How Zip Helped T-Mobile Transform its Procurement

Michael Simpson, CPO at T-Mobile, joined Zip’s Co-founder, Felix Meng, on stage at Zip Forward and shared the company's ambitious journey to modernise its procurement operations – serving 30,000 suppliers and managing US$35bn in spend.

The effort to transform T-Mobile was across a number of functions, including its finance, supply chain and all of procurement, driven by a mandate: simplify the business.

Before Zip, T-Mobile had legacy ERP and procurement systems reaching end of life, were using a homegrown orchestration tool with zero integration between procurement, legal and ERP. This was leading to long SLAs from procurement to business partners, taking more than 30 days.

Shifting from transactions to strategy

Michael said that not every transaction should be prioritised equally, and procurement's role must evolve from being transaction-heavy and policy-driven to becoming a strategic value-add partner that moves "further to the left in the right conversations."

The core philosophy of the plan was simple: to make procurement frictionless for repeatable buys while ensuring procurement staff could focus on deals that truly matter. Michael is of the belief that every procurement professional should actually use their own process to understand the employee experience first-hand.

Michael believes the critical attributes of the modern CPO are being data-driven, leading with business process change first and having the right conversations at the right times with informed information.

He believes that the days of relying solely on outdated benchmarks or consultants are gone. The procurement teams working today need the ability to research capabilities and must be equipped with the tools to educate the business, asking questions like: "You already have five applications. Do we really need five for the future?"

Building a culture of feedback

The culture has played an important role within the success of the transformation; Michael emphasised listening to team members at all working levels and gathering constructive feedback from business partners to distil actionable change.

Michael said: “It’s simplifying things for the business, making sure that we have procurement focused on the deals that bring value and benefit to teams.”

For its operations, T-Mobile had previously built a homegrown orchestration tool about five years ago, but it lacked system linkages and real integration. When evaluating the build-versus-buy decision, Michael concluded that procurement deserves purpose-built applications that evolve with peer group feedback rather than static ERP platforms.

The search for a unified gateway

It was while Michael was on LinkedIn that the discovery of Zip was made, in an advert for the platform’s procurement orchestration. This appealed to T-Mobile, who had a vision centred on having "one door into procurement" with full visibility into where deals are stuck in the process, whether with legal, cyber risk or other stakeholders.

When offering his advice to other procurement leaders, Michael was very clear: invest in business process change first, allocate bandwidth for leaders to dive into the work and commit to real, measurable efficiencies and savings. He stressed the most important part was to find a business sponsor willing to go first and learn together. As Michael candidly shared, his own procurement team is using the new system.

After Zip, T-Mobile had that one door into procurement with full visibility, offering a frictionless buying for repeatable transactions. It also had a purpose-built, flexible system that evolves with peer group feedback, with the procurement team now being able to focus on high-value spend while routine purchases are streamlined.

Michael’s biggest piece of advice: If you're not willing to fundamentally change your business process, you're not ready for transformation. But if you are, you have one really significant crack at making a big enough leap in experience that the business can get behind.