Purchase requests and budget gating in one shared base
A global food ingredients supplier manages innovation center build projects and procurement in Airtable: MEP specs, capital assets, shipping costs, and facility access all link to the same purchase request and budget gating workflow. R&D, Facilities, Finance, and IT get a mobile-friendly system that bypasses IT restrictions on calendar sharing and cuts manual administrative entry into SAP.
The problem
Procuring equipment and services for a new innovation center build meant routing purchase requests through a process that leaned heavily on Excel for tracking and manual administrative entry into SAP for every vendor and cost center lookup. Facility access scheduling had the same problem: IT restrictions blocked Outlook calendar sharing across teams.
Field staff working the build had no mobile way to check request status or facility availability, and budget tracking was fragmented across spreadsheets that did not connect to the underlying build or asset records.
What they built
R&D, Facilities, and Procurement built a shared Airtable base that intakes purchase requests and gates them against budget, while tracking the same innovation center build project: MEP specs, capital assets, and facility scheduling and access management.
SAP vendor and cost center lookups feed directly into the request records, and a robotic process automation tool picks up downstream processing, so the manual handoff into SAP shrinks to the fields that actually require it.
The outcome
Procurement intake and purchase request tracking now run from one system of record instead of Excel and manual SAP entry, giving Finance and Procurement auditable spend and asset visibility across the build.
Automated scheduling notifications replaced ad hoc calendar coordination, and cross-company coordination happens without requiring new IT integration work, cutting the administrative rework that used to slow requests down.
Inside the solution
Procurement Intake and Purchase Request Tracking
Procurement & Sourcing
- Innovation center build tracking
- Facility scheduling and access management
- Procurement request intake and budget gating
- Asset installation and location tracking
- SAP vendor and cost center lookup
- IT restrictions on calendar sharing
- Heavy reliance on Excel for project tracking
- Manual administrative entry into SAP
- Lack of mobile access for field staff
- Fragmented budget tracking
- Auditable spend and asset visibility
- Automated scheduling notifications
- Reduced administrative rework
- Cross-team coordination without new IT integration
- Single source of truth for build projects
- R&D
- Admin & Operations
- Finance & Procurement
- IT
- SAP
- UiPath RPA
- Outlook
Procurement intake and purchase request tracking
Intake every purchase request in one place, gate it automatically against the remaining balance on its cost center, and follow the capital equipment it funds from order through installation in a specific room. Approvals, ERP handoff queuing, asset records, and site access notices fire automatically, and native AI fields draft the approver brief, the project status digest, and the badge access notice.
From manual SAP entry to one connected request system
Copy the templates
Link requests to the build
Feed downstream systems
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
Every purchase request links to the build and asset records it funds, so Finance and Procurement approve against the same data R&D and Facilities use for capacity planning, instead of a separate spreadsheet.
Vendor and cost center lookups now feed directly from the request record. Only the fields SAP requires make the manual handoff, and a robotic process automation tool absorbs part of that downstream work.
The same build project drives both purchase requests and facility access needs, so tracking them together avoided duplicating status information across two separate systems.
A mobile-friendly base lets them check request status and asset installation progress without returning to a desk or waiting on an email reply.
No. It is a structured intake and approval workflow. The clean request and asset data it produces is exactly the kind of input later AI-assisted procurement work would need.