The Yard adopts a seamless purchasing process

Benjamin Miller-Jones, Operations Manager, manages ordering across the east coast.

The problem

Vendor disorder: Ordering from multiple vendors made purchasing overly complicated

Difficulty budgeting: Unconsolidated ordering also presented challenges with budgeting

Lack of spend visibility: Financial reports were cumbersome and delayed

With 14 locations spread across four different cities, The Yard requires purchasing from ten vendors to adequately cover all the supplies needed. This creates a strenuous task of tracking, budgeting, and maintaining consistency between suppliers. Benjamin recounts, "It became very tedious to keep track of everything – it took a long time to see and report across all of our spend."

The solution

The Yard needed a better way to expedite and streamline their purchasing process and easily balance budgets between locations and across vendors, so they partnered with Order.co in the fall of 2017.

The Yard began its experience with Order.co by connecting each vendor account to the platform, allowing for products from Amazon, Webstaurant, WB Mason, and their other seven vendors to be imported automatically into their Order.co catalog.

"It is incredibly user-friendly," Ben says, "Being able to link our previous third-party vendor accounts and then having all of those products already available for us made for a very smooth transition. Community managers just had to be directed to order from the cart on the Order.co platform instead of each vendor."

Order.co presented The Yard’s employees with a simple and efficient way to manage their purchasing.

The outcome

Easy maintenance

Benjamin and his team found it easy to maintain the approved catalog, finding products needed from any vendor and then simply adding the URL to Order.co to import and automatically negotiate. "It is so easy to go to a third party like Amazon, do the research on a product that you need by looking at things like customer reviews, and then just copy the URL into Order.co so it can be purchased and tracked in one system. It takes seconds."

Spend managed

Order.co’s centralization made spend immediately visible, Benjamin says; "It's so easy to keep track.”

The Yard implemented budgets for their locations and cost centers to gain complete control: "Assigning individual budgets to the cost centers through Order.co has been a huge improvement and has kept us on budget. Our reporting is much easier as well."

Ben summarizes: "Order.co is the easiest way to streamline the entire vendor purchasing and negotiating process into one system."