How SAM Construction Group built procurement clarity while growing 10x

James started with a small Ramp Procurement pilot: a handful of key users, including the CEO. In the old system, the CEO wasn’t just involved—his approval was the step every purchase had to pass through. “He approves every single PO, no matter the dollar value,” James explains. Before Ramp, that approval lived where so many decisions go to disappear: an inbox—private, untracked, and intermittently interrogated.

With Ramp, that approval moved out of email and into a shared workflow—timestamped, visible to the team, and attached to the PO itself. “He hits approve on the PO, then he approves the payment, and on our end we can easily see that he's approved it,” James said.

That small act of visibility did what visibility tends to do: it rearranged the work around it. The anxious rituals—manual entry, CSV uploads, the one-by-one cross-checking against the ERP—began to recede. “It has saved so much time and stress,” James admitted, with the relief of someone describing a headache that finally lifted.

And because procurement is never really one workflow but a thicket of exceptions, James’s team started shaping the system to fit the business: approvals that followed the vendor, the purchase, the project. “We see the workflow approval, and the processing time is night and day,” he said.

Now, vendors know a PO is the price of admission: no PO, no payment. That policy also clarified who owns what internally. “Our project managers create the POs, and our on-site equipment manager confirms delivery and documents receipt,” James says. The result is a cleaner audit trail—and fewer surprises when it’s time to pay.

With procurement on solid footing, the expansion felt like a natural next step. James brought Ramp Bill Pay onto the platform, letting the same automation that transformed approvals take over the full AP cycle: invoices captured and routed automatically, payments scheduled without manual intervention, everything syncing directly to the accounting system. The monthly close that had always run long now had far less drag.

From there, Ramp Cards replaced the informal corporate card arrangements that had made spend difficult to track, giving employees policy-based controls and giving James a single view across card spend, AP, and procurement. For James, it meant fewer systems to reconcile—and a clearer read on what was being bought, approved, and paid across the business.

Seeing everything changes everything

Where James once felt blind, he now has a complete picture across every vendor, every approval, every entity.

"Ramp has been the tool that's really helped us manage our purchases, because we can see everything now."
— James Hardy, CFO

That visibility quietly reshaped how much time the business spends managing money. Before Ramp, reconciling the team's corporate card spend could stretch across two full months — employees submitting Excel files with receipts when they submitted them at all, and the accounting team chasing the rest. Now the process runs in a fraction of the time.

"I always tell people it's those unseen costs that really add up. With Ramp, it now takes my team a day and a half to review and approve purchases, compared to two weeks before."

Consolidating AP and procurement into one platform also eliminated the duplicative work of logging into separate systems to track and upload invoices.

"The biggest advantage with Ramp is that we don’t have to switch between tabs or log into different accounts. Everything is captured in one place and syncs to our accounting system."
— James Hardy, CFO

Even the small daily interruptions have quieted. "I used to get five people asking me if the same invoice was paid," he says. "Now they can log into Ramp and actually see where it is in the process."

Paying on time, saving more

Before Ramp, SAM was often paying late on bills they didn’t even know were coming. An invoice would arrive, the approval chain had to be rebuilt on the fly, and the clock would keep running. "We used to be consistently two weeks late or more on certain things that we didn't know about," James says.

With Ramp, the goal wasn’t “pay faster” in the abstract; it was to make payment predictable. Automated PO-to-invoice matching helped SAM confirm what was billed against what was ordered and flag problems early — including catching more than $800K a year in potential overbilling, by SAM’s estimate — so approvals stayed on track and invoices could be scheduled instead of chased.

"More vendors are allowing for discounts now, because they're seeing the quick payment. That started with Ramp—getting everyone paid on time. We'll get a 1 to 2% discount for paying early. That doesn't sound like a lot, but when you're dealing with hundreds of millions of dollars, it does add up."
— James Hardy, CFO

With >72% of AP spend now routed through Ramp across 11 entities, that discipline is built into the system itself—not dependent on anyone remembering to act.

The easiest rollout is the one that doesn’t feel like one

At SAM, Ramp took hold quickly—not because James pushed it through, but because the work itself got simpler. It stuck because it didn’t ask people to become “procurement people.” It asked them to drag, drop, and keep building.

"Everyone who uses the procurement system loves the drag-and-drop functionality," James says. "It's the easiest thing in the world, and it saves everyone time."

That ease did what the usual rollout memos rarely do: it made the switch fast. Because the work lived in one place—and because each step made the next one simpler—adoption became a default, not a campaign."Even the CEO, who is a critic of everything, loves it," James shared.

What started as a fix for procurement became something bigger: a shared operating system for spend. As Ramp became the place where requests, approvals, invoices, and payments lived, visibility stopped being a finance-only benefit. It became a team-wide advantage.

"I have visibility, the CEO has visibility, the team has visibility. Now people get the information in the system, and everything flows better."
— James Hardy, CFO

For James, the real win isn’t just faster approvals or fewer follow-ups. It’s confidence. As SAM continues to scale across projects, vendors, and entities, the controls can scale with it. “Ramp is probably one of the best programs I’ve ever used in my business career,” he says. “Everyone says ‘Ramp’s awesome,’ and I say yes, it is.”

Today, SAM runs cards, procurement, AP, and accounting sync in one place, so the business can keep building without the back office playing catch-up.