Knight 39 optimizes & automates purchasing across its 6+ high-end golf courses with Planergy
- Company Overview
With a portfolio of high-end, multi-state golf courses, Knight 39 boasts decades of experience in owning and managing golf course properties, including resort, private, and daily fee facilities. Held in the portfolio are distinguished courses designed by world renowned architects, such as Robert Trent Jones Sr. and Jr., and Jack Nicklaus.
- Why Planergy
Across their 6+ owned and managed golf courses, Knight 39 sought a solution to improve transparency and spend visibility, standardize and automate procurement and purchasing, track spend at a more granular level, and cultivate efficiency.
Key Challenges
- Lack of spend predictability and forecasting
- Limited accountability and transparency across two main purchasing departments - hospitality and agronomy
- Required an easy-to-use solution with on-the-go access and functionality
- Using excel to manually submit and track POs, risking human error
- Needed a dedicated reporting solution
- Inefficient budget control and management
Key Benefits
- A fully automated and digitized purchasing and procurement system serving both purchasing departments
- Improved inventory, purchasing, and invoicing management
- Eliminated use of spreadsheets in Procure-to-Pay
- Introduced speed, transparency, and efficiency saving hours of manual labor per week
- Automated reporting across purchasing and accounts payable
- Enabled mobile and remote functionality
The Story
Customer
Golf course owner and management company
Key client
Vice President
Industry
Hospitality & Leisure
Company Size
200+ employees
Before Planergy
Owning and managing golf courses is no easy feat, especially when they are located in multiple states. With 6+ courses under management, Knight 39 has two distinct purchasing “arms” – one for hospitality, day-to-day operations; the other for agronomy.
Each “arm” has multiple staff members responsible for purchasing, billing, and approving POs. Devoid of a suitable technology stack, Knight 39 needed to streamline and bring balance to these two purchasing “arms”, while improving the flow of information, inventory traceability, and budget control.
This led to the implementation of Planergy Spend Management software. “The point of having Planergy was to give us the ability to streamline the PO submission process”, said John Bixler, Vice President.
Prior to Planergy, Knight 39 ran the risk of inefficient spend and vendor management; lack of visibility; and revenue loss due to, “manually using internal Excel spreadsheets to match invoices against their purchase orders”, as mentioned by Bixler.
Further, with golf courses across Tennessee, the Carolinas, and Florida, the Knight 39 team not only needed to optimize their entire purchasing operations, they required access and the capability to create and authorize POs across locations and while on-the-go.
After Planergy
Planergy’s automated, all-in-one purchasing platform proved to improve performance of Knight 39’s overall business operations from the outset.
The Knight 39 team reaped the benefits of greater transparency and accountability, access to real-time spend analytics, controlled budgeting, and fast and efficient approval processes.
Advanced reporting features offered predictability, visibility, and granular insights to make more informed business decisions, such as forecasting or leveraging opportunities to save. It also provided a way to track trends.
With the software’s cloud-based functionality, Knight 39 was empowered to create, track, and approve POs from any mobile device while on-the-go.
An additional benefit realized was ease-of-use. For the less “tech-savvy” team members, the software was both intuitive and inviting, allowing for painless user adoption.
That said, John shared his thoughts regarding support – “Support has always been efficient in getting the problem resolved the first time. Whenever I have a technical issue, I call and it’s resolved right there.”
Testimonial
We are seeing the biggest savings from a labor standpoint and in our accounting office when reconciling invoices with POs. We can quickly address scenarios that previously took a lot of time.
John Bixler
Vice President
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