How Brajan and Nils automate Personio’s 9-figure spend
- Pius Schmid
- Jul 22, 2025
- 8 min read
Updated: Jul 24, 2025
Procurement at Personio looks different from what you would find in most companies. And that’s by design. A big part of that are Procurement Lead Nils Brauckmann and Senior Manager Brajan Gatys, who bring a tech and automation-first mindset to the way software & services get sourced, negotiated, and implemented. Working inside one of Europe’s fastest-growing HR tech companies, they have helped shape a lean, self-built procurement setup that prioritizes speed, ownership, and simplicity. This case study takes a closer look at how and why it works.
Procurement at Personio
Procurement at Personio doesn’t start with a contract. It starts with a problem.
When a team needs a new tool (say, for data quality or collaboration) they come to Procurement early. Together, they look at what is needed, review vendor options, and go through selection, negotiation, and implementation. The Procurement team stays involved all the way to go-live.
Personio has around 2000 employees, over 1500 vendors, and a nine-digit spend. Even so, the Procurement team is small: just 3 people. From day one, they have followed an automation-first mindset, a direction strongly shaped by Nils's leadership. Instead of using standard procurement software, they built their own stack using low-code. This gives them more flexibility, lower costs, and full control over their processes.
Why it works
Personio’s Procurement does not follow the usual playbook. Intentionally.
Most companies treat Procurement as a support function. At Personio, it is treated as a strategic partner. That means:
No category managers or handovers: The team does not split responsibilities by product or contract. Everyone works across topics and owns the full process.
Contract handling stays in Procurement: Legal steps in when needed, but most contracts are managed directly by the team.
Stakeholders have a single contact: Users don’t need to talk to four departments. Procurement handles approvals, compliance, and vendor onboarding in one flow.
Automation and AI are built-in: Manual contract tasks are automated. AI helps with summaries, routing, and lifecycle steps.
Just as important as the structure is the mindset. No team member comes from a traditional procurement background. All have a technical understanding, and it shapes how they think: fast, product-focused, and hands-on. They own their systems end to end, with no reliance on IT or shared backlogs. When something needs to change, they make it happen. Often the same day. That speed and autonomy weren't handed to them. They built it that way from the start.
Automation and AI in procurement’s daily operations
Procurement at Personio is heavily automated: not in theory, but in everyday work. The goal is simple: make processes invisible, intelligent, and scalable. That shift did not happen overnight, and it’s not about fancy dashboards. It’s about building solutions that remove friction, improve quality, and enable a small team to do a big job.
1. Backend automation that just runs
Most of the automation happens in the background. You don’t see it, but you feel the impact.
Take, for example, Purchase Orders (PO). When a PO is created, an AI agent kicks in. It checks and completes fields, validates data, updates linked records and triggers follow-up actions like database updates or handovers to other tools. In 90% of cases, the process runs end to end without anyone touching it again.
The result: clean data, no bottlenecks, no post-processing.
2. Human input only when it matters
The team’s principle is clear: only involve people when needed, and then, make it effortless.
Take the German freelancer compliance process, which involves Legal, Procurement, IT, and People. Normally, this is messy. At Personio, all the involved parties have to do is click “approve.” The system takes care of the rest: generating contracts, managing signatures, archiving documents, updating records, sending notifications. What used to take multiple departments and touchpoints is now a single automated flow. What takes weeks in other companies can be done in 10 minutes.
The result: full compliance, zero chaos, no bottlenecks.
3. Self-service instead of support tickets
Where possible, the team thinks in self-service processes - without losing quality.
A typical example is NDAs. Instead of downloading a template, filling it in, emailing vendors, and manually uploading signed copies, the user now submits a name or email address. Then, the system takes over: it generates the NDA, sends it via e-signature, monitors progress, and archives the result.
Over 50% of NDAs are signed and archived within one hour. Around 75% within 10 hours. Completely without manual support.
4. AI that thinks with you
AI is built into many of Personio’s procurement flows: sometimes behind the scenes, sometimes up front.
Some examples:
AI validates fields, formats entries, or turns messy text into clean data.
It classifies requests and contract types.
It runs risk analyses and highlights potential issues.
This turns AI into more than a chatbot. It becomes an intelligent assistant that understands the context and helps move work forward.
5. Vendor scoring with AI
With about 1500 active vendors in play, the Procurement team uses an AI-driven scoring system to evaluate risks and relevance. The system looks at financials, market trends, data privacy history, geography, reputation, and more. It pulls from public data sources and internal systems, classifies risks from “Negligible” to “Severe,” and generates a weighted risk score per vendor.
It also layers in how strategic a vendor is (for example, whether Personio is product-dependent on them). Together, risk and relevance shape how the team prioritizes renewals, deals, and internal conversations.
This setup eliminates manual data collection and gives procurement managers the space to focus on what matters: analysis and execution.
Automation that connects teams
The automation doesn’t stop at Procurement. It extends into adjacent areas like Legal and Finance.
Legal: Data privacy assessments are triggered and processed automatically throughout the year. They feed into risk scores and influence contract strategy.
Finance: Procurement has cost visibility before Finance does, because they see contracts first. To make that data useful, they built a system that turns PO and contract data into monthly spend forecasts and cashflow projections. This way, the finance department gets a live forecast without sorting through hundreds of documents.
This setup doesn’t aim to replace people. It frees them up.
AI and automation handle the busywork, so the team can focus on decisions, not admin. Most importantly, everything is designed to scale: if Personio doubles in size, the system keeps working. Procurement becomes a strategic lever, not a service desk.
Success criteria in procurement & automation
What does success look like when Procurement runs on automation? At Personio, the metrics are simple, but the impact is big.
Financial success: Savings as the core KPI
Savings are the primary metric for measuring Procurement’s success both in absolute terms (€) and relative terms (savings rate).
Personio’s current savings rate is around 30%. That means: for every €1M of budget, €300K is saved. Or put differently: you can spend €130M with a €100M budget.
Automation impact: No time-tracking, no manual fall-backs
Time savings aren’t tracked, because there was never a manual baseline to compare against. Processes are automated from day one.
The mindset is clear: "If I can’t automate it, I don’t do it."
Things like data exports and double entry are out of the question. Only fully integrated processes are acceptable.
Cost efficiency: Building beats buying
Personio’s team deliberately chose low-code over off-the-shelf software. And it paid off.
Take ERP: a traditional setup would have cost a mid six-figure amount, while a custom build was over 95% cheaper.
With internal builds, the team gets: better pricing, more flexibility, custom fit for how they work. Market tools just can’t match that.
Build philosophy: Automation is the starting point
There’s no debate between manual vs. automated. It’s automation or nothing. Processes are designed to scale from day one without extra headcount. Leveraging the low-code automation platform Make is key. Easy to operate and even easier to scale. Personio’s procurement team is small, lean, and handles a broader scope. And that’s the real success metric: more output, fewer inputs.
What’s next for procurement at Personio?
AI capabilities are evolving fast, and so is the setup at Personio. The team is focused on turning AI from a layer into the foundation. What used to be “automate later” is now “AI-native by default.”
Manual fields are being replaced by agents that read, decide, and update automatically.
Briefing reports and business cases are now generated by AI, ready for audits or internal reviews.
Contract data extraction is shifting to fully automated flows using new models like Claude 4.
The goal stays the same: less manual work, more clarity, and systems that scale without extra effort.
→ Meet Brajan and Nils
Brajan lives in Barcelona and has been working at Personio for three years. Nils, based in Düsseldorf, joined the company shortly before him and leads the Procurement team. Both share a background that blends business and technology. And a mindset that has shaped how Procurement works at Personio today.
→ About Personio
Personio is one of Europe’s leading HR software companies based in Munich, focused on simplifying people operations for small and mid-sized businesses. Over the past years, they’ve grown fast and built a modern internal setup. One part of that is Procurement: lean, digital, and deeply connected to the rest of the business.
From Tech Curiosity to Procurement
Always interested in technology and software, Brajan completed both his Bachelor and Master studies in Business and Technology Innovation Management. During his studies, he applied for a student job in IT Procurement, even though he barely knew what that meant. His first impression?
“Just click the Google Drive Buy button – done”
But what he found was a role that brought together everything he liked: solving problems, working with tech, and improving how teams operate.
Nils followed a similar path. He studied Economics and later completed a Master's in Innovation and Technology Management, and Entrepreneurship. He was always interested in engineering, and dove into the tech industry through his first job as a working student at Microsoft. Procurement was not on his radar at first, but it sounded like the right mix of business and technology. Once he started, it clicked. Both have stayed in the field ever since.
Discovering the Power of Automation
Brajan’s love for automation started even earlier. In his early 20s, he came across Zapier and was instantly hooked . That curiosity grew into a habit, then into a mindset. Whether it's routing data or building logic flows, Brajan looks at every process as something that can be improved. Today, that means low-code platforms and AI. Still, according to Brajan, a team lead does not have to be a deep-tech expert. A solid understanding of AI and automation, paired with genuine interest in technology, is enough to start.
Nils also came to automation through practice. Before Personio, he co-founded a small travel startup and, lacking strong coding skills, leaned heavily on plug-and-play tools. The startup didn’t last, but it brought him many learnings about the possibilities of automation.
When he hired Brajan and they later joined Personio together, they shared one clear goal: grow through efficiency, not just headcount. Automation (and now AI) was the only way to scale. And as processes got more complex, they didn’t hesitate. They dove in head first.
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