YMCA - NORTH

Empowering spend control from the bottom up

Industry:

Public Sector & Non-Profit

Regions:

North America

Solutions:

Procure-to-Pay

With Basware, the YMCA helped employees use a powerful system to them save costs, thanks to easy user adoption. The result? Real behaviour change

The YMCA of the Greater Twin Cities went from 0% spend control to 50% of spend under management in 18 months by creating spend stewardship across their user base. Their goal is to hit 90% controlled spending in the next year.

The YMCA of the Greater Twin Cities’ mission is to nurture the potential of kids, promote health and wellness, and encourage social responsibility through programs at multiple locations spanning the entire state of Minnesota.

Key takeaways

50%

Under spend management

30%

Increase in product adoption

25%

Increase in savings

YMCA's Challenges

The YMCA had 0% control over spending across their many branches, with each employee wielding a P-Card to purchase goods and services.

The YMCA needed a way to demonstrate to employees how saving money could better support their mission and provide employees with a new solution that would be even more convenient than a P-Card.

The additional objectives were to raise spend visibility and allow spend control measures to be put in place.

YMCA creates spend stewardship with Basware

When the YMCA selected Basware as their P2P technology vendor, they also began promoting spend control across the organisation. They positioned this discussion around stewardship of the organisation's funds with 2 core pillars.

The first pillar focused on implementing Basware across the business and educating employees on the new system that was intuitive, accessible, and could accommodate the decentralised structure of the YMCA.

The second pillar focused on communicating to employees how they directly contributed to the YMCA’s cost-savings goals. YMCA discovered this second pillar was pivotal in user adoption. When the finance team showed employees their direct impact on the overall success, it empowered employees and affected real change in their behavior.

Basware helped our employees increase their participation in the procurement process and see the savings they were delivering. This created real community engagement and even more support for the mission of the YMCA.

Heidi Murphy, Director of Procurement, YMCA of the Greater Twin Cities

Results

YMCA now has an easy-to-use system where end-users can visit Basware Purchase and have an online shopping experience. There are multiple suppliers available to the end-user, and there is the ability to compare prices between suppliers to ensure the user is getting maximum value on their purchase.

This increased spend visibility has also allowed employees to take pride in seeing how making better choices in their procurement decisions leads to substantial progress in freeing up more money that can then be used to support the mission.

With Basware, our adoption rate surged 30%, and our savings increased 25% over the previous year.” Heidi Murphy, Director of Procurement, YMCA of the Greater Twin Cities

Strategically, Procurement is now focused on organizing collaboration between multiple locations to maximize cost savings and improve supplier relations. And, Finance has improved payment times and invoice handling times thanks to the removal of P-card receipts.