Central Garden & Pet Achieves Real-Time Expense Reporting with Navan

Region

NORAM: North America

Headquarters

Walnut Creek, CA

Company Size

Enterprise (2,500+ employees)

Industry

Industrial

Products Used

• Navan Expense
• Navan Travel Payments
• Navan Business Travel

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Central Garden & Pet, a leading supplier of garden and pet products, has a diverse and distributed operation with some 7,000 employees across multiple locations in North America. The company’s structure, which includes multiple business units with unique needs and operations, required a sophisticated travel and expense (T&E) management solution to streamline processes and improve efficiency. Recognizing this need, the company undertook a comprehensive review of its T&E policies and systems.

Challenges Central Faced Before Navan

The catalyst for finding Navan was Central’s T&E policies, which were overdue for updates. The leadership team worked to overhaul these policies and find opportunities for improved cost control. 

“We hadn’t updated our T&E policies in 13 years,” said Becky E., Principal Data Analyst at Central. “Rewriting the policies made the inadequacies of our former platforms clear.”

This policy rewrite prompted the team to explore more modern solutions.

Over the years, Central tried different travel, expense, and banking solutions and recognized the need for a more robust, modern platform to support all of these areas. 

These former solutions lacked integration, a modern user interface, real-time data processing, and more — leading to operational inefficiencies and employee dissatisfaction.

“

There’s no other solution bringing together all these pieces like Navan.

Becky E.

Principal Data Analyst

Why Navan Was the Right Choice

In search of a comprehensive solution, Central sought a tool that seamlessly integrates travel booking and expense management. Navan’s all-in-one platform stood out as the optimal choice.

“User experience, integration, and the ability to handle complex accounting needs were our top priorities,” said Summer P., Senior Accounts Payable Manager at Central. 

“Navan’s interface was intuitive and forward-thinking, and offered the integrated solution we needed.” 

Summer and Becky have spent more than a decade at the company, so they intimately understood its business needs and culture when they set out to find a new solution.

“We liked the entire interface with Navan,” said Becky. 

“It was very forward-thinking. From a UI perspective, it had the right look and feel. We were wowed by all the different features and thoughtful ways that Navan helped users book travel and manage expenses. Having travel and expense management all tied up in a bow so we could manage it together was exciting.”

Implementation and Adoption

Despite the complexity of the company’s operations, Navan’s implementation was smooth and efficient. 

“The Navan team did a phenomenal job,” said Summer. “We linked arms and created training programs specific for different user groups. One of the things we were impressed with, even in the exploratory phase, was Navan’s focus on customer service.”

Culture and Leadership Support

Culture is important in building a healthier T&E ecosystem at Central. When leaders did not like previous solutions, they were lenient in suggesting their team use of prior platforms. With leaders’ appreciation of Navan, there’s been more adoption among team members, too.

“Leadership support and adoption is important. If the leader doesn’t buy in on it, then they’re not going to reinforce the correct practices within their team,” said Summer.

“We are optimistic that we now have a better solution for our leaders. It was a square peg, round hole situation in the past,” said Becky.

“

We wanted an end-to-end solution that was more seamless and gave users time to focus on their core job responsibilities. We estimated Navan would result in a 90% time savings.

Summer P.

Senior Manager, Accounts Payable

Results with Navan

Time Savings

“If you look at all of our users and approvers, everyone is saving time within their step of the expense process,” said Summer.

While Central hasn’t measured the time savings specifically, they estimate that Navan has already saved the team 75% of the time previously spent on monthly processes.

Before Navan, a finance team member had to extract and upload data to the different ERP systems daily. Now, what used to take an hour each day takes just a couple of hours each month.

“We don’t have to do any daily uploads back to the ERP because it’s all happening automatically through Navan,” said Summer. “Instead, there’s one monthly tie-out for our process.”

Better Data and Strategic Focus

Since implementing Navan, Central’s team has had more time to focus on strategic decision-making.

Ins–members can now focus on analysis and making faster, more informed decisions based on the real-time data coming out of Navan. Instead of doing manual work, the team can help provide insights into the business and foster meaningful conversations to move forward on.

“All of our Navan users are getting time to focus on what they’re being paid to do,” said Summer.

“

Navan is helping elevate us as an organization. We have better statistics, better tracking, better tools. We don’t have to focus on tasks that the system does automatically.

Summer P.

Senior Manager, Accounts Payable

Travel Efficiency

On the travel side, the average booking time is down considerably from what Central estimates was 35 minutes with previous tools.

“Some people said it took them upwards of an hour to get a travel booking down. With Navan, we’ve seen a significant improvement,” said Becky.

“

I would select Navan as our travel, expense, and credit card solution 100 times over.

Summer P.

Senior Manager, Accounts Payable

Looking Forward

Central is optimistic about the future with Navan and excited to leverage the platform’s innovations to enhance its T&E management processes further.

“We’re on this journey as a partner, not just a customer,” said Summer. “One of the things we appreciate about Navan is how open the team is to feedback and how closely they’ve partnered with us throughout the journey. We’ve already seen our feedback materialize into real product updates.”

By adopting Navan, Central has significantly streamlined its T&E management, resulting in substantial time savings and improved efficiency across its operations. This partnership sets a solid foundation for future growth and success.