Meet Bongo™: The App That Cuts Purchase‑Order Time in Half

Every procurement manager knows the drill: screens full of supplier spreadsheets, WhatsApp groups buzzing at midnight, and a ticking clock between quote and confirmation.  Bongo™, GMI’s new mobile and desktop app, was engineered to reclaim those lost hours.

It starts with live inventory.  The moment a pallet is scanned into our Ajman warehouse, the SKU appears in Bongo with weight, pack size, and best‑before date.  Users swipe to build a cart and the stock is soft‑reserved for 30 minutes—no more phoning sales reps to ‘please hold two containers of S‑30’ while approvals snake through the finance team.

Smart bundling runs under the hood.  Bongo analyses your previous delivery addresses and cart composition to suggest the cheapest truck configuration—perhaps a single 20‑footer if your order is sugar heavy, or a mixed reefer plus flatbed combo for oil and pulses.  Click accept and dispatch gets the routing profile instantly.

Approval workflows are equally slick.  Set a dirham threshold for your junior buyer and Bongo will ping the department head only when that ceiling is breached.  Digital signatures satisfy audit requirements, and a PDF PO lands in the finance inbox automatically.

The time savings are tangible.  Early adopters in Dubai’s catering sector report a drop from 42 minutes average quote‑to‑confirmation to just under 19 minutes.  One operator estimated it freed the equivalent of half an FTE in admin work—labour they redeployed to menu R&D.

Security was non‑negotiable in the build.  Two‑factor authentication, end‑to‑end encryption, and hashed payment tokens put Bongo in line with PCI‑DSS guidelines.  An offline mode caches your last eight price sheets so rural buyers can still assemble orders during patchy connectivity and sync once back online.

Yet the app’s most loved feature might be the simplest: a live ETA countdown that updates as the truck ticks down Emirates Road.  Chefs can see at a glance whether the rice will arrive before the lunch rush, while warehouse teams pre‑assign a dock slot.  When supply chain becomes this transparent, the stress evaporates from daily operations—and that is the real value Bongo delivers.