How Procurement Orchestration has Captured the Imagination
Procurement orchestration seems to be the hot topic right now, with numerous platforms appearing to help businesses take control of their operations.
Such platforms were a new addition to the Gartner Hype Cycle for Procurement and Sourcing Solutions report this year and procurement orchestration is being described as a major market shifts.
ORO Labs was among those listed by Gartner as a Sample Vendor in this transformational technology.
Procurement Magazine spoke to Lalitha Rajagopalan, Co-Founder of ORO Labs, about the rise of procurement orchestration.
Tell us a bit about you and your role
I’m one of three co-founders of ORO Labs, where I serve as Head of Operations and Strategy. With more than 20 years of experience in procurement tech, including my previous role as Global Vice President of Products and Innovation at SAP Ariba, I’m a ‘procurement geek’ at heart.
I believe businesses are fundamentally about people and the key to unlocking a business’ potential is understanding their experiences and using technology to make their experiences as effortless as possible.
I’m also driven to improve diversity and inclusion in the supply chain industry, as diverse perspectives drive innovation and deliver better business outcomes. That’s a core value for me as a co-founder and it’s central to our culture at ORO, which is why we strive to make it apparent in the experiences we build into our product.
Give us a brief overview of ORO Labs
My co-founders and I started ORO Labs in 2020 in response to an important realisation: many of the longstanding issues facing procurement today – long cycle times, low rates of compliance, challenges in change management – really share a common root cause: poor user experience.
This isn’t just about disliking certain solutions; it’s not a user interface problem. It’s about navigating a complex landscape of constantly changing regulations, growing numbers of uncoordinated systems and challenges managing processes between stakeholders. The move toward democratisation has made procurement less linear and more complex, with up to 70% of processes now falling outside standard workflows. Managing that kind of complexity is just not something that traditional procurement systems were built for.
And it’s not something that suites and best-of-breed tools should concern themselves with. It’s a fundamentally different business problem that requires a fundamentally different solution and that’s what ORO Labs was built to address.
ORO is a Gen AI procurement orchestration platform that coordinates people, processes and tools so that employees get what they need without frustration. Since 2020, we’ve raised more than $60m through two funding rounds, grown to more than 100 employees and have many of the largest companies in the world among our active customers, with users in more than 60 countries.
Our customers have seen cycle times reduced from months to days, 100% compliance with procurement policies and millions saved through an orchestrated approach to fraud detection and resolution.
Why is procurement orchestration so hot right now?
I know that everyone is talking about how ‘hot’ procurement orchestration is. But I don’t think that does it justice. Describing a technology as ‘hot’ is a recipe for hype, because it tends to put too much emphasis on the solution and not enough on the problems it is there to solve.
Procurement orchestration has captured the imagination of procurement leaders around the world because it addresses a real, growing pain. Just 18 months ago, no one was really talking about procurement orchestration. You know what they were talking about? Manual processes, low rates of user adoption and compliance, uncoordinated systems and ‘swivel-chair integrations.’
Some procurement departments tried leveraging RPA to try and ease their pain, but quickly realised that bots were not long-term solutions. They were involved in procuring orchestration solutions for other departments, but those solutions were often too costly, IT-intensive and misaligned with procurement’s needs. When ORO introduced the first true no-code orchestration platform specifically built for procurement, I think it came as a breath of fresh air. Unlike many technologies that are solutions in search of a problem, procurement orchestration solves real problems and has a clear business impact.
I don't typically like using the term ‘game changer,’ but that’s really what this is. It’s allowing procurement departments to break free from the status quo and imagine a future in which they can drive business outcomes that were previously out of reach.
One of the most memorable quotes from Digital Procurement World last month: “CPOs everywhere are budgeting for procurement orchestration in 2025 and most don’t even know what it is.” Why do you think this is the case?
That’s surprising and I’m not sure if it’s still true. If it is, it won’t be for long.
It was true 18 months ago and, to be honest, vendors haven’t always been helpful in educating procurement leaders. That’s the thing about ‘hot’ technology: vendors hear a new word, believe there’s opportunity and then work to connect that new word to whatever it is that they do. The result is a lot of weak and muddled messaging that impedes innovation and adoption.
In the last year, however, we’ve seen tremendous efforts from industry analysts who have recognized the confusion and have made great strides in clarifying the market. Gartner included Intake Management and Procurement Orchestration in their 2024 Hype Cycle for Procurement and Sourcing Solutions. IDC released a new Marketscape for Spend Orchestration. Spend Matters has written a lot on the subject and is preparing to release its first Solution Map for Procurement Intake and Orchestration in spring 2025 and Ardent Partners is about to publish a thought piece on the space as well.
The work of industry analysts has been very welcome, not just as a way to ‘get the word out,’ but also to clarify definitions and help procurement leaders to understand the vendor landscape.
As 2025 approaches, we are finding that most procurement leaders we're speaking with are past the point of asking ‘what is orchestration?’ and are coming to us with specific challenges and use cases. In other words, the question is now less about ‘what’ it is, and more about ‘how do we get started?’
How is ORO Labs making sure orchestration provides lasting benefits and is not the latest five-minute trend?
In some ways, the technology and need for it will drive lasting benefits on their own. Procurement orchestration is grounded in real, existing challenges that traditional solutions weren’t built to address and it’s rooted in pain points that leaders have faced for years. Process orchestration is also not a new idea, but has been around for the last 40 years in different shapes and forms. We see it in marketing. We see it in operations. That’s why I think we’ll see widespread adoption much sooner than Gartner’s estimate of 5-10 years. Because orchestration as a concept has already been proven out in other domains, I can see a rapid acceleration toward the ‘plateau of productivity’ in a way that bypasses the ‘trough of disillusionment’ altogether.
We’re also not in this alone. An orchestration platform is a tool and, as a tool, it’s only as effective as the organisations that leverage it. Our customers – and procurement professionals in general – are incredible.
They are the ones that are delivering value to their organisations. We just provide transformative leaders with the tools and support that they need to be effective. All it takes is to hear a handful of customer stories to realise that the value of procurement orchestration is real and that we’re just beginning to scratch the surface of what’s possible.
What sort of particular application will orchestration have in procurement and supply chain management?
The easy answer here would be to say that procurement orchestration can deliver wherever there is a manual process involving multiple stakeholders and/or systems. That’s the beauty of a no-code platform built for procurement.
Specifically, however, we tend to see procurement departments orchestrating processes in a few major areas: intake management, supplier onboarding and maintenance, risk management and performance management.
Intake management is often either confused with orchestration or treated as something separate from orchestration. However, intake is simply a process that can be orchestrated like any other. It involves providing business users with a unified front door, an intuitive experience and visibility into the progress of any procurement request regardless of how many systems or sub-processes may be involved.
Supplier onboarding and maintenance involves coordinating people, processes and technologies to make it easier for suppliers to provide required information for onboarding, automate risk checks and make it easy for employees to request things like supplier extensions into new regions.
Risk orchestration doesn’t replace existing third-party risk management (TPRM) and analytics tools, but rather consolidates risk scoring into a single pane of glass so that teams can effectively triage transactions, coordinate and centralise assessments, accelerate approvals and automate repetitive tasks.
And performance management gives procurement organisations a centralised way to create, track and report on various initiatives they’re driving, whether that’s sourcing activity, efficiency projects, contracts clean ups, supplier performance reviews, etc. The important element there is global visibility and being able to analyse results.
What does the next 18 months look like for ORO Labs and what plans do you have for orchestration?
Over the next 18 months, we’re excited about building more intelligence into our platform. We think of ORO as a Gen AI procurement orchestration platform and have already released a number of AI-powered features including intent detection, category recommendations, buying channel guidance, supplier recommendations, smart PO/PR creation and smart proposal reviews.
We were also recently recognised as first in the world to earn an accredited ISO 42001 certification for responsible AI. None of these features are as ‘cool’ as being able to generate a song or a piece of art. They’re actually pretty boring. And that’s the point. We don’t want users to say, ‘I’m doing a Gen AI thing right now.” Instead, we’re using large language models transparently to create effortless user experiences.
And we’re building these features in collaboration with our customers to ensure that they aren’t just ‘cool,’ but drive significant business value. We’ve got a lot more coming in 2025, but all I want to say right now is ‘stay tuned.’
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