Corvus Brings Order to Purchasing Process Chaos with Tropic

About Corvus Insurance

Corvus^® is in the business of making the world a safer place, helping insurance brokers predict and prevent complex cyber risks for their clients and policyholders. 

The company sells Smart Cyber Insurance^® policies and risk prevention tools that give policyholders visibility into risk and extensive protection when cyber events happen. The Boston-based entity is a MGA, or Managing General Agent, meaning it binds and services insurance policies on behalf of insurance carriers.

Founded in 2017, Corvus has grown quickly and now has more than 250 employees.

The Challenge

Bring order to a chaotic purchasing process

Though the Corvus team is brilliant at illuminating risk, the company’s processes around purchasing and contracts were murky. 

Jeremy Klein, Senior Director of Finance Operations at Corvus, said that only a few years back, purchasing inside the company was not overly organized, leading to occasional communication lapses.

"A lot of times our purchasing process was a Slack thread between the business, my boss, and me, simply asking if they could buy tooling," Klein says.

The company initially solved this problem by reconfiguring a legal redlining tool into an ad-hoc purchase approval tool, so some of Corvus’s spend would pass through legal or security reviews. But using a tool not specifically made for procurement required workarounds that created hours of tedious work for Klein and his team. And it just didn’t fly when the company moved at breakneck speed.

"There was a lot of manual back and forth. It was like a ‘ding, ding, ding, ding,’" he says. "It was just this slow burn, but the burn never stopped because of the velocity at which we were growing," Klein says.

The Solution

Create purchasing approval workflows with built-in security reviews

Klein saw Tropic as a breath of fresh air for his staff to better handle the procurement cycle — they weren’t procurement experts but were being forced to learn it anyway.

"I was saying to myself that Tropic deals with this sort of thing all day. That solves a problem and is going to be huge for us. The way I always describe Tropic to people that ask is that Tropic gives you your own procurement team."

Tropic is especially helpful to a risk-prevention company that prioritizes safety and security.

Yes, Corvus sizes up new vendors for budget-friendliness. It also has good reasons to run every new vendor through a strenuous security check and legal review. 

Daniel Groark, Manager of FP&A at Corvus, says the company’s head of governance and compliance often asks for specific security documents when Corvus considers a new supplier. When they send a request through Tropic, not only can they easily call up those documents, but Groark can maneuver quickly based on his colleagues’ concerns. 

For example, a new purchase request recently went through an approval workflow where the requirements and preliminary documents were collected. When Groark was alerted for review, he quickly identified a potential security concern and was able to update the request to a different plan that ensured compliance—all while keeping the purchase on track without delays. 

"I think that goes back to having an established streamlined workflow where any supplier is going through the appropriate approvals," Groark says. 

"If you don't have that process, someone could just go off and say—’Hey, I'm going to buy this on my credit card,’ and get the base plan and not look into it," says Groark. "Now they send it through a security team that works on this stuff day in and day out." 

Build a centralized repository for all contracts including software and freelancer agreements

Corvus has steadily streamlined other areas of their procurement. They needed a one-stop-shop for contracts, including agreements with part-time and freelance entities. Groark says stashing all the details in Tropic has saved him countless hours and reduces the need for dozens of meetings. He can see which contracts are up for renewal (and when), plus costs related to forecasting, budgeting, and planning.

When an employee wants to sign up for a new software or service, Groark has a quick conversation with them to confirm their intent. Then the employee creates a request in Tropic and Corvus’s workflow rules automatically route the request to the right stakeholders based on the request type. "We’re essentially putting everything in Tropic and Tropic puts everything on autopilot," he says. 

Klein says his team has even picked up a few tips about procurement from Tropic’s procurement experts along the way. 

During a renewal negotiation with a product design company, a Corvus team member asked a supplier to switch its billing terms but was initially turned down, Klein reports. The finance team, taking a lesson from Tropic, knew they could push back. 

"On round two, they said yes," Klein says. "It was a win financially and organizationally, so some of that stuff is filtering into the Corvus-managed negotiations as well, which is great. It was a good example of, 'Hey, we can change our behaviors for the good based on the best practices that we're learning from Tropic.'