Transcript 0:00 Your stakeholders hate your procurement process. They're not mildly annoyed, they actively avoid it. They put things on corporate cards and expense them later. 0:10 They sign contracts without telling you and send the invoice to accounts payable. If this describes you, hot take, for the most part, they're not wrong to do that. 0:20 Following a process characterized by red tape means jumping through disconnected systems, filling out forms that ask for information that nobody has yet, waiting weeks for an approval that takes five minutes of actual human attention, and never knowing where a request stands and when you're gonna get answers. 0:38 Operations have to operate, and so they end up routing around you to get things done if that's what it takes. A whole category of software now claims to fix this. 0:48 It's called procurement intake and orchestration, and every vendor in procurement has an I&O story. So today, what it is, where it fits in your stack, and when you don't need it at all. Let's get into it. 1:01 Technology presumes there's just one right way to do things, and there never is. AI will do what you tell it to do, but that may be very different from what you had in mind. Computers are useless. 1:13 They can only give you answers. For a list of all the ways technology has failed to improve our quality of life, please press three. 1:24 Welcome to ProcureTech Unpacked, the show for procurement professionals who want to master the technology shaping our function. I'm Joel Conin-Demers. I've written about intake and orchestration a few times before. 1:37 Let's start with the symptoms because you will recognize them. Maverick spend that shows up in your analytics months after the fact. Email tennis between requesters, approvers, and buyers that eats hours from your week. 1:51 Requests stuck in someone's inbox while the stakeholder assumes you're ignoring them. 1:56 Shadow IT purchases that skipped procurement and InfoSec because it was easier to do so, and the same supplier getting onboarded twice because nobody knew the first request was already in progress. 2:08 If this sounds like stuff you experience, that's not a training problem. You can't train your way out of broken processes and fragmented systems. But it's not purely a technology problem either. 2:19 It's a user experience problem. There's a gap between how and where procurement w- wants requests to arrive and how requesters actually carry out their work. 2:30 That gap is what I&O vendors are selling into, so let's look at what they're actually selling in three parts. Part number one, two capabilities, one label. 2:42 Intake and orchestration is two different capabilities sold under one name. They get bundled because both deal with how procurement work flows through an organization, but they solve different problems. 2:54 On the one hand, intake is the front door. 2:57 It's the single place where stakeholders submit a request for whatever they need, a new software license, a contract renewal, onboarding a new supplier, or getting a disputed invoice resolved. 3:09 Intake is about the requester experience. The goal is to make the right process the path of least resistance, easier to follow than to get around. 3:19 Good intake captures structured and s- unstructured information upfront from requesters. 3:25 It guides the requesters to a high-quality, complete request before routing it to procurement without the need for extensive training. It sends it to the right workflow without a requester or buyer triaging it by hand. 3:40 And it meets people where they already work in messaging apps like Slack or Teams or in email instead of sending them to yet another portal that they have to find on the intranet. 3:51 Orchestration, on the other hand, is the glue. It's what happens after the request comes in. 3:56 The right steps in the right order across whatever systems and teams the request has to touch to get to completion, whether it's your ERP, your CLM, your procure-to-pay suite, your risk tools, your supplier portal, whatever. 4:10 Orchestration is about process coherence. It automates the handoffs so nobody rekeys data from one system to another. It applies your business rules the same way every time. 4:21 And when the process changes, you change the workflow without having to rebuild integrations between systems from scratch or having to retrain everyone. 4:31 So intake collects high-quality requests that procurement can actually work with, while orchestration makes sure that it follows the right process end to end. 4:41 The distinction matters when you shop because some vendors are stronger on intake, the requester experience, AI-assisted request handling, while others are stronger on orchestration with deep out-of-the-box integrations, complex workflow logic, and 4:56 of course, a few do both very well as well. You should know which problems you're attempting to solve before you build your shortlist. Part two, where it fits in your stack. 5:10 Whether I&O pays off for you depends on what you're already running. So let's look at three architecture archetypes to illustrate what I mean. 5:19 First scenario, you try to run a single source-to-pay suite as your main procurement system. Most of your processes live there. Here, I&O gives you a friendlier front door over a complex interface. 5:31 It can also stretch workflows into legal, IT security, finance, and risk systems that sit outside the suite. But you're paying for a better re- experience, not necessarily a new capability. 5:44 If your suite's native intake works and adoption is strong, another layer adds complexity without much to show for it. Second scenario, a hybrid. A suite is the foundation plus point solutions. 5:56 You've got spend analytics, supplier risk, contingent workforce management, maybe a separate CLM, SaaS management tools, maybe two different suites working in two different regions of your business. 6:07 This is the sweet spot. I&O becomes the system of engagement. The user talks to the front door, a single one, and the orchestration layer decides which system handles what underneath. 6:19 The stacks are hard for users to navigate and hard for you to administer, and so orchestration fixes both of these issues. Third scenario, best of breed with no suite. 6:31 A sourcing tool here, a CLM there, a P2P somewhere else, maybe something homegrown. Here, uh, orchestration is infrastructure. 6:39 It's the only thing that's gonna tie your ecosystem together and the only way to enforce consistent rules and see requests end to end. 6:47 The question as or-- isn't whether you need something like this, it's which one and how fast can you implement. 6:53 Some INO providers now cover sourcing, CLM, and supplier management functionality themselves, so you might be able to skip the suite entirely. There are definitely more scenarios out there. 7:04 Most complex organizations don't fit neatly into one of these three molds, but I wanted to share them with you to serve, uh, as a good starting point for reflection. Part three, when you need it and when you don't. 7:18 Not every procu- not every procurement team needs a dedicated INO solution. Here are five signs that you do. Number one, adoption is bleeding you dry. Spend under management is stuck and maverick spend keeps climbing. 7:31 Stakeholders bypass you as a habit. Number two, your stack is a maze. A simple purchase request touches three systems and four handoffs. 7:41 Number three, your buyers spend more time triaging requests and chasing approvals than doing procurement work. Number four, you're the air traffic controller between legal, IT, security, finance by hand on every deal. 7:56 Number five, an executive asks you how long it takes to process a purchase request end to end and you do not have the data to answer. Now, three signs that you might not need this. 8:07 Number one, your suite works, adoption is strong, stakeholders are reasonably happy, native workflows cover your needs. You don't add complexity for its own sake. Two, your processes are the problem, not your systems. 8:20 An approval matrix nobody can explain, unclear policies, undefined roles. INO won't fix that. It gives you a faster way to route requests, but into the same broken approval matrix or ambiguity. 8:34 Fix the ambiguity and the process first, then you might be able to turn to INO to help you achieve execution on that. And then number three, you can't commit to integration work. 8:46 INO only delivers value when it's connected to, connected to other systems. No IT capacity for integrations means a shiny front door that opens onto a brick wall. 8:57 And one more objection that I often hear is, "Hey, we'll build intake ourselves. We j- we h- we already have insert generic tool here." And the math looks good until you realize building isn't the one-time cost. 9:10 It's a permanent job. Requirements are gonna change, APIs are gonna break, and the person who built it leaves. 9:16 And so a vendor spreads that cost across hundreds of customers and ensures that, uh, you're supporting for continuity. But custom workflows on a built-- a purpose-built platform, absolutely. 9:29 That's actually the whole purpose of intake and orchestration, right? Giving you flexibility, but in a standard way. 9:36 But if you're building the platform itself, that's growing your own coffee beans because coffee seems ex-expensive. Part four, the category is disappearing. 9:46 One last thing changes how you should evaluate all of this because INO, yes, was a new category, but what we're witnessing is that INO, intake and orchestration, and source-to-pay suites are converging. 9:58 INO vendors are moving downstream, so what started as intake forms and workflow routing now includes sourcing, contract management, supplier management, and even procure-to-pay and accounts payable functionality in some cases. 10:10 They're not only orchestration oth- they're not only orchestrating other systems anymore, they're building the processes and the functionality themselves on the orchestration layer. 10:21 And the suites heard the complaints about their user experience as well. Most if not all of them have come out with their own flavors of intake and orchestration. 10:31 So a year or two from now, I don't think we'll talk about INO vendors and source-to-pay vendors as separate categories, just end-to-end procurement platforms with different strengths, different weaknesses, different origins. 10:45 And that has four consequences for your evaluation. Don't assume that you need both a suite and an INO layer. 10:52 You can increasingly put them head to head according to the business capabilities that you need, and if you've already got a system, you might be able to ask the vendor for what their offering is around these capabilities. 11:04 Judge vendors on trajectory, not only on today's demo. Where are they investing? How well are they funded? And do they have a track record of execution? 11:13 You might have the capabilities that you need by the time you implement the base, the foundations. 11:19 Number three, decide explicitly between a thin orchestration layer over best-of-breed tools and a single end-to-end platform. Both are valid choices, but they're different choices. And watch out for lock-in. 11:32 Every module that you add raises your switching cost because it becomes more and more like an end-to-end suite, so choose that path on purpose. So what is intake and orchestration really? 11:43 Intake is a front door that makes the right process the easy one. Orchestration is the glue that carries a request through every system and team it has to touch to get to completion. 11:54 These technologies won't fix a broken process or an unclear policy. They magnify them. 12:00 But if your stakeholders route around you, if your stack only makes sense to the people who built it, and if your buyers spend their weeks chasing approvals, it can certainly help. 12:09 But before you talk to a single vendor, you need to answer one question. Is your problem the fun- front door, the glue, or something else entirely? 12:17 I've written the full intake and orchestration guide in the Pure Procurement Newsletter, including a vendor shortlist for enterprise and seven questions I'd ask every INO vendor before signing anything. 12:29 The link is gonna be in the show notes. That's it for this one. See you next time. [upbeat music] That's a wrap on this episode of ProcureTech Unpacked. 12:37 If you enjoyed this one, give us a follow on your podcast app and sign up for the Pure Procurement Newsletter for more on how to help you make better procurement technology decisions. 12:47 Every resource we referenced today is linked in the show notes. You can also leave us a review on your podcast app. It takes 30 seconds, and it helps us more than you know. 12:57 As always, a big thanks to our production team over at Resonate Recordings for making us look and sound good. I'm Joël Conné De Messe. See you next week.
