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.

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.

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.

Create Harmony Across Your Procurement Process

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.

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stakeholder collaboration across tools and processes, it solves the issues of fragmented and manual processes caused by outdated legacy solutions.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 Orchestration – What You Get

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.

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. onboard a new supplier, initiate a renewal, request a NDA etc.

The intake management process typically involves the following steps:

• Receiving requests: Procurement requests can vary in nature, requiring a user-friendly single front door interface for all employees
• Qualifying requests: Once a request is received, it is important to qualify it to ensure that it is legitimate, and that the organization has the budget and resources to fulfil it.
• Prioritizing requests: Not all requests are created equal. Some requests may be more urgent than others, or they may have a greater impact on the organization’s bottom line. It is important to prioritize requests so that the most important ones are processed first.
• Automated workflows: Once the requests have been assessed, automated workflows ensure that that the requests are handled quickly and in-line with company prolicies, driving compliance and reducing timeframes.

Introducing ZIP’s Procurement Orchestration Platform

Zip’s market leading procurement orchestration solution brings every stage of the purchasing process onto one, flexible platform, as well as providing a single source of truth for vendor information, contracts, POs, invoices, and more. Organizations get more spend visibility and employees enjoy a simple, transparent process for requesting purchases.

It offers out-of-the-box integrations for dozens of critical SaaS tools like Slack, Jira, and IronClad, as well as deep, customizable integrations for leading ERPs, Source-to-Pay and Best-of-Breed applications, supercharged with embedded AI capabilities.

Key components:

Kick-Start Your Transformation With a Procurement Orchestration Diagnostic

With your Procurement strategy in place, the best place to start is by taking the pulse of your current procurement platforms, processes, and workflows to help you determine its fitness for the future and to assess how procurement orchestration could provide a more automated and user-friendly solution.

Our Procurement Orchestration Diagnostic is a comprehensive independent assessment. It evaluates and provides recommendations as to how well your existing approach supports both your procurement strategy and engagement across the business.

Using a combination of workshops, interviews, and system analysis, it is a comprehensive review that not only incorporates solution and process design, but also user adoption and future scalability.