A lean procurement team onboarded during supply-chain disruption
4 Farmers operates a lean procurement team in order to give farmers the best prices for their manufactured products.
In July 2024 there was a new procurement team (working 2-days per week on procurement). In the same month, there was significant supply chain disruption, with the closure of a local surfactant manufacturer.
The procurement team was tasked with ensuring supply chain resilience for 100+ raw materials that are essential for production and ensuring that they sourced competitive prices from their existing suppliers.
The old way of spreadsheets and emails wasn’t an option
Historically, these procurement tasks would be done manually, digging around in spreadsheets to find existing approvals and sending emails to suppliers asking for availability, pricing and lead times - and then tracking responses in another spreadsheet.
This is time-consuming work, creates a risk of manual-input errors, and makes it hard to collaborate across team members.
With a manufacturing facility to keep running, and disruptions across the whole supply chain, the team knew the traditional approach simply wouldn’t work.
ChemCloud's AI-Powered Procurement Platform
ChemCloud presented multiple ways to automate the process.
A single place to manage procurement
4Farmers consolidated all approved materials into a single, ‘live’ list, linked to technical documents including SDS and Specifications on ChemCloud.
Automated RFQs and AI quote ingestor
The Requests feature automated the sending of RFQ emails to approved suppliers with three clicks, and the response emails were ingested and stored by the ChemCloud AI.
New Supplier Discovery
New alternative suppliers for products that had had supply disrupted, were easy to discover with just one click.
“ChemCloud allowed us to manage our whole domestic procurement process ‘in one place’ instead of having copious spreadsheets. As a result we can run a lean procurement team and still achieve the cost savings our customers require."
Monique Crabtree, 4Farmers Procurement
From Manual to Automated
This way of managing approval achieved impressive results
- 100+ approvals stored in one place, accessible by the whole team
- 250+ automated RFQs to approved suppliers
- 4-6 hours saved per month freeing up resources for strategic initiatives.
What began as a way for a new procurement team to quickly onboard at a time of supply chain disruption, has become 4Farmers’ new platform for managing all of their domestic procurement.
4Farmers can now spend more time focusing on new chemical products at competitive prices for farmers.
