Tropic Transforms Procurement at Kandji from Decentralized Process to Efficient Competitive Advantage

Kandji is the Apple device management and security platform that empowers secure and productive global work. With Kandji, Apple devices transform themselves into enterprise-ready endpoints, with all the right apps, settings, and security systems in place. 

Danny Zorotovich is the Chief Financial Officer at Kandji, where he oversees the company’s finance, accounting, and legal teams — including managing the company’s procurement process.

He shares how Tropic's intelligent spend management solution has helped Kandji centralize their procurement process, enabling their teams to be more proactive and strategic about purchases and renewals, ultimately making their leaders more efficient so they can focus on their primary responsibilities.

What business problems were you trying to solve with Tropic?

“We still are a small company under 300 employees, and we don't have a procurement team. It falls into the finance, accounting, and legal realm. We leverage a lot of our senior leadership to know their tools, negotiate their tools —  to be really heavily involved in procuring, renewing, and replacing and bringing new tools into our tech stack.

Before Tropic, it was really a bifurcated, broad effort of a lot of individuals. It was mainly managed through email conversations. So we found a lot of inefficiencies in the negotiation practices and the time spent by our leaders in just procuring our tools.

We really wanted a solution that would centralize a lot of our efforts and leverage specifically the services that Tropic could offer to help us spend our days working on what's most vital for those roles of the company.”

Why is proactive spend management important for you and your team?

“Being proactive, I think, really just saves a lot of time. We are in front of deals and we know they're coming, we know they're renewing. We can be more thoughtful and strategic about the negotiation and not waste time. And it really just allows us to focus more of that saved time on what really matters to the business, and to allow our leaders to spend their days doing their day job and less time negotiating.”

What value do you get from Tropic?

“Freeing up anyone's time is going to make the business better. There's a very high indirect value that Tropic brings to a company that you can't really exactly quantify. But if you can make procurement more seamless and easier, anyone in any role—from R&D to sales and marketing—can do that job better, which is better for the business and drives value for our company.”

What value do other teams find in using Tropic?

“I think it's really the efficiency on the sales side that our sales leaders are selling Kandji instead of procuring tools to support Kandji. We've really seen a lot of efficiency on the sales side, which has enabled us to grow as a company and acquire more customers on our side.

Then on the support side, our legal team, our finance team, our accounting team, the IT team, our security team – they're all leveraging Tropic as a source of truth for the data that is in any specific contract. Whether it's budgeting and forecasting for the future and the cost that we're going to incur for those vendors, or it's the legal and security risks and policies that we're trying to comply with in our contracts, there's a breadth of support functions at Kandji that are using Tropic as a source of truth for data around our contracts.”

How has Tropic helped you make a tangible impact on your goals?

“I try and simplify business down into three aspects: You're trying to sell your product, you're hiring people to do that, and then you're signing contracts to support those people to do their job. And that third bucket is really what Tropic does. When you're simplifying business down to three things and Tropic does the entire one of those buckets, it's a huge part of the business.

That's why it stretches beyond so many different teams. Every team needs to help their employees do their jobs. And they do that through procuring a service or a tool to do that. Having that centralized in a tool and a process that can seamlessly help all those different teams make a single decision to better the business really speaks to the breadth of the impact Tropic can make.

​​What metrics have been most compelling in reviewing the value of Tropic?

“Anecdotally we share the efficiencies we gained in the process for sure. We go to the numbers and look at what we spent in aggregate on vendors month over month, quarter over quarter, as time passes. We definitely look at Tropic as a driver to that savings.

In a growing business, our spend is going up. We are hiring more people, we are doing more business. It’s  not necessarily, “Hey, look – spend went down,” but it's, “We're growing at a more efficient pace.”

How would you describe Tropic to another CFO?

“Tropic is a service just as much as it is a tool. The value that it brings isn't just in the data and the reporting features, but it's also a partnership that enables you to leverage experts in a service that otherwise you would have to perform on your own – either with your current headcount or hiring people permanently to do the job.

It's not another software to purchase software. It's just not another tool to buy tools. It's really a more holistic partnership with the business to outsource procurement instead of having to devote your time and energies and headcount costs to the effort.

We really appreciate the automation that Tropic is bringing to our processes and the AI improvements in the automation that Tropic is bringing, from the price benchmarks to the renewal reminders. Just the process efficiencies we're getting from the automation has been really great and I look forward to seeing more and more.”

This transcript was lightly edited for clarity.