Why Zip is a Leader in Intake & Orchestration

By solving procurement’s critical "front-door" problem, Zip have introduced an intelligent employee interface that unifies data, mitigates risk and streamlines approvals across heavily fragmented enterprise legacy systems.

For decades, enterprise procurement has suffered from a fundamental UX flaw: the "front-door" problem. When an ordinary employee wants to request a new software tool, order marketing assets or onboard a vendor, they are instantly met with a confusing maze of fragmented systems. ERPs, contract management databases, IT ticket queues and legal frameworks rarely talk to one another. The result is a broken user experience, rogue spending and massive compliance risks.

Enter Zip.

As the pioneers of the "Intake & Orchestration" category, this platform act as an intelligent orchestration layer. Instead of forcing employees to navigate rigid legacy software, it ingests complex user requests, instantly cross-reference data across existing tech stacks, assess vendor risk and route parallel approvals, all through a single, intuitive interface. As the market enters a definitive era of AI-driven automation, Zip has rapidly scaled to a category-defining juggernaut.

In late 2025, Zip crossed the US$6bn mark in customer savings, processing hundreds of billions in spend across a network of over 7 million suppliers. Amid economic uncertainty, supply chain volatility and the rise of AI, market leaders like OpenAI, Dollar Tree and Mars have adopted Zip’s agentic AI platform to drive efficiency, collectively saving billions of dollars and reclaiming millions of days in productivity.

"What began as a simpler way to start a purchase has grown into a full procurement operating system," says Rujul Zaparde, Co-founder and CEO of Zip.

"This year, we introduced agentic procurement orchestration – not just a new term and category, but a new way of thinking about how AI can transform every aspect of how companies purchase. The results speak for themselves: US$6bn saved, 10 million days of cycle time eliminated and procurement finally emerging as a board-level priority."

Forrester validates the orchestration model

While the conceptual benefits of procurement orchestration are clear, a recent Total Economic Impact (TEI) study conducted by Forrester Consulting has put definitive numbers behind the phenomenon.

Evaluating Zip’s impact on global enterprises, the study revealed that the platform delivers a staggering 386% Return on Investment (ROI), with the software completely paying for itself in under six months.

Forrester’s findings outline a dramatic shift in how modern enterprises manage cash flow, efficiency and compliance. By bringing more spend under management and establishing centralised orchestration, enterprises achieved an average 3.3% reduction in overall spend.

At the same time, the combination of intuitive intake and automated routing allowed organisations to realise an average 70% reduction in the time spent submitting and approving procurement requests.

This shift to a single orchestration layer with no-code workflow maintenance significantly cut IT overhead, drastically reducing internal change requests and ongoing operational friction.

Frictionless operations at T-Mobile

Take, for example, T-Mobile. The sweeping initiative to transform its procurement was driven by a singular executive mandate: simplify the business. Prior to partnering with Zip, T-Mobile navigated legacy ERP and procurement systems that were reaching their end of life, relying on a homegrown orchestration tool that lacked integration between procurement, legal and the ERP. This friction resulted in bottlenecked service level agreements (SLAs) that frequently stretched past thirty days.

This bottleneck sparked a philosophical shift under Chief Procurement Officer, Michael Levenson. The core philosophy guiding the transformation was to make procurement entirely frictionless for repeatable, everyday buys. By automating routine intake, specialised procurement staff could step away from administrative tasks and focus on high-value, complex deals.

Michael emphasised listening to team members at all working levels to distil actionable change. “It’s simplifying things for the business, making sure that we have procurement focused on the deals that bring value and benefit to teams.”

This execution is a microcosm of a much broader market shift. As Rujul noted at its Zip Forward event in London: “Our customers to date, having deployed over a thousand agents into production in their Zip environments, have seen over 800,000 hours saved and over US$59m of cost avoidance and savings.”