A more enlightened way of working

Dropbox has been reimagining the way people and remote teams work together since 2007. Its cloud storage and file sharing services are now enjoyed by more than 700 million users in 180 countries.

Dropbox's pioneering platform and portfolio of services are constantly evolving, in anticipation of how the world of work will look in the future.  

To maintain its position as an industry visionary, Dropbox introduced a new working model that combines the best of in-person and remote collaboration called Virtual First as part of their mission to design a "more enlightened way of working" for its people. The model provides a deeper understanding of the challenges its customers face managing dispersed workforces, inspiring the company's next generation of products and services that simplify day-to-day tasks and promote collaboration, innovation and creativity.

Turning procurement into a strategic asset

Dropbox is pursuing a relentless digital transformation programme. Across all business teams, the aim is to drive speed, agility, and efficiency and equip its talented people with tools to maximise productivity and provide great services. ServiceNow is a long-term partner on this journey, supporting the company to achieve its vision across numerous domains, including IT, HR and Finance.

When Dropbox reviewed its procurement activities, it identified a unique opportunity to redesign its entire approach. Its vision was to replace disconnected processes requiring multiple, time-consuming manual interventions with a user-friendly, end-to-end, automatically orchestrated and integrated system.

The potential to unlock enterprise-wide savings and benefits was significant. Dropbox's procurement activities are substantial, spanning budgeting, sourcing, risk management, contracting, purchasing, vendor management and payments.

Reunan Varene is Dropbox's Director, Source to Pay: "Our goal is to 'get to simple' as quickly as possible, to yield speed, focus and efficiency. Continuous innovation is vital for Dropbox's ongoing success.

"At the start, our teams had to overcome significant challenges, due to a heavy reliance on people, multiple systems and policies, unique practices and varying levels of digitisation.

"The employee experience offered opportunities for improvement, across many teams, trying their best to navigate complex, manual processes. A lack of transparency and visibility left colleagues feeling unsure where to start, who to engage with and how their request was progressing." 

Says Reunan: "We want to support our teams to get the goods and services they need to do great work in a seamless, fast and cost-effective way. To achieve that, we needed innovative technologies to create a great user experience, to turn corporate spend into an asset and to use it to fuel employee productivity and top-line growth."

Unifying procurement and building a shared vision

Dropbox selected ServiceNow, alongside Genpact, as its consulting and implementation partner to deploy Sourcing and Procurement Operations (SPO) to build a highly efficient, cross-functional, transparent purchasing experience for all employees and vendors.

"We chose ServiceNow for its proven track record for automating complex workflows at Dropbox, for example in IT and HR. Over the course of many implementations, ServiceNow has demonstrated a true spirit of partnership with us, consistently delivering results that meet or exceed our expectations.

"ServiceNow's vision was a seamless fit with where we wanted to take our purchasing function, for a unified, streamlined approach to procurement processes. This alignment is critical in simplifying and optimising our purchasing workflows, making them more efficient and adaptable to our evolving business requirements."

Recognising the strategic significance of automating its entire, end-to-end procurement process, teams from across the organisation came together to ensure alignment and coordination. These teams worked towards achieving a consensus on process standardisation, policy, budgets and technologies—and to define what collective success looked like.

Applying its procurement and supply chain expertise, Genpact shaped the solution to solve the procurement challenges and ensure that it supported Dropbox's overall procurement transformation programme, Purchasing 2.0. This included implementing workflow best practices and orchestration to increase self-service, transparency and reliability.

"ServiceNow and Genpact understood our vision and both have a culture of collaborative problem-solving. In partnership, they built an integration with our Oracle ERP system, for financial control and purchase order approval, which was critical to the project's overall success."

One system used by everyone

The procurement experience across the business has been completely transformed. Now, employees log into their ServiceNow Help Me portal, click on purchasing and fill out a request form using drop-down menus and other self-guided prompts. From one single intake, the teams that need to respond to the request are automatically engaged and actions triggered.

Users have complete visibility to track the progress of their request, where it sits in the process, what's going on and when it will be completed.

"Purchasing 2.0, powered by ServiceNow, is a single intake and platform for connected, end-to-end procurement, one place where all purchasing activity takes place," explains Reunan.

"By automating the purchase order creation process, our people don't have to go into our ERP system anymore, they don't have to do accounting tasks. The level of excitement about this was through the roof! There's no need to go anywhere else." In all, more than 1,000 ERP and risk assessment processes have been automated, with a 99% compliance rate across the organisation.

"By updating policies, automating workflows and integrating applications, everything is much faster and more efficient. Colleagues have a single point of entry with a simple intuitive interface and now they have time back to focus on what they do best—adding value for the company and customers.

"SPO benefits our organisation as a whole and at the same time helps individual teams to achieve their own targets, whether that's about savings, managing risk or ensuring that we are purchasing ethically and sustainably."

Reunan Varene also expects Dropbox's new procurement model to enhance relationships with its supply chain. "We want to be a customer of choice and work with the very best suppliers and partners. With ServiceNow, they have a transparent process too, with a clear view of the sales or renewal cycle and a system that cuts administrative costs. By being a great customer, easy to do business with, our suppliers and partners are more likely to invest in us, using their best people and resources on our projects."

Complete control

In the first eight weeks following launch, more than 200 Dropbox employees initiated more than 500 purchasing workflows on the new system. "With ServiceNow, we've cut procurement cycle times by more than 50% in just eight weeks and we have complete control of our corporate spend," says Reunan. "Now our teams can use this new corporate asset to drive value and maximise return on procurement investment, with the support of the company's collective expertise, for the benefit of their own areas of operation.

"We're moving step-by-step. Creating purchase orders and conducting third-party risk reviews were real pain points previously. Using ServiceNow, we've demonstrated that this can be resolved.

"Next, we're moving onto contract management to address those workflows in the same way. To do this we're integrating ServiceNow Legal Service Delivery's automation capabilities and moving our legal teams onto the platform too, as well as integrating Dropbox Sign, our eSignature solution to prepare, send, sign and track eSignatures."

Generative AI is also on Reunan Varene's radar screen, to further enhance and simplify the user experience. "We're excited to also explore how generative AI can enable conversation, provide insights and help reach conclusions more quickly. This will raise the quality of support, save time and improve consistency and ease of use for everyone.

"Enabling a seamless and automated end-to-end purchasing experience is a multi-year journey. Thanks to ServiceNow and Genpact, we're well on our way, with huge potential to unlock so much more value."