What is procurement orchestration? A complete guide

Procurement at most companies can often feel overly complex. Without clear processes, employees may bypass formal procurement workflows entirely, unsure how to process intake requests or navigate opaque approval cycles, leading to rogue spend and unnecessary manual effort for procurement teams. Procurement orchestration simplifies and streamlines complex purchasing workflows, eliminating the confusion and inefficiencies often caused by siloed legacy systems.

By creating an integrated, collaborative layer across existing tools and systems, procurement orchestration provides financial and procurement leaders with full visibility and control at every stage. Orchestration ensures smoother workflows, better compliance, and faster cycle times, empowering employees to follow established processes effortlessly.

In this guide, we’ll unpack the inner-workings of procurement orchestration, and share some tell-tale signs that your organization could benefit from a procurement orchestration platform.

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What is procurement orchestration?

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Procurement orchestration involves the strategic integration of all processes leading into an organization’s procurement strategy, offering a holistic view above individual process levels. This involves ‘orchestrating’ the many tools and processes that cross-functional departments and stakeholders prefer to use in their own work.

It is a powerful, broad view, encompassing tools and strategies that help maximize spend visibility and augment efficiency of procurement teams. Financial leaders and those driving procurement operations are increasingly adopting procurement orchestration as a ‘collaboration layer’ to integrate their preferred tools and tie purchasing processes together.

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The value of procurement orchestration

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Working with procurement orchestration providers introduces several efficiencies to yield an optimal intake process. Here’s how procurement orchestration can benefit your organization:

• Increased employee adoption: The single-front door for all intake requests provides compliance, comprehensiveness, and the visibility you need to inform purchasing decisions before at the earliest possible time.
• Decreased cycle times: When cross-functional workflows are coordinated across parallel paths, approval times no longer need to reach into weeks.
• Simplified routing: Requests are routed to the right teams and appropriate approvers using queues and user hierarchies.
• Linked systems: Orchestration allows your ERP, CLM, GRC, ITSM, and other best-of-breed tools to seamlessly coordinate, ensuring teams can review and approve requests in their preferred environments.
• Enhanced accuracy and savings: With AI-powered process automations, and full visibility across the entire purchasing process, you can gather detailed insights to unlock bigger process optimizations and savings opportunities.

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How does procurement orchestration work?

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Think about procurement orchestration as a collaboration layer for your end-to-end purchasing tech stack.

You may already be using an ERP, a Procure-to-Pay (P2P) system, or other best-of-breed solutions for Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) or Supplier Information Management (SIM). Increasingly, companies are opting for an intake management solution—what might be described as ‘Intake-to-Procure,’ allowing for a procurement ‘start button’ for employees to begin any request—be it a new purchase, a new contract, or onboarding a new vendor.

But procurement orchestration takes it further, covering the entire process from ‘Intake-to-Pay’. When tools, people, and processes are unified, they are ‘orchestrated’ together, working both in rhythm and in harmony.

Because procurement orchestration allows for fully integrated, real-time stakeholder collaboration across tools and processes throughout coordinated parallel workflows, it solves issues of fragmented, manual processes caused by outdated legacy solutions.

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Key components of procurement orchestration

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The work of procurement generally involves two main components to function: best-of-breed software solutions for the workflows involved in each stage of the procurement process, and seamless connection between those solutions, enabling full visibility and coordination at all times. Here are the key components broken down

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Automated workflows and processes

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From the moment of purchase initiation, every manual touchpoint slows down intake and approval processes. In a research study conducted by Zip, 27% of respondents said they require 10 or more approvals throughout a typical procurement cycle. It’s easy to see how fragmented, manual processes can quickly become a drain on efficiency. 

Procurement orchestration can overcome this by automating time-consuming tasks, and integrating seamlessly with existing systems. A procurement orchestration layer works as an embedded platform on top of existing systems, simplifying the experience ofprocurement, and providing AI-powered guidance at each step along the way.

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Supplier relationship management

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Procurement is a human process that requires deep and mutually beneficial relationships with suppliers. Orchestration allows procurement teams to consolidate supplier data, keeping vendor information like documents, contracts, spend history, risk scores and more, into one unified system.

Zip makes supplier relationship management easy. You can provide your suppliers with their own portal, where vendors can upload business data, tax IDs, payment details, and other information to streamline onboarding, making it simple for procurement, finance, legal, IT, and AP teams to conduct reviews within their own preferred tools.

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Contract management

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In the contract management lifecycle, legal teams must ensure compliance and protect the business from potential risks. Orchestration helps to ensure compliance from the point of intake, with automated workflows, AI-powered process guidance and document review, with full transparency at every step of the process.

With access to the information legal teams need, and visibility into cross-functional workflows at every step, the legal teams can begin their reviews from the start of the purchasing process, rather than chase down information downstream.

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Process reporting and analytics

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More data and metrics allow you to identify bottlenecks and streamline procurement throughout the entire procurement cycle. Increased visibility allows procurement teams to control rogue spend by catching inefficiencies or bottlenecks as they occur.

In addition, modern orchestration tools include AI-powered insights that can flag duplicate vendors and also provide other opportunities for savings and efficiencies. The predictive power of procurement orchestration can uncover value and drive measurable impact that aligns with broader business objectives.

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3 signs your organization needs procurement orchestration

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Is procurement orchestration right for you? Increasingly, companies are realizing that legacy solutions no longer provide the flexibility, the user experience, and the capabilities required as the scope of procurement expands. Here are some signs your organization will benefit from procurement orchestration:

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1. Your procurement process is fragmented

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If you’ve already adopted one or more common procurement solutions, you might have experienced fragmentation, or siloed workstreams and data. These inefficiencies compound over time, leading to manual, ad hoc workflows to coordinate the procurement process.

Procurement orchestration links systems together, so legal, IT, and other teams can work in their preferred systems, while finance and procurement gains full visibility into every stage of the process.

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2. You’re constantly having to dig for data

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Have your finance or procurement team members ever had to chase down receipts, or request further information from employees before moving forward in a procurement request?

Just imagine if employees didn’t have to waste anyone’s time requesting help through email or Slack—employees just make your request at the single front door for intake, and every move is guided by an agentic AI, and remains fully transparent.

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3. Your spending’s gone rogue

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Procurement, especially when managed through legacy systems, can be a painful process. So painful, in fact, that employees are often tempted to bypass the process entirely and go rogue—which can turn into a major headache for AP teams.

With a clear, user-friendly process enabled by procurement orchestration, your team can enforce strict controls and approval workflows reducing unauthorized spend and improving financial governance, a blessing come reporting time.

It quickly becomes clear that a single source of truth unifying all of procurement increases visibility, control, data integrity, and user-experience, leading to countless opportunities and downstream optimizations across your entire business.

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Take control of your procurement process with Zip

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Procurement orchestration makes adopting unified procurement easy for everyone involved, throughout every stage of the purchasing process.

With Zip’s platform, employees can harness the power of AI-powered automations to direct requests to stakeholders, reduce cycle times through parallel workflows, and integrate within the best-of-breed tools they already prefer to use. 

Zip requires no training, and provides a simple, consumer-grade user experience that employees love to use. With AI-powered automation and process guidance every step of the way, your finance teams will enjoy the downstream benefits of increased compliance and transparency into every purchase.

Ready to learn more? Request a demo today and find out why Zip is the world’s leading intake and procurement orchestration platform.