Automated online purchasing

How Zumtobel Group reached process efficiency with the AirPlus-Mazepay solution

04 | 2024
A smiling woman in a green blouse holding a tablet, talking to a colleague in an office hallway.
zumtobel-group-logo

About the customer

Zumtobel Group is a leading global player offering innovative, high-quality lighting solutions and components for customers worldwide. Through various brands, including Zumtobel, Thorn and Tridonic, Zumtobel Group employs more than 5,300 employees worldwide and operates through 90+ sales offices and partners globally. Headquartered in Dornbirn, Austria, Zumtobel Group keeps pushing the boundaries for technological innovation and quality.

Optimize corporate spend.

Reduce bottlenecks.

Zumtobel Group had been heavy users of AirPlus' secure Virtual Cards for a while and were looking for ways to further improve the financial processes associated with their employees making online purchases.

Initially, Zumtobel Group faced a bottleneck situation where a single individual managed the issuance of virtual cards, sometimes leading to delays. Instead of having a single virtual card administrator, they wanted to enable employees to request their own virtual cards. Employees themselves should be responsible for requesting and using virtual cards for their online purchases.

However, it was important that approvers would be involved in these requests before any virtual cards were issued. Having a clear, transparent and automated approval flow is important to Zumtobel Group, so they were naturally looking for a solution that facilitated compliant processes, efficiency and automation.

s1oumnqy

AirPlus Virtual Cards provided us with a great payment tool to make online purchases and pay for subscriptions and licenses. But we identified a need for an automated process around the payment that benefits employees, managers, procurement and finance alike. We knew that automation needed to be at the core of our future purchasing processes and asked our partner AirPlus for a solution.

 
Christian Hogenmüller, Senior Director, Head of Corporate Treasury

Automate business spend & increase compliance

AirPlus and Mazepay's joint solution was the perfect fit for Zumtobel Group. The benefits of AirPlus Virtual Cards are even more effective in unison with Mazepay's cloud-based platform. The approach with Zumtobel Group was to identify all areas of the purchasing process that could be automated and simplified. Business rules were then set up for online spending based on purchase amount, cost centres and purchase types, which were automatically enforced when employees made purchase requests on the AirPlus-Mazepay platform.

All employees had to do was make a simple request on the AirPlus-Mazepay platform, while the underlying business rules would ensure the right people were involved in the approval flow at the right time – all triggered by automatic notifications to the people involved.

Simplifying procurement processes and boosting efficiency

 While end-user processes are very important, so are the financial processes that derive from the purchases made.

A key focus during the onboarding was ensuring alignment with Finance at Zumtobel Group to identify the best way to collect financial data from AirPlus and Mazepay and deliver it to Zumtobel Group.

A new payment process: more flexibility and increased security

The result was an increase in process efficiency for both Finance and employees involved in making purchases. This gave Zumtobel Group the proof they needed to scale the AirPlus-Mazepay solution internally and include more users and legal entities.

Giving employees access to the AirPlus-Mazepay platform so they could make their own purchasing requests was a natural step for Zumtobel Group in making our processes more effective and transparent.

 

"We wanted to remove bottlenecks and empower employees, but never at the expense of compliance and security.
The AirPlus-Mazepay platform provides us with full transparency over every single transaction made, and all financial data is easily available to us for analysis and posting."

- Christian Hogenmüller, Senior Director, Head of Corporate Treasury.

 

Zumtobel Group is a company that is always looking for improvement and innovation. We knew that our AirPlus-Mazepay solution would create a lot of additional value, so introducing our joint solution was the natural next step in our long and productive relationship with Zumtobel Group.

 

Christoph Kraska
Key Account Manager
AirPlus International

A joint achievement: efficiency through dialogue

The collaboration with Zumtobel Group is based on a close dialogue between Zumtobel Group, AirPlus and Mazepay. Our mutual goal is to constantly find new ways of improving processes and grow the use of the solution. Through frequent and productive dialogue, the configuration on Mazepay is adjusted in real-time to help achieve Zumtobel Group's business goals and policy requirements.

Discover now how your procurement can be more efficient and speak to one of our experts today: