Intuitive on-demand procurement with Ketera's Mercury

By Maria Varmazis -- Purchasing, 11/30/2006

Kennametal believes in on-demand procurement software—so much so that the company plans to expand its use of the tool.  John LaDuke, North American purchasing manager at Kennametal, says the company will roll out Ketera’s Mercury platform in the near future. One major reason: its user-friendliness.  

“[Mercury] is going to allow us to process our transactions on a much quicker, more efficient method, and I think it will encourage our users to use the system, which is what we want,” says LaDuke. “We want our users to go in and use it so they’re leveraging our spend with our preferred suppliers.” LaDuke says it takes far fewer clicks to go through the entire procurement process, so rolling out a system that is quicker to use and user-friendly to staff that aren’t necessarily web experts he believes holds a lot of promise in his procurement.

Right now LaDuke says he has about 80-85% user compliance with his current procurement platform (also by Ketera), and hopes he can push that rate well over 90% with the Mercury system. The company puts about $2.5 million of high-volume spend through its current procurement platform, buying items like industrial, safety and office supplies, as well as chemicals and software. Because of the volume of spend going through the platform, LaDuke says a powerful search option was imperative. “It’s a key thing for us, because we’re dealing with suppliers like Grainger, MSC or Software Spectrum, where their catalogs are huge, so to be able to quickly drill through the products to find the items that you need is paramount to us,” he says.

Sept 26, 2006 Ketera press release for Mercury