Aramsco, a North American distributor of specialty surface preparation and restoration products, runs a high volume of sourcing projects each year. Before LightSource, that volume was managed manually, coordination spread across email, spec data and vendor contacts living outside any durable system, and sourcing cycles that stretched from weeks into months. When a project was revisited after a year or two, the team often had no choice but to start over.

With LightSource, that changed. Cycle times compressed from months to weeks. The team now completes more RFPs per calendar year than it could before. Product specification data and vendor contacts persist in the platform, eliminating the need to rebuild. And Aramsco has achieved seven figures in cost savings across its sourced spend.

"LightSource has given us the ability to get seven figures of cost savings out of our spend. It's been a great tool to gain efficiencies and drive cost savings."

Michael Elefante 
Vice President Of Product Strategy

What challenges did Aramsco have before LightSource?

Aramsco's procurement team managed a large, recurring volume of RFPs a workload that depended on coordination happening manually. Without a dedicated platform, moving a sourcing project from concept through pricing to award required significant administrative effort, and cycle times reflected it.

The sharper problem was institutional knowledge. Specification data, vendor contact information, and project history existed outside any centralized system. When a project was relaunched after a two- or three-year gap, that data was often gone. The team rebuilt from scratch each time not because the work hadn't been done before, but because there was no reliable way to retrieve it.

That pattern carried two costs: time spent recreating work that already existed, and procurement capacity consumed by administration rather than strategic sourcing.

Why did Aramsco choose LightSource?

LightSource gave Aramsco's RFP team a platform built for high-volume sourcing structured enough to run faster, durable enough to retain the work across cycles.

The RFP process itself got faster. LightSource structured the coordination and communication that had previously been managed by hand, compressing the concept-to-award timeline. A focused RFP team running on the platform can move through more sourcing projects per calendar year than was previously possible.

The archive capability addressed the institutional knowledge problem directly. Once a project closes, it lives in the platform. When Aramsco relaunches that project months or years later, all the specification data and vendor contacts are already there. As Sukesh on the Aramsco team put it: "Once you complete the project, it will go in the archive, and the next time when you have to relaunch, it's just a click away."

Supplier participation improved as well. Because the process is fast and structured on both sides, suppliers consistently return to participate.

How did LightSource deliver results and ROI?

The impact on cycle time was immediate. Phebe Kearney Director - Supplier Management on the Aramsco procurement team, described her reaction when the team started using LightSource: "Seeing how much that it cut down time and compressed the entire decision-making process, I was like, 'Oh wow, this is going to work very, very well.'"

That compression extended across the entire sourcing workflow. "You've taken something that may have taken months from start to finish  on just the concept, to pricing, to award, to now weeks," Phebe said.

With that time recovered, the procurement team redirected capacity toward higher-value work. "It's really freed up my team to go do more productive types of tasks. It makes the decision-making process very quickly."

Michael described the throughput gain: "With the power of LightSource and a focused team on RFPs, [we're able] to move through more RFPs in a calendar year than we were previously able to do. There's a huge efficiency gain we get from that function alone."

Nick explained what the archive means in practice: "One of the biggest differences when starting a project from scratch versus relaunching it from the archive in LightSource is the fact that all the product specification data, all the vendor contact information, is readily available in the platform. It eliminates the risk of losing the data two to three years down the road when you're revisiting the project."

Aramsco's future with LightSource

Aramsco built durable infrastructure for its procurement function. The platform runs a high-volume RFP operation faster, preserves institutional knowledge across multi-year project cycles, and frees the team to focus on strategic work rather than administrative coordination.

As Nick put it: "LightSource is a great platform for Aramsco's procurement needs."