A company’s vendor management system is crucial to its operations. Vendor managers oversee relationships with external suppliers and vendors, managing contracts and monitoring performance. In the process, however, they wind up spending a lot of time consolidating data before they can focus on strategy—something TruPacta co-founder and CEO Omesh Piryani saw as a huge problem.
Targeting companies under strain from operational costs, TruPacta is a software company that aims to optimize vendor contracts by providing business insights.
“Having a platform like TruPacta, it really frees up the vendor managers who can actually focus on the strategic tasks that they are asked to do,” Piryani said.
Piryani said vendor managers waste a lot of time analyzing data, and now that process can be automated. TruPacta’s target market exists across all industries, as manufacturing, pharmacy, finance and others all have procurement processes.
TruPacta is a part of this year’s GRO Incubator program, a 12-week program for early-stage startups. Piryani said GRO has been “a great help,” guiding his company to conduct customer interviews and define their market.
Piryani said they are looking to raise funding through the connections made via GRO, but up to this point the startup has been completely bootstrapped.
TruPacta’s official headquarters are in Cary where Piryani is based, yet the other three co-founders – Michael Faircloth, Kamal Nainani and Subbu Palanisamy – work remotely from Wilmington, Raleigh and as of last month, India. Piryani said the company eventually plans to set up a base in India.
The co-founders have a lot of industry expertise, which Piryani said helps them serve their customers by optimizing vendor contracts to the best possible financial outcome for that company. Combined, the co-founders have worked many years in supply chain management, vendor management and product development.
“Our team is well-positioned to bring something like that in the market because we bring tons of experience,” he said. “We have lived through this industry. We have seen the pain points, we have seen the gaps in terms of where the need is.”
With TruPacta, companies can hire fewer vendor managers and minimize their operational costs. When a company hires a new vendor manager, Piryani said it can take one to two years for that employee to get up-to-speed on the vendor ecosystem of that business. By contrast, TruPacta increases productivity by providing a platform for those vendor managers to get up to speed quickly on the procurement scene.
Piryani said companies may have a lot of operational and cost inefficiencies that are sitting “right below the surface” that TruPacta can help them discover.
“You’re probably leaving a lot of money on the table,” he said. “Nobody has paid attention to that. But a software platform like TruPacta gives you that insight into what has been lurking under the rug.”
With this software solution, vendor managers can have a more strategic role in their company’s operations. For example, the software may reveal that a company is buying the same product from several vendors, and the vendor managers can work on consolidating those vendors.
TruPacta has about four customers who have signed contracts to begin piloting the software.
