Molekule Buyers Increase Productivity and Achieve More With Ravacan.
About Molekule
HQ
San Francisco, CA
Industry
Consumer Electronics
Employees
~200
Founded
2014
The challenges
Molekule has a small team of sourcing managers heavily constrained by the torrent of spreadsheets and emails across the organization and shared with suppliers. They were unable to pinpoint the data required to negotiate effectively. While revenue from sales was growing rapidly, the sourcing team struggled to keep up with the equally growing workload.
The outcome
Ravacan has made the sourcing process more efficient and unlocked sourcing managers to achieve more. They are better equipped for negotiations and can effectively drive product costs down. The visibility provided by Ravacan gives sourcing managers improved predictability in their business and supply chain.
Molekule is reinventing the future of clean air. Their proprietary PECO technology destroys the widest range of pollutants. This technology destroys particles like bacteria, viruses, allergens, and chemicals at the molecular level. They have over five products available for sale to individuals, businesses, and hospitals all over the world.
Headquartered in San Francisco, California, Molekule has a team of 4 sourcing managers. Their mission is to find the best suppliers for their products, components, and materials, negotiate prices and monitor supply chain performance.
With new product launches, internationalization, and rapid growth, the sourcing team struggled with the workload. They had to source new components and materials, prepare negotiations for recurring programs, analyze product costs, manage supplier allocation, and review price variances with contract manufacturers. Manual spreadsheet updates and back-and-forth reconciliations via email were slow and error-prone.
“With Ravacan, we’ve been able to consolidate our supplier business more easily. This provides us with the ability to negotiate more effectively and reduce our component costs. In turn, this provides better predictability in our business and supply chain.”
Jim Kronik | COO, Molekule
Too Many spreadsheets and endless emails were slowing them down
Mike is a Global Commodity Manager at Molekule. Before Ravacan, he would spend countless hours in Excel, reading through supplier emails, reviewing quotes, and doing everything he could to be as prepared as possible to jump into that next negotiation.
When suppliers promised cost savings against longer-term forecasts, he could not hold them to it. Each product had hundreds of part numbers, and the number of product lines was increasing.
This situation became particularly painful during the quarterly price update process. Like many other electronics companies, they relied on contract manufacturers (CMs) to assemble their final products. Every quarter, Mike and his team re-negotiated the component prices. CMs use these new standard prices when placing orders with suppliers.
For Mike and his team, the process was inefficient and not scalable. They had to send individual emails with excel attachments to each supplier, keep track of the lengthy exchange and merge all the data together at the end. The CM then needed to re-verify the agreed prices with the suppliers, as errors inevitably made their way unnoticed into the master spreadsheet.
When he learned of Ravacan’s, it all made sense; no more spreadsheets! He could send requests to all suppliers at once, with just one click. Suppliers could securely access a consolidated demand forecast and submit improved price proposals.
“Ravacan enables our team to scale effectively by providing a platform for real-time supplier collaboration on demand, product costs & lead times.”
Stephanie Manda | Director of Supply Chain, Molekule
With Ravacan, Molekule accelerated their budgeting cycle from 10 to 2 weeks and generated more savings.
After only a few days of data preparation, Molekule was ready to get supplier information, bills of materials, demands, and historical prices loaded into Ravacan. The setup time for Ravacan is undoubtedly much faster than any ERP implementation they had experienced in the past.
The Ravacan team arranged live sessions with suppliers to show them the benefits of using this new tool and guide them through the process.
Molekule experienced an increase in productivity right away. They currently do their Quarterly Price Update in only 2 weeks. They’ve since been able to grow 4x internationally without hiring and have seen positive profit margin growth every quarter since joining the platform.
“We can now negotiate better pricing with component suppliers with a consolidated view of each supplier’s business and remain aligned on demand & lead times in real-time.”
Mike Maloney | Global Supply Manager, Molekule