About Snowflake
Snowflake Inc., headquartered in San Mateo, CA, and with principal operations in Bozeman, MT, is a leading technology provider of cloud-based data storage solutions. The company's mission is to mobilize the world's data through its AI Data Cloud platform, which offers capabilities such as interoperable storage, elastic computing, AI-driven services, automated cloud services, global connectivity, data governance, and marketplace access. Snowflake serves diverse industries, including advertising, financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, retail, technology, and telecom, with more than 11,000 global customers.
Guided by core values such as integrity, excellence, and inclusivity, Snowflake emphasizes ethical practices and diversity, striving to build a procurement ecosystem reflective of its customers and communities. Snowflake's procurement team, comprising approximately 12 members, focuses on strategic sourcing, procurement operations, and maximizing efficiency and visibility in sourcing practices. They maintain high standards for partner compliance and vendor interactions, fostering relationships with a commitment to ethical business practices.
Snowflake’s procurement challenges
Snowflake's procurement team encountered several critical challenges that hindered their efficiency and strategic impact. The key challenges included:
- Extensive manual processes: Procurement activities involved significant manual work, causing inefficiencies and diverting valuable resources away from strategic tasks.
- Excessive email communications: A heavy reliance on email for sourcing communications with suppliers, particularly RFQs, resulted in delayed responses and prolonged procurement cycle times.
- Lengthy sourcing cycle times: Average sourcing processes took approximately 25 days, slowing down business responsiveness and agility.
- Buyers burdened by repetitive, tactical tasks: Buyers spent substantial time managing routine procurement activities, limiting their capacity to engage in strategic, value-adding initiatives.
- Procurement bottlenecks: The accumulation of tactical work created bottlenecks, reducing the overall efficiency of the procurement team.
- Limited strategic influence: Internally, procurement was perceived as the "spend police," limiting its ability to partner effectively with other business units and reducing its strategic influence.
Snowflake sought a solution capable of automating repetitive procurement tasks, significantly shortening cycle times, and driving strategic value. They required an intuitive, centralized platform to manage supplier interactions, streamline communications, and shift buyer responsibilities toward high-value activities. A key focus was elevating procurement's visibility and influence within the broader business, promoting partnership and collaboration.
Selecting and implementing Fairmarkit
Aware of the limitations of their existing procurement processes and benefiting from previous successful experiences with Fairmarkit at other organizations, Snowflake's procurement leadership selected Fairmarkit for several key reasons:
- Automation at Scale: Fairmarkit's platform automates repetitive, time-consuming tasks, allowing Snowflake's procurement team to prioritize strategic initiatives.
- Accelerated Procurement Cycle Times: Advanced AI allows for streamlined supplier interactions and significantly shortens sourcing cycles, improving overall procurement responsiveness.
- Seamless Integration: The platform easily integrates with Snowflake's existing systems, enabling rapid integration with minimal disruption to current workflows.
- Enhanced End-User Communication: Tools like KIT, Fairmarkit's GenAI-powered procurement assistant, reimagines the intake process by streamlining communication between requesters and buyers in a hyper-efficient platform.
- Innovative Functionality: Capabilities such as auto-send, auto-award, intake, multiple bid management, and scope of work (SOW) generator bring autonomous sourcing from concept to reality and bring productivity to unprecedented levels.
Fairmarkit's hands-on implementation process ensured smooth and rapid deployment. Detailed planning, regular communication, and robust data governance practices expedited Snowflake’s time to value, while the intuitive UI and low-lift user training accelerated change management.
Having experienced Fairmarkit’s people-first and deeply collaborative approach before, the Snowflake procurement leadership team knew they needed not just a vendor that would give them what they needed today, but a true partner that would continue innovating to deliver what they would need in the future.
Results and outcomes
The implementation of Fairmarkit delivered substantial and immediate improvements for Snowflake's procurement team:
- Record-Low Cycle Times: Cycle times dropped dramatically, from 25 days to 6.4 days.
- Autonomous Sourcing: 31.8% of sourcing events now run autonomously through Fairmarkit, up nearly 15x from the previous year.
- Operational Transformation: Buyers shifted their scope to focus on more strategic activities after automating tactical processes.
- Elevated Savings: Improved awarded savings by an additional 5%.
- Enhanced Communication: Centralized sourcing communications improved supplier interactions and transparency, resulting in quicker resolutions and increased trust among stakeholders.
These high-impact results have completely revamped Snowflake's procurement operating model. Buyers are no longer tactical executors but strategic partners who significantly influence and drive value across the organization. Fairmarkit's automation fostered a strategic decision-making culture, considerably strengthening the team's capacity for value-added activities and cross-functional collaboration.
Looking Ahead
Snowflake and Fairmarkit are continuing to push the boundaries of procurement innovation together. Snowflake is expanding its use of Fairmarkit to take on more spend under management, encompassing more categories and greater levels of spend. Auto-send, auto-award, intake and SOW generator tools continue to gain traction among Snowflake’s internal user base, where buyers are developing their own workflows and trainings to establish a procurement function with Fairmakit embedded in its DNA.
Fairmarkit is introducing agentic workflows into its platform, developing an entire Agentic AI product roadmap that will further refine Snowflake’s procurement transformation.
The two groups operate on a tight feedback loop, where Fairmarkit quickly releases product updates based on Snowflake’s feedback, Snowflake utilizes those new capabilities and provides additional feedback, and Fairmarkit actions for the next release. Together, Snowflake and Fairmarkit have created a dynamic model for agility, scalability, and sustainable growth, setting new industry standards for procurement excellence.
