In this episode of AOP Introducing, Helen Mackenzie speaks with Rose Punkunus, CEO and Founder of Sudozi, a company elevating procurement with intuitive tools enabling business buyers to better collaborate, make decisions, and pay.
Rose is also a former CFO at Uber, and she shares her insights on how Sudozi’s procurement software is transforming processes and capabilities for businesses of all sizes.
Sudozi unifies procurement intake, analytics, and payments by providing a simpler user interface where teams, managers, and cost centers can communicate their purchasing needs to procurement and finance, who guide the stakeholders through the purchasing experience while also ensuring the correct workflows, approvals, and contingencies are met.
“We help companies provide a simple UI for their employees, for their managers, the cost center leaders to communicate with procurement teams, finance teams, what they’re looking to buy,” Rose explained. “We really want to have that connectivity between centralized procurement and finance teams and their potentially globally dispersed end users.”
Rose’s inspiration to found Sudozi came from her own firsthand experience as a CFO, where she saw the need for better systems and processes to support decision making. Rose set out to build the software that she would have wanted and needed as a CFO, and she recognized the universal need for greater connectivity, efficiency, and transparency across procurement’s stakeholder network.
Sudozi has a few key differentiators, says Rose, starting with its focus on data structure and availability. The company helps provide decision makers with clean, reliable, and structured data that can be used for AI-powered approvals and strategic recommendations that save time and resources in the process. What’s more, she says, the look and feel of Sudozi is distinctly user friendly and “snappy.” Their unique interface is by design. In building the tool, Rose recruited talent from companies like Uber, Google, and The Real Real, so the engineering and product teams were able to pull in best practices in design and UX from consumer-oriented sites to create a truly best-in-class user experience.
“Imagine if you could be handed data that’s actually useful for you and giving you a recommendation and that the leader at the company, that approver, can actually make that decision more confidently,” said Rose. “The user interface and data availability are the two areas that drove me to build Sudozi, and in my experience, those are such big pain points in the procurement approval process.”
