Zip Opens Zip Forward 2024 with Bold New Brand Design, Powerful AI-Driven Innovations, and a Streamlined, Consumer-Grade Purchasing Experience for Employees Worldwide

“Zip gives us the flexibility to scale with Arm’s evolving needs and ensures we’re prepared for whatever the future holds,” said Sean Park, vice president of Procurement Transformation, Arm, from the stage at Zip Forward.

More than 400 finance and procurement executives from industry leaders like Prudential, Arm, and Reddit entered SF JAZZ this morning for Zip’s second annual Zip Forward Conference, where they found every inch of Zip’s visual presentation had been reimagined. Zip’s design team, hailing from companies like Nike, Airbnb, and Google, sought to further elevate Zip with a cutting-edge, consumer-grade experience that embodies the company’s core philosophy: that when businesses achieve ‘flow’ in their work, they unlock their ‘peak’ potential — creating value that elevates the entire business ecosystem.

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“In interconnected business world, companies thrive by focusing on their core strengths and leveraging the expertise of suppliers for everything else. This makes procurement one of the most critical processes in business, yet it’s often a fragmented, bureaucratic mess,” said Rujul Zaparde, Zip Co-founder and CEO. “Zip is changing this paradigm by reimagining how businesses connect with other businesses — enabling them to build on each other’s strengths to maximize their impact. When a hospital quickly accesses life-saving equipment, a manufacturer effortlessly sources sustainable materials, or a retailer swiftly stocks seasonal products—that’s Zip in action.”

From the Zip Forward keynote stage, in addition to the brand reveal, Zip also unveiled several disruptive product innovations, including:

• Preferred supplier purchasing: A new suite of capabilities that helps employees fast track purchasing from existing, contracted suppliers in a single, unified catalog experience. By streamlining the vendor selection process, Zip saves employees thousands of hours of manual searching across catalogs and helps to reduce vendor sprawl by encouraging employees to spend with existing suppliers — ultimately reducing risk and maximizing procurement savings across the organization.
• AI invoice coding: A revolutionary new way for accounting teams to reduce manual work and process invoices faster by leveraging artificial intelligence to determine the appropriate invoice line structure and automatically code invoice lines. Unlike other solutions on the market, Zip AI analyzes how invoices have historically been coded within the organization to make more accurate suggestions and eliminate the need for accounting teams to manually review dozens of individual invoice lines.
• Budget integration with Workday Adaptive Planning: A strategic integration that provides real-time budget visibility within Zip’s interface, allowing teams to make informed purchasing decisions based on current financial data. This seamless connection enables organizations to enhance spend control, improve financial predictability, and manage complex budgets across multiple regions more effectively.

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“As an engineering, product, and design-led company, we’ve made it our mission to continuously push the boundaries of what’s possible in procurement,” noted Zip CTO Lu Cheng. This commitment is evident in Zip’s significant R&D investment and rapid innovation pace. In the past year alone, Zip completed 500 feature requests, implemented 20,000 code changes, and introduced several groundbreaking products — including Zip Premier, Zip’s Integration Platform, and powerful Zip AI enhancements like an AI assistant and AI intake automation. The result? Over $4.4 billion in procurement savings for Zip’s customers in less than four years.

At the forefront of this procurement transformation are Zip’s customers, who are setting new standards for operational excellence and forging paths to sustainable success. “Through our collaboration with Zip we are transforming our procurement process,” said Sean Park, vice president of Procurement Transformation, Arm, from the stage at Zip Forward. “The powerful Zip platform gives us the flexibility to scale with Arm’s evolving needs and ensures we’re prepared for whatever the future holds.”