Casey’s Onboards Suppliers in Record Time

Casey’s shortens supplier onboarding time to 10 days with Graphite.

Casey’s is a Fortune 500 company operating over 2,500 convenience stores nationwide. Founded more than 50 years ago, Casey’s has grown to become an essential staple in the small towns they call home. 

Casey’s has three main areas of business: (1) Fuel, (2) Prepared Foods & Dispensed Beverages, and (3) Grocery & General Merchandise. After more than 50 years in business, Casey’s is still a staple in the small communities they serve with around 50% of their stores in locations with populations less than 5,000.

Before Hilary Hoffman, Senior Procurement Analyst, started at Casey’s three years ago, there wasn’t a specialized master data team. With the help of a third-party consultant, Casey’s created the supplier master data team and hired two team members to manage the process. That team grew from two to four members and focused only on manually validating their supplier data.

With suppliers spread across multiple industries, including food, IT, transportation, construction, and fuel, the validation of these suppliers was more than the team could take on. Getting suppliers to respond, entering their data, doing the necessary research, and validating the data took more time than the team had.

Partnering with Graphite

With Graphite, Hilary’s team implemented a standardized supplier onboarding form for each supplier category. While the team still touches every form from a supplier to ensure it has the correct vital information, Graphite shortens that process considerably by removing the manual back and forth of collecting the data.

Implementing these automations through Graphite has saved Casey’s over 100 hours of work every week and nearly eliminated all manual data entry.

Verified, safe, secure data

Casey’s has been able to customize their Graphite experience to meet their needs. Now, suppliers are onboarded in Graphite, where the data is validated for accuracy and maintained by suppliers. That supplier data feeds into Casey’s critical business systems, eliminating duplicate records and inaccurate data.

This process also makes preventing fraud and payment failures easier with automated validation and authorization checks done automatically within Graphite. Any suspicious data is flagged for further investigation. Each supplier is also given a risk score, and Casey’s avoids surprises by being alerted immediately if supplier information changes or when a supplier risk score increases.

Whenever Casey’s deals with a food or packaging product, suppliers must go through a specified food safety process through email, phone call, or documents on a shared drive. Before Graphite, the process was 100% manual. Now, with Graphite, that process is automated. When a new supplier form is submitted, it is specified as a food-related product which triggers the food safety form.

Connecting with suppliers instantly

Another thing that became important for Casey’s was connecting with suppliers instantly. Graphite Connect is built like a social network; the LinkedIn for buyers and suppliers. Connecting with suppliers and sharing critical business data has never been easier.

This was certainly true for Casey’s, where 90% of suppliers are approved within two weeks and 78% within one week. The average time to onboard a supplier at Casey’s is ten days. 

Centralized and streamlined required approvals

Not only does this process increase efficiency, but it also centralizes the experience– providing greater visibility into the onboarding and validation process and a more holistic view of all suppliers, which, as a Fortune 500 company, is very important for Casey’s.

Now, executives or others with a vested interest can see all of the past actions a supplier has taken, their most current data, etc., and how many suppliers are working with Casey’s at any given time. This eliminates bottlenecks and makes accessing all the information needed from Graphite’s supplier-managed profiles easy. It’s now also a part of Casey’s process to utilize flexible workflows with total visibility for cross-team collaboration.

What’s next?

Many procurement organizations still manually onboard suppliers, validating and managing supplier master data. Businesses like Casey’s desperately need an innovative solution to save time and get their suppliers onboarded as quickly as possible to meet critical employee or customer needs.

Graphite Connect answers this need by doing more than simply collecting and cleaning up data; it operates as a social network that securely manages procurement data and supplier risk in a fully collaborative and familiar environment.