Adopt a Transparent, Automated, and a Workflow-Centric Approach to Spend Management

As the scope of procurement’s responsibilities has expanded, so too has the proliferation of technological solutions designed to address its multifaceted challenges. From contract management to third-party risk management, ESG considerations and beyond, countless specialized applications have emerged, each addressing a piece of the procurement puzzle, but collectively complicating the overall procurement process.

Procurement workloads are increasing faster than staff and budget investment.

Procurement’s increased workload will continue to create productivity and efficiency gaps if not addressed, either through increased resources or improved efficiency through new ways of working including the adoption of AI.

Procurement Orchestration is a Next-Gen Approach to Procurement Management

Recognizing the need to streamline fragmented processes and systems, the concept of procurement orchestration has emerged, offering a path to unify disparate systems into a cohesive, intelligent, and efficiently managed workflow.

Procurement orchestration enables companies to centrally co-ordinate all of the workflows, information, and people involved in the procurement process across all related systems. It brings your static business process and procurement policy documentation to life by integrating it directly into the applications your employees use, allowing procurement teams to coordinate or “orchestrate” processes across applications and people.

Improved Agility

As most modern workflow orchestration solutions are low-code/no-code platforms, it’s easier to make process changes in response to policy changes or to address process bottlenecks. Workflow configuration is also faster because most common tasks can be dragged and dropped as modules rather than having to be built from the ground up.

Orchestrate Harmony Across Your Procurement Process

Procurement orchestration solves these issues by facilitating an integrated, collaborative layer across all existing tools and systems, ensuring financial and procurement leaders maintain full transparency and control at every stage of the procurement process. And because procurement orchestration allows for fully integrated, real-time stakeholder collaboration across tools and processes, it solves the issues of fragmented and manual processes caused by outdated legacy solutions.

Procurement Intake is the Cornerstone of Orchestration

In recent years, intake management has become increasingly important as organizations seek to overhaul their procurement processes and achieve better visibility into their spending. The importance of intake management in procurement is immense. It establishes the groundwork for an efficient, cost-effective, and risk-averse procurement system, ultimately enhancing value across the organization.

You need to fully understand your intake points before you build out your orchestration.

Whilst many people view intake management as primarily linked to initiating a purchase request, its scope is actually much broader than this, covering any activity across the entire source-to-pay process e.g. onboarding a new supplier, initiating a renewal, request a NDA etc.

Identifying when and where stakeholders collaboration points take place throughout the end to end process, what are their pain points and the required activities, is critical to creating a successful orchestration framework.

Kick-Start Your Transformation With a Six-Week Procurement Intake and Orchestration Pilot

To help identify how procurement orchestration can help drive efficiencies across your source-to-pay processes, we have developed a 3-step pilot approach at a category/commodity level that can be delivered in just six weeks.

Step 1 – Identify further opportunities for S2P end-to-end process improvements across a pilot category/commodity
Step 2 – Define a future state S2P category channel across a pilot category/commodity
Step 3 – Shape a business case and define requirements for intake & orchestration