Making the business case for Intake and Orchestration tools

Intake and orchestration (I&O) solutions can transform initial customer requests and subsequent interactions for just about any business into streamlined, end-to-end, secure and transparent engagements. But these solutions are quite new to the market and as yet their definition and value is not very well understood, so it’s hard to make the case for investment.

To understand their proposition read our Buyers Guide To Intake and Orchestration solutions.

Of course, the reasons to implement these solutions and the benefits they could bring to your organization depend on the business you are in, so it’s important to hone in on what resonates best with your stakeholders. As our senior analyst noted in our recent webinar:

“… we have heard from many customers that there is no one recipe for this … everybody has their own challenges. But there are some benefits that really help make the case, like enhancing user adoption and satisfaction, and operational efficiencies, which is key for every organization. But it’s important to remember that it’s not just about making the case for your procurement organization, it’s for the whole organization. And you need stakeholder buy-in in order to align all their organizational goals and to transition to these new tools, because this is a change management topic to drive continuous improvement, not just for this one implementation, but for long term.” — Xavier Olivera, Lead Analyst, Downstream Procurement.

And as one practitioner explained for his business case:

“I actually customize my message depending on the audience. So if it’s Finance, I talk about budget, both budget visibility and spend visibility. If it’s Security, I talk about data privacy primarily; if it’s Legal, I talk about getting better in terms of having conditions more aligned with the company’s objectives, and so on.”

Watch the dedicated Intake & Orchestration analyst-led webinar with end-user Q&A, “Demystifying Intake & Orchestration in Procurement,” to hear these points in full.

Four main steps usually apply to any software business case:

• Consider the reason:

It’s important to relay why change is needed. That could involve highlighting the manual processes involved in submitting a request and how it flows downstream taking in all the ports of call required and different systems involved, the creation of errors along the way, the miscommunications, the difficulties for audit control, the extended time the requester has to wait for fulfilment and ultimately the user dissatisfaction with an arduous process. See a list of user benefits here.

• State the evidence:

You may have existing evidence that backs your reason. This could be survey results, performance reports, complaints, market intelligence from research sources like Spend Matters, evidence of long cycle times and so on.

For an example of an investment that has worked well, read this case study featuring Sören Petsch, head of procurement at end-to-end e-commerce solution Rithum, who has reaped the benefits of using his intake management tool for two years:

“I compare the time before we had the tool to where we are today. I believe that we have improved the productivity of the procurement team by about three to four times. And the measure here is the number of requests handled per person per month.”

• Create a short list of solutions:

You will need a team of the right people to define your criteria for the solution. That might include price, functionality, ease of use, etc. The right stakeholders should understand what would fit your existing tech stack, ecosystem and people.

For an outline of the core capabilities of both intake and orchestration solutions, and to see a list of potential providers, see our table Discover Intake and Orchestration Vendors.

• Recommend a solution:

Evaluate the potential providers and their solutions against your criteria (using something like Spend Matters Insider, which provides invaluable comparisons). It’s important to connect your evaluation with the original need for change. From your shortlist you should be able to recommend a solution — but Finance always needs a number, so spend time researching the right solution and provider pricing before providing that figure.

Challenges to making the I&O case

Making the case for I&O tools is more difficult than for procurement S2P suites or point solutions for a couple of reasons:

• Clearly you are competing with every other division of the company for tech resources, and you’re at a disadvantage because many firms think they already have an orchestration-type process in place — but we often find that there are several tools doing the same job, so paying just one provider would be economically advantageous. It’s also important to note that I&O solutions should not be considered by IT as an ‘extra layer,’ rather, as the I&O management specialists in our series of interviews put it:

Zip – “Rather than looking at Intake and Procurement Orchestration as a ‘layer’ on top of existing tech, it’s important to consider the intricate but fractured web of best-of-breed tools thousands of companies use across teams and systems … intake and orchestration is more than just a process layer, but the most effective way to deliver continuous improvement and value from procurement at any company, at any scale.”

Focal Point – “… it acts as a bridge, bringing together data from disparate procurement tools for clearer insights. The idea is to keep time-tested S2P tools intact while enhancing visibility and efficiency in procurement.”

Opstream – “… by implementing procurement tech, the goal is not to add more layers, but to seamlessly orchestrate the tools you’re already using for effective collaboration.”

Tonkean – “It empowers non-technical users to manage and evolve processes that span all relevant technologies and people without heavy IT involvement … Orchestration technology wraps around all your organization’s existing databases, policies and systems so you can connect and pass data back and forth between these systems seamlessly and automatically.”

• There is wide variety in how some organizations implement intake management systems in particular. Some are lifting and shifting other processes into it, like contracts or approvals. Some use the integration to monitor progress but enact the processes in separate tools rather than enabling the action in the intake system itself. The value proposition here lies in highlighting to Finance and IT how deep your integration goes, how you will shift your processes around and how that can relate to savings.

Regardless of these challenges, there are certain keywords that will resonate every time with the business …

Main arguments for the I&O solutions business case

From our outreach to practitioners who have implemented or are considering implementing I&O solutions we have gathered the following advice on how to sell their benefits to your business.

• Savings — The number-one consideration that will resonate with any stakeholder, including Finance, is savings, and in that we include more spend under management. Because the process is user-friendly for the business, they will be more open to following procurement best practices and less inclined to rogue spending. I&O solutions are all about efficiency, speed and customer communication. When Procurement is brought too late into the process, the result is lost leverage and therefore lost savings. Better intake, orchestration and proactive outreach gives Procurement the levers it needs to find the opportunities otherwise hidden to it by the very cross functional nature of the process. As one practitioner said: I/O “provides insights earlier in the requesting process to enhance customer’s negotiation leverage — these benefits alone can lead to tens of millions of dollars in savings annually.”
• Customer satisfaction — Internal users often lament procurement processes (and don’t follow them well) considering them complex and cumbersome. They have no visibility into what’s happening behind the scenes and why. Not only do intake solutions create transparency, they also achieve ‘fit-for-purpose’ guided buying, succumbing the internal user only to parts of the intake process pertinent to their requests (instead of a 100-question standard survey that all too often yields an abandoned process and rogue buying). I&O tools are a way to address that. Getting procurement involved earlier means they can make more impact. Good usability leads to greater adoption and therefore better savings opportunities for the company.
• Efficiency — When you are working across various business units with tens of different systems, all with their own approval hierarchies and processes, cycle times will be slow. A centralized intake and orchestration tool that ties it all together means execution can take place within those local systems but seamlessly — and this efficiency can better support corporate objectives. It can also help remove non-critical steps and streamline the processes overall, across involved functions (finance, compliance, risk, etc.).

• Better buying decisions and reduced risk — According to one practitioner: “If procurement makes the user’s life easier, faster, happier, that expectation is not valued as a payback calculation for Finance. So to make an investment happen you have to justify user experience and easiness, better decision making and ultimately, the prevention of risk. These are very good reasons why procurement teams need to become more data-driven and more disciplined in how they standardize knowledge capture, process, orchestration and so on.”

Other business benefits to consider for making the case

Having spoken about making the business case for these solutions with several practitioners and with the vendors that sell them, we have distilled the following tangible benefits to help you sell them to the organization:

• Ease of use — This is the main criteria buyers look for in pursuing an I&O solution. “Ease of use means far better user experience, and importantly, without completely replacing your existing tech.” … “Most employees have no direct knowledge of how the procurement process works — where to start, what steps are required, which forms or systems need to be utilized. This can lead to confusion and frustration, especially if the person who usually does this job leaves or is absent. It could lead to risk to the business if the request involves a critical vendor and it cannot be fulfilled. Intake management software makes it easy for the requester to submit the request and have it follow the correct route.”
• Improved reporting — Ease of use results in less rogue spending, which then results in improved spend visibility and leverage with your suppliers.
• Taking the load off the business — One front door for requests makes it not only easier for the user to submit a request, but “from there it is routed through all the channels, departments and platforms needed to the end of the process, saving time with follow-up queries and reducing helpdesk time and costs.”
• Improved working relationship — “With all information held in one place and automated workflows, stakeholders find it much easier to work with procurement.”“When employees don’t have a single, user-friendly point of entry into the procurement process, they either evade the process entirely or push the work onto others. This transforms the role of procurement from a strategic lever of growth and savings, into a function scrambling to manage rogue spend and risk exposure.”
• Speed — “The centralization of information and general ease of use combine to enable stakeholders, including non-procurement users, to quickly issue requests and understand the system without requiring any training or IT involvement.”“Large volumes of requests can be handled much quicker, and the visibility drives more savings – which is even more true after an M&A when volumes shoot up.”
• Central repository for legal — “All versions of a contract are uploaded in the request, so there is never a question from a legal review perspective; likewise all the information that a vendor provides about payment routing, legal and tax information, is also in the system … Reviews, such as InfoSec, and other checks aren’t carried out separately in different systems.”
• Save on admin — “The solution can be connected to e-signature software, so once marked as final, the request can be routed for signature, saving many administrative steps.” … “Without an intake-orchestration layer, procurement teams exert significant manual effort handling request triage, managing handoffs between functions and systems, pestering stakeholders for approvals, and doing tedious data entry.”
• One channel, more transparency — I&O solutions “get people out of disparate Excel spreadsheets, shared folders, email approvals, Slack channels and so on.” “Visibility of when licenses or contracts expire means the team can work proactively to handle the renewals.”
• Onboarding — “If integrated with your ERP system, new vendor onboarding (and even PO raising) are made simpler since all the information you need is in the I&O system.”
• AI — As more and more vendors incorporate AI into their solution, it will “augment the process further, for example, if someone uploads a new contract, InfoSec documents, etc., an AI can actually screen these documents and summarize them in the right language. The AI will conduct an initial check through the document to see if it’s compliant with your requirements. That augmentation would make the processes before submitting something to legal a lot easier and less time-consuming.”

To learn how one firm that has been using I&O for over two years has improved the productivity of the procurement team by three to four times, measured in number of requests per person per month, and eliminated about 75% of all emails and searches related to a request, doubling their savings each year, read this case study.

For deeper insight into how the I&O vendors perceive the benefits of their solutions, read our series of interviews.