GRAPHITE CONNECT
PARAMOUNT X GRAPHITE
Tracey Walton serves as SVP at Paramount, overseeing the global procure-to-pay process and accounts payable across Viacom, CBS and Paramount. Her primary responsibility is ensuring suppliers are efficiently onboarded and paid whilst driving continuous improvement.
For Tracey,“ effective supplier management is the starting point for my job.” Without a streamlined, user-friendly onboarding process, Paramount would miss crucial opportunities – particularly critical in media production.
“ If you don’ t have an effective supplier management process,” Tracey explains,“ you’ re looking at increased internal resource time and potentially even additional resources just to get suppliers onboarded. If you don’ t have that solid process, then you lose out on better negotiations with suppliers regarding pricing and payment terms. Most importantly, overall satisfaction for everyone involved in the process is why supplier management is so important to me.”
Paramount and Graphite launched their partnership in 2023 after 18 months of preparation.“ They’ ve been spot on the entire time – with the customer service, the knowledge, the assistance in building our integrations – everything. It’ s been amazing,” says Tracey.“ Most importantly, with Graphite, our partnership has been truly focused on how we make things better and easier for our suppliers, specifically within media and entertainment, collaborating with other media and entertainment clients to ensure we have a process that works across the industry.”
The most significant benefit has been dramatically reducing supplier onboarding time by transforming a complicated process into a simpler one.“ Graphite helped us design questionnaires for our suppliers and workflows that allowed the tax departments and risk management teams to become more involved in the process. Graphite has made the process overall just better.”
While Graphite’ s well-designed workflows, flexibility and bank verification stand out, its customer service has been exceptional.“ That was hugely important,” Tracey notes.“ We want a tool that onboards our suppliers, validates bank information, does ID verification and protects personal information. But, more importantly, we want a tool and a company that can provide amazing customer service – and they do that for us.”
The partnership aims to continue long-term, enhancing collaboration within the media and entertainment industry by creating more efficient, standardised supplier onboarding processes tailored to the industry’ s unique needs, such as onboarding talent.
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