A Guide to Procurement Orchestration

What is Procurement Orchestration?

With procurement functions under pressure to move faster, operate smarter, and deliver more strategic value, organizations must rethink how they manage their procurement operations. Traditional approaches – often reliant on siloed systems and manual tasks – are no longer fit for purpose in an environment that increasingly demands speed, transparency, and adaptability.

Procurement orchestration has emerged as a solution to this challenge.

By definition, procurement orchestration involves the seamless coordination of procurement processes through integrated systems and automated workflows. It integrates and unifies fragmented processes, streamlines operations, reduces inefficiencies, and helps teams gain end-to-end visibility across the entire procurement lifecycle.  

‍“Procurement orchestration pulls the strings of the streamlined procurement process. It enables the flow of information between steps to be qualified, quick and efficient. Once a stakeholder has finished their part, they can rely on the procurement orchestration setup to carry the contract, complete and with full context, to the correct next stage without interruption, fuss or complication.” Hayden Munt, Director of Product Marketing

Key components of procurement orchestration

• Intake management – Ensures that procurement requests are captured, standardized, and routed to the appropriate stakeholders. By streamlining this initial step of any procurement cycle, companies can prevent delays, reduce errors, and ensure that requests align with business priorities.
• Automated workflows – Intelligent, no-code workflows automate procurement tasks such as approvals, routing, and stakeholder notifications. This advanced automation reduces manual effort by as much as 70%, while accelerating procurement cycles, and ensuring compliance through detailed audit trails and real-time visibility.  
• Supplier relationship management – By centralizing the management of supplier data and interactions, procurement teams can improve collaboration, transparency, and compliance.
• Contract and renewal management – A robust procurement orchestration platform will have the capabilities to ensure that all contracts are consolidated in a single repository, are easily accessible, and are proactively monitored for renewals or renegotiation opportunities. It reduces the risk of missed deadlines, non-compliance, or financial penalties, and facilitates more strategic contract lifecycle management.
• Cost control – Procurement orchestration enables cost control by enforcing budget thresholds, automating spend approvals, and offering real-time visibility into procurement spend. It helps eliminate maverick spending and ensures that purchases are aligned with financial goals.
• Data analytics and reporting – Data analytics is a crucial component of procurement orchestration, providing teams with real-time insights, including from within the workflow itself. This allows teams to track key procurement metrics, monitor supplier performance, and identify continuous opportunities for optimization. ‍
• Seamless integrations – Procurement orchestration further enables seamless integrations with any existing systems used throughout your purchasing process, including ERPs, supplier platforms, and financial systems. These integrations not only help to achieve a unified, end-to-end workflow, but they eliminate data silos, reduce manual entry errors, and improve cross-system visibility, driving greater efficiency and accuracy within the procurement process. This is made possible through the procurement orchestration layer, which sits on top of your existing tech stacks to unify data and ensure smooth process handoffs between systems.

Benefits of procurement orchestration

• Enhanced efficiency and maximum time savings – One of the biggest advantages of adopting procurement orchestration is the significant time savings it can deliver. Procurement is one of the most time-poor functions within an organization, often burdened by repetitive, manual tasks and siloed processes. By automating these tasks and streamlining workflows, procurement orchestration eliminates bottlenecks and accelerates process speed, allowing teams to dedicate more time to strategic initiatives.

See how one company accelerated their procurement cycles by as much as 55% by implementing procurement orchestration

• Improved compliance and risk management – Procurement orchestration standardizes processes to ensure compliance with both internal policies and external regulations. Automated workflows create a clear audit trail, tracking decisions, approvals, and supplier interactions. In addition to this, integrated contract management provides visibility into terms, renewal dates, and compliance requirements, helping reduce legal or financial risks while ensuring the company meets its obligations.
• Significant cost savings – Advanced procurement orchestration platforms combine spend analytics capabilities with procurement workflows, providing organizations with deeper insights into their procurement spend. This data helps improve negotiation outcomes, consolidate tech stacks, optimize utilization, and reduce maverick spending, ultimately driving significant cost savings.‍
• Helps demonstrate strategic value – Procurement orchestration goes beyond cost savings, playing a pivotal role in positioning procurement as a strategic business partner within the organization. By automating routine tasks, providing actionable data, and enhancing supplier collaboration, procurement teams can focus on higher-value activities such as strategic sourcing, risk management, and innovation. This shift enables the function to contribute directly to key business objectives, improving both operational efficiency and long-term value creation.

Signs your organization needs procurement orchestration

• Fragmented procurement processes – Lack of a standardized procurement process often results in employees procuring goods and services without the knowledge or approval of procurement, finance, or IT, which risks compliance issues and a substantial amount of wasted spend. Even when purchases are approved, decentralized procurement processes such as manual approval workflows and the use of disconnected systems create inefficiencies and hinder effective contract management.
• Lack of procurement data visibility – Lack of visibility into procurement data prevents organizations from effectively tracking spending, identifying procurement bottlenecks, and ensuring compliance. This not only results in inefficiencies, but risks missing valuable cost-saving opportunities. Procurement orchestration solves these challenges by providing real-time access to data, improving decision-making and ensuring total visibility across the procurement lifecycle.
• Manual and error-prone tasks – When processes are reliant on spreadsheets and other manual tools, the risk of human error increases substantially. From missed or delayed approvals to inaccurate data entry, these inefficiencies slow down procurement cycles and create compliance risks. By automating routine tasks, reducing manual input, and ensuring greater accuracy, procurement orchestration frees up teams to focus on more strategic initiatives.

Implementing procurement orchestration: A step-by-step guide

The successful adoption of procurement orchestration within any organization requires a structured approach that combines technology, process optimization, and stakeholder alignment. Here’s a step-by-step guide to implementing it effectively:

1. Evaluate current procurement processes

Start by assessing your existing procurement processes to identify inefficiencies, bottlenecks, and areas that are prone to manual errors or maverick spend. This can help define what a successful procurement process might look like, while clarifying the pain points orchestration should address.

2. Leverage the right technology

Choosing the right procurement orchestration tool is critical. Ideally, you should be looking for a platform that aligns with your organization’s goals, while offering the right balance of automation, visibility, and control. When evaluating platforms, it’s important to consider whether they offer a true procurement orchestration layer – capable of connecting disparate tools and providing a single source of truth for procurement activities.

Other key capabilities to prioritize include:

• Customizable, no-code workflows
• Real-time usage analytics
• In-workflow insights with comprehensive procurement benchmarking capabilities
• AI-driven recommendations
• Negotiation offered as a service
• Seamless integrations with ERP, finance, and supplier platforms

3. Implement automated workflows

Build workflows that mirror your defined procurement cycles. This is why it’s essential to opt for a platform that offers advanced automation capabilities and is entirely customizable – from intake to procure.

By automating tasks such as approvals, escalations, document routing, and stakeholder alerts, you reduce the manual effort and in turn both improve compliance and accelerate cycle times.

4. Prioritize change management

Introducing procurement orchestration involves changing how people work. Or more specifically, how they procure indirect goods and services.

By proactively training stakeholders on new systems, clearly outlining process changes, and communicating the reasoning and benefits across departments, you stand to increase user adoption and achieve long-term success.

5. Continuously improve your processes

Continuous monitoring and refining is key to effective and efficient procurement orchestration. This involves measuring performance against your KPIs, gathering feedback from stakeholders, and leveraging data to identify further optimization opportunities.

Regularly assessing workflows for inefficiencies or bottlenecks allows for iterative adjustments that improve efficiency and compliance, and deliver greater cost-savings.

Tracking the right data is key to uncovering these insights and driving measurable improvements. Key data to monitor therefore includes:

• Procurement cycle length – Tracking the time it takes from requisition to purchase. Measuring this helps identify delays, while enabling targeted improvements to streamline the procurement process, reduce waiting times, and enhance overall operational speed.
• Approval times and bottlenecks – This can pinpoint where delays are occurring in the approval process – whether in specific departments, with certain stakeholders, or during high-volume periods. According to our own data, approvals take an average of 11 days, with HR taking a week longer at 18 days.

• Spend data and budget compliance – Tracking actual spend against budgeted amounts – overall and at a departmental level – can help to ensure procurement achieves cost control. Tracking this helps identify areas of overspending, while allowing you to implement corrective measures to reduce maverick spending and enforce compliance.

Future trends in procurement orchestration

Procurement orchestration may still be a relatively new concept, but we’re already seeing it evolve in response to rapid technological advancements such as AI and machine learning, and external pressures like volatile supply chains and rising SaaS costs.

Some of the most significant trends we’re seeing include:

• Efficiency is becoming a non-negotiable

As companies continue to grapple with rising levels of inflation and heightened budget scrutiny, inefficient procurement processes are no longer sustainable. Every dollar spent must be justified, fuelling a shift towards leaner and far more transparent procurement operations.

This shift is driving demand for procurement solutions that not only offer real-time process visibility, but also actionable cost insights and data-driven spend controls – empowering teams to prevent unnecessary purchases, enforce compliance, and maximize cost-savings.

• AI, automation, and analytics are reshaping platform capabilities

As AI and automation capabilities rapidly evolve, procurement technologies are shifting way beyond transactional support. Today, procurement teams expect solutions that can offer intelligent features such as automated approvals, customizable workflows, contract intelligence, predictive insights, and benchmarking data.

• Managing supplier ecosystems is becoming increasingly challenging

As organizations continue to expand and diversify their supplier networks, vendor management becomes all the more complex to handle. For SaaS alone, the average company now uses 132 software applications – a figure that is increasing at a rate of 11% each year.

Beyond the sheer amount of time required to effectively oversee and renegotiate these contracts, overlapping functionalities and constantly shifting pricing models create even more complexity – duplicate tools, underutilized licenses, and missed renewal opportunities to name a few.

• Procurement must prove strategic value beyond cost savings

The fundamental role of procurement is expanding – from cost containment to value creation. This means procurement leaders are now expected to show how their efforts contribute not just to cost savings, but to broader business objectives such as risk mitigation, operational agility, and revenue growth. Delivering on this expectation requires more than just executing well – it demands the ability to track, measure, and communicate impact clearly and consistently across the organization.

Measuring long-term success, demonstrating ROI, and delivering strategic value with procurement orchestration

Procurement orchestration isn’t just about automating mundane tasks, it’s about creating measurable value across your procurement function.

Understanding the ROI of procurement orchestration – and subsequently using the insights to refine your processes – relies on having clear KPIs and leveraging analytics to track and demonstrate value.

Define and align procurement KPIs

Procurement KPIs serve as a critical tool for monitoring and evaluating the effectiveness and efficiency of your processes. Ensuring they align with your core procurement objectives – whether that be reducing costs, ensuring compliance, increasing efficiency, or a combination of the three – is crucial for driving continuous improvement.

We would therefore recommend:

• Identifying 3-5 high-impact KPIs
• Aligning each one with a specific procurement objective
• Reviewing and refining these KPIs quarterly to reflect shifting business priorities

‍Leverage real-time visibility

A core strength of procurement orchestration is the ability to access real-time insights directly from within a workflow. From monitoring request-to-approval timelines, to tracking budget thresholds and renewal alerts, it enables teams to measure what’s happening in the moment – enabling faster and more informed procurement decisions.

Real-time visibility into renewal timelines is not just about compliance – it’s about value. Data from Vertice shows that organizations initiating negotiations more than 90 days ahead of renewal deadlines achieve significantly better outcomes, securing 49% greater average discounts compared to those who begin within 30 and 60 days.

Embedding early-renewal triggers into your procurement orchestration layer ensures teams can act proactively and maximize cost-saving opportunities.

Demonstrate value beyond cost savings

Cost reduction is – or at least should be – a priority for any procurement function. After all, software costs are rising by 11.3% each year – a rate that far outpaces general market inflation. But cost savings isn’t the only value that procurement orchestration delivers:

• Accelerated procurement cycles
• Stronger supplier collaboration and performance
• Greater compliance and stronger risk management  
• The ability to support ESG and diversity initiatives through enhanced supplier visibility

Take a look at the 11 procurement metrics that all leading teams are tracking to measure ROI and demonstrate strategic value

Leveraging the right procurement orchestration software

Procurement orchestration is no longer a nice-to-have; it’s a necessity for any organization focused on driving efficiency, improving compliance, and delivering measurable strategic value.

But while this shift pushes procurement teams to think beyond just cost-cutting, the reality is that spend optimization remains a core priority – especially in an environment where software and operational costs are escalating beyond _. Yes, companies need a robust system in place to automate and streamline processes, but with spend quite frankly spiraling out of control, procurement leaders also require visibility into this spend, and the means to manage and reduce these costs.

Vertice is one of the only procurement orchestration software solutions that delivers both advanced orchestration capabilities paired with powerful spend management and optimization features.

Why not see for yourself how Vertice can streamline your processes and uncover cost-saving opportunities by taking a self-guided tour of our platform.