Procurement and Purchasing
3 min read
Procurement processes can often feel overly complex. When this happens, employees may find themselves dismissing the formal purchasing workflow, either because they’re either unsure how to properly process intake requests, or they simply don’t even know where to begin.
Perhaps they wish to sidestep the long cycle times, or opaque approval processes, and just make their purchases independently—forcing procurement departments to chase down receipts and manage rogue spend.
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.
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 includes integrating processes that may reside in different systems or departments.
It is a powerful, broad view, encompassing tools and strategies that help maximize spend visibility and augment efficiency of procurement teams. Increasingly, businesses are seeking to integrate their existing tools and systems by applying a procurement orchestration layer to tie purchasing processes together.
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-to-Procure solution, 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 the tools, people, and processes are unified, they are all ‘orchestrated’ together, working both in rhythm and in harmony.
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stakeholder collaboration across tools and processes, it solves the issues of fragmented and manual processes caused by outdated legacy solutions.
The key reason businesses are looking at procurement orchestration is to add a collaboration layer for their procurement processes that increases stakeholder adoption across the company.
How do procurement orchestration layers accomplish this? Consider the numbers, which paint a picture of painfully slow, stop-and-start processes internally.
The question is: how do you manage these needs and streamline the intake and approvals processes? That is where modern procurement orchestration diverges from traditional methods.
If you’ve already adopted one or more common procurement solutions, you might have experienced one of these problems in your procurement team:
As is often the case with many employees, new procurement policies and processes are often met with resistance. In many ways, this is simple behavioral science: even when traditional methods are unwieldy or problematic, teams can be resistant to change—from executive leadership on down!
Fortunately, procurement orchestration offers so much advantage that it’s impossible to ignore.
When executed properly, how does procurement orchestration make for a healthier intake and approval process?
From the moment of purchase initiation, every manual touchpoint slows down intake and approval processes. As mentioned earlier, 27% of survey respondents said they require 10 or more approvals. It’s easy to see how a fragmented, manual process can quickly become a significant drain on efficiency.
Automated workflows and processes streamline time-consuming processes and integrate with existing systems and technologies (e.g., ERP, Procure to-Pay). Technological inertia is real—and not just limited to the procurement function.
Procurement orchestration can overcome this by integrating seamlessly with existing systems. A procurement orchestration layer works as an embedded platform on top of existing systems, unifying experience and reporting.
More data and metrics allows you to identify bottlenecks and streamline the intake process. Increased visibility also allows procurement teams to control rogue spend.
Add in AI insights that can flag duplicate vendors and also provide other opportunities for savings and efficiencies, and a predictive procurement orchestration platform can immediately demonstrate value and impact.
Procurement orchestration allows you to manage the intake process by using a ‘single front door’ for employees to make requests. This easy access point makes for a simplified user experience that lends itself toward self-service for procurement.
Just imagine if employees didn’t have to waste anyone’s time requesting help through email or Slack—just make your request at the single front door for intake, and every move is easy and fully transparent.
Working with procurement orchestration providers introduces several efficiencies to yield an optimal intake process.
These benefits include:
To be sure, there can be challenges associated with introducing a procurement orchestration layer to your intake-to-procure processes.
Legacy tools, like P2Ps and ERPs, can make implementing procurement orchestration more difficult. Some tools may use custom fields that are more challenging to integrate effectively. Others may not play well with procurement orchestration layers that offer competing functionality.
In addition, resistance to change among some procurement teams can be a challenging factor, as stakeholders may view procurement orchestration layers as yet another piece of software to complicate things.
However, it should be quickly clear that having a single source of truth unifying all of procurement increases visibility, control, data integrity, and user-experience.
How can procurement professionals get the most out of orchestration? Like any tool, you will need to know how to best use it.
Procurement orchestration best practices include:
Procurement is always evolving. As we look to the future, here are some potential trends that will impact the space:
Zip’s category-defining procurement orchestration platform makes adopting unified procurement processes easy for all stakeholders involved, at every step of the process.
With Intake powered by Zip, users can harness the power of AI-powered automations to direct requests to the appropriate stakeholders. Zip requires no training, providing a consumer-grade user experience for any employee to initiate or approve requests. Zip creates purchase requests and purchase orders at the right time, with automation and AI insights every step of the way.
Zip also offers a powerful way to streamline the approval process, automatically looping in the appropriate stakeholders with notifications at the right time for each purchase request. You can even parallel-track vendor approvals—allowing teams to work within the tools they already use—decreasing cycle times and improving the employee experience, driving adoption, and ensuring a process people want to use.
Ready to learn more? Book a demo today to find out why Zip is the procurement orchestration layer your team has been waiting for.
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