Initial Situation
A large multinational with 15,000 employees across 22 locations operates more than 80 distribution vending machines for office supplies, IT accessories, tools, and shop floor consumables. Each location manages its machines separately, with its own setup, its own configuration, and its own local supplier contacts. A central, real-time overview of demand patterns and spend simply does not exist.
Roughly 12,000 small orders are triggered through these machines every month, with an average order value of around €25. There is no spending control in place, no approval logic, and cost assignment is performed manually by Finance, which leads to an error rate of around 15%. Controllers receive consolidated invoices without proper allocation to locations or cost centres, so monthly reconciliation ties up several working days. On top of that, maverick buying through Amazon and other side channels is strongly suspected, but the actual uncontrolled volume remains entirely unknown.
Your Solution with simple system
simple system unifies all 80+ vending machines on one neutral procurement platform via the External Order Systems module. The integration runs through one single interface, requires no additional IT effort, and brings every transaction under the same governance as classic catalogue orders.
- All 80 vending machines are registered centrally on the simple system platform.
- Each machine receives a unique ID and is permanently assigned to a department and cost centre.
- Automatic data transfer: 12,000 transactions per month flow automatically into simple system, with no manual upload.
- Cost assignment and GL account mapping for external systems, with automatic allocation per location.
- Approval workflows for external systems, for example, automatic approvals for orders below €100 as standard.
- Consolidated reporting across all order channels, broken down by location, department, and individual machine.
- Long-tail integration: parallel rollout of Amazon Business to bring uncontrolled side purchases back under governance.
Result
- 100% of vending machine orders are centrally visible across all 22 locations
- Allocation accuracy rises from 85% to 99%
- Approval process unified instead of running differently in every location
- Maverick buying has reduced from around 30% to 5% through Amazon Business integration
- Controller reconciliation accelerated from 3 days to 2 hours
- Monthly cost savings of €5,000 to €10,000 through faster approvals and better vendor negotiations
Your Benefit
- Time savings: controller reconciliation reduced from 3 days to 2 hours per month, freeing capacity for strategic financial analysis.
- Measurable EBIT impact of around +€108,000 per year: +€9,000 (controller time) + €9,000 (error reduction) + €90,000 (maverick buying reduction).
