Mars enables a multi-year global procurement transformation at scale

At the 2025 World Procurement Congress in London, Julia Gorchakova, VP of Indirect Procurement Europe at Mars, joined Zip to share her team's procurement transformation journey. In front of an audience of senior procurement leaders, Julia offered candid insight into what readiness actually looks like in practice, including what it takes to move from legacy gaps to a future-forward procurement organization.

Challenge

Procurement is at an inflection point. Process complexity is increasing, stakeholder expectations are rising, and the emergence of AI is accelerating both. At the same time, teams are becoming leaner, with 72% of procurement leaders expect workloads to increase in 2026 while budgets and headcount are projected to decline. Leaders are increasingly looking to technology to fill the gap.

But AI only delivers when the foundation is in place. Organizations that rush to deploy without first aligning stakeholders, standardizing processes, and cleaning up data end up amplifying existing problems.

For Mars, the challenge was navigating that reality at global scale. With complex indirect procurement operations spanning multiple regions, the question wasn't just what to transform, it was how do you know when you're actually ready? Who owns which decisions? Which processes need to be reengineered before they can be automated? Can a system trust the data inputs it's given? And who's clearing roadblocks at the executive level?

Solution

Mars partnered with Zip to bring structure to the transformation process, working through three foundational dimensions: people and governance, process and policy, and data.

Process and policy turned out to be the most significant area of focus. Julia shared that the tool is only as good as the processes and policies that feed it. Before orchestration could work, Mars needed to do the harder work of documenting, standardizing, and re-engineering their procurement processes. Before fixing the technology problem, the operational challenges had to be solved first.

Governance and business case were equally critical. Securing funding and executive sponsorship for a transformation of this scale required a strong business case and a clear connection to organizational design. Julia emphasized the importance of understanding how a procurement transformation links to broader organizational changes, and making sure that story is told to the right stakeholders.

Julia also emphasized cross-functional collaboration across different teams, since procurement transformation doesn't happen in isolation. The data Mars’ procurement team generates and the connectivity between systems has implications for other functions across the enterprise. Building that awareness early was a key part of setting up the program for success.

Underpinning all of this was Zip's orchestration layer: a single entry point for procurement requests, intelligent routing, and real-time visibility from request through to purchase order. With Zip, the team can streamline workflows and build data governance into processes from day one, creating the foundation Mars needs to move toward AI-enabled procurement in the future.

Results

Mars' transformation with Zip is establishing the operational and data foundation required to unlock AI-powered procurement at scale. The groundwork being laid now around clean data flows, standardized processes, and connected systems, is setting up the team to enable future AI-powered workflows. 

Transformation programs of this scale are multi-month efforts, and success depends as much on executive sponsorship and internal alignment as it does on the technology itself. The organizations that get this right are the ones that invest in the foundation before they invest in the future state.

Key takeaways from Mars' journey:

• Process and policy first. The technology performs as well as the processes that support it. Reengineering processes before implementation — not during — is what separates successful transformations from stalled ones.
• Governance is a prerequisite, not a follow-on. Building the business case, securing funding, and aligning with organizational design decisions must happen before the program gets underway.
• Think cross-functionally. Procurement transformation creates data and connectivity dependencies across the business. Designing for that fromthe start avoids costly rework later.‍
• Orchestration sets the AI foundation. Even without AI agents in the immediate roadmap, a well-implemented orchestration layer builds the data infrastructure and process rigor that future AI deployment requires.