PO generation, three-way matching, and vendor payment into a single system that shares data with cards, expenses, and bill pay.

• Custom intake forms: Route different purchase categories through different approval workflows
• Rules-based approval routing: Sends requests to the right approvers automatically, with parallel approvals when multiple teams need to weigh in.
• AI-powered intake and OCR: Parses dropped contracts, quotes, or screenshots and auto-fills the request form
• Ramp's Procurement Agent: Runs vendor research, compliance reviews, renewal tracking, and PO routing autonomously
• Three-way matching on ingestion: Validates every invoice against the PO and receipt before it clears to payment
• Unified spend visibility: Covers cards, expenses, AP, procurement, and vendor payments so the compliance layer applies to total addressable spend

We've got our customers covered—and we're ready for you, too.

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