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The latest BriefingsDirect case study interview explores how large businesses are using cloud commerce and automated sourcing and procurement to dramatically improve how they modernize and manage their buying processes.

In doing so, we'll see how they improve cash management and gain an analytical edge to constantly improving these vital processes. The Ohio State University Medical Center (OSUMC), for example, has moved its procurement activities to the cloud and adopted strategic sourcing, dramatically increasing efficiency across the purchases managed.

Through our discussion with Karen Sherrill, Senior Commodity Manager at The Ohio State University Medical Center in Columbus, learn more about how a large medical enterprise is conducting its business better through collaborative cloud commerce. The moderator is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. [Disclosure: Ariba is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: What did you need to change in how you sourced and procured that led you to adopt more automation and more of these cloud-based services?

Sherrill: The Medical Center is a government agency. So as you can imagine, it’s tied down with a lot of bureaucracy and paper. But as we moved into the year 2010, we were receiving a lot of pressure to do things faster and more efficiently. The only way to do that was some type of technology to allow our current staffing levels to support the needed growth to be able to support our customers faster.

We were processing about 422 bids a year, and that equated to about the same number of contracts. We had only 26 buyers who were able to support the business that was projected to grow significantly with our medical center expansion and the growth of our ambulatory site.

Some of the limitations that we were running up against was that our resources were spending a lot of time providing technical support to the old legacy system. In addition, the legacy system was supporting static documents. So we were posting PDFs, and suppliers were mailing in bids, which was not an efficient way to analyze them on the back-end.

We were manually tracking supplier contract terms, conditions, and modifications, and that was taking a significant amount of time in order to execute the final agreement.

We had no repository for contracts. So when people were seeking agreements, we were looking on shared drives and peoples’ desks and were having to go to external storage. Contracts were expiring. We were not aware of them and not renewing them in a timely fashion.

In addition, we had counterparts with the university and we weren't able to collaborate with them and have visibility into what bids they were doing and what bids we were doing. So there was no framework to support that type of collaboration that was essential for us to be successful going forward.

Those were some of the limitations and concerns that we were trying to address and we therefore implemented technology in order to help us meet or relieve some of these concerns.

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Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: Ariba.