Evaluating Intake and Orchestration vendors: A simple 3-step guide

This content does not express the views or opinions of Spend Matters.

Selecting a software vendor is a bit like buying a car. Generally speaking, all cars do the same thing: move people and things from Point A to Point B. Yet buyers agonize over purchasing a car — with good reason. Cars aren’t cheap, and if they don’t work as advertised you’ll pay more later to fix what you might have been able to prevent in the first place.

Making smart buying decisions — both in cars and in software — is even harder in a new market. There’s new terminology to learn, in-depth comparisons between incumbents and alternatives, and hype from upstarts that make it difficult to objectively compare choices.

In procurement, this also describes the way companies often evaluate intake and orchestration solutions. While Spend Matters pegged intake and orchestration as procurement’s ‘next big thing,‘ many businesses are still in the process of ‘crossing the chasm’ from curiosity and awareness to adoption and scaling.

Intake and Procurement Orchestration RFI template

To help with this, Spend Matters has created a first-in-the-market RFI defining the components and capabilities for intake and orchestration solutions. It’s worth checking out, as it’s a monumental feat to clearly map the structure of these solutions in a rapidly changing, and growing market.

Alongside that, I’d also like to share a complementary process for digging into these solutions.

In a sense, this process can be used to assess any kind of enterprise software vendor. For our purposes in this guide however, I’ll share some specifics to look out for in intake and in orchestration vendors to help with your task at hand.

Step 1: Does the vendor have the essentials?

Start by defining your ‘must-have’ capabilities. What are you hoping to achieve with this purchase, and what essential components will deliver this result?

For intake and orchestration solutions, the essentials are everything from dynamic forms to collect request information, the workflow engine that routes info to stakeholders, approval configurations for the variety of reviews that need to occur, and the underlying integration approach that orchestrates tasks across multiple heterogeneous systems.

When you’re looking at intake and orchestration, a solution needs baseline coverage over, at minimum, the following:

• Request creation and intake management: How does the system facilitate dynamic collection and handling of procurement requests — e.g., new purchases, vendor on/offboarding, new contract requests?
• Routing and task management: How does the system push collected information to stakeholders, or define the steps to be completed, and loop in the integrated applications?
• Tracking and process monitoring: Is there a single-pane-of-glass for the whole workflow, with SLA tracking and configurable alerts for collaboration?
• Approvals and stakeholder collaboration: How does the system manage conditions for completing tasks and gather supporting information from collaboration tools?
• Integrations: Does the system have a large breadth of connections and methods for connecting? (Note: there should be options, not just a sales rep saying ‘API’ until you tune out from boredom.)
• Orchestration: Beyond the technical aspects, how does the system handle data harmonization, task handover and visibility, and automation?

If a vendor can’t meet these minimums — with proof, not just a staged demo — be wary that the solution might not deliver as expected.

Step 2: Does the vendor have the ability to serve your company type?

Just as all car buyers are different, no two companies are exactly alike. A global enterprise in financial services will have different user permissions and audit tracking requirements from a rapidly scaling tech company. The key thing here is that there are different levels of depth, even for the core areas above. Within each, there are different levels of capability that govern how well prepared a vendor is to serve your requirements. Look for foundations and flexibility, with powerful options tailored to each area, but also the ability to expose that powerfully artfully and logically, depending on your organizational needs. Look for:

• Hierarchical approvals: Can the system organize approval chains based on role hierarchy?
• Queue management: Can the system arrange approvers by role and group similar approvers into queuers or sub-queues?
• Dynamic workflow adjustment: Does the system allow for modification of live workflows to adjust for new information or exceptions without affecting other workflows?

This is just a sampling, but the features below the surface often determine how quickly you can go live and achieve value with any solution. Familiarize yourself with what these are for intake and orchestration solutions to make a smart selection.

Step 3: Can the vendor deliver long term?

Some cars are notorious for recurring issues and recalls, other brands are known for their durability and ease of maintenance. With software, you should know what you’re getting into beyond year one. Especially in procurement, many solutions deliver great value initially but risk becoming shelfware by year two when they face harder challenges.

Intake and orchestration solutions are no different. If you’ve evaluated the market, you’ve likely seen pitches around ease of use, delightful user experiences, and ease of integration. These factors are a large part of achieving success at go-live. Longer term, however, you need more than just adoption of controls.

This is where intake and orchestration start to overlap with source-to-pay (S2P). The lines are not always clear, and blur often. In fact, thoughtful integration of these areas is one of the chief origins of long-term ROI.

Consider these potential overlaps:

• Sourcing: Intake enables procurement teams to get earlier visibility and involvement in demand for spend. It not only encourages stakeholders to involve procurement earlier, but helps procurement review requests that may fly under the radar and reroute to RFx events. Early involvement can increase total sourcing savings by 5%-10%.
• Contract renewals: Many S2P or CLM repositories contain large volumes of contracts, but not necessarily all the contract metadata you’d expect. Intake and orchestration solutions are a great way to collect data about contracts up front and establish proper controls for vendor reviews and renewal decisions automatically. Based on customer experience, Zip has seen scenarios where companies claim 20% savings on contract renewals from proactively managing renewal processes via orchestration.
• Procure-to-Pay: Intake and orchestration is ultimately about enabling your end-to-end S2P process. A less understood benefit of well-executed intake is to improve the efficiency and data quality of transactional procurement. When intake works, POs work, invoice processing works, and vendor onboarding works.

In our experience at Zip, reducing manual data correction, along with a drastic reduction of the errors that derail downstream transitions, result in a 5X faster procurement process.

Always look under the hood

Having observed this process unfold firsthand with hundreds of businesses at Zip in the past year, I’ve observed recurring themes as companies discover and evaluate this new category of solutions. Many start with a basic understanding of intake and orchestration, but it takes time to see the full potential. This makes sense, given how new the intake and orchestration category is!

When teams lift the hood and really start to poke around, they see the complexity of this process at scale. It’s more than just ‘workflow’ and a ‘nice UI layer’ improving the usability — managing wise user volumes, no-code workflows, and integrating heterogeneous applications for process orchestration is anything but simple. Fortunately, the Intake and Orchestration RFI template by Spend Matters was designed to help.

Whether you’re starting to learn about intake and orchestration solutions or building your own RFI to adopt one, I encourage you to kick the tires with the above steps in mind. If you do, I promise you’ll end up with a faster, safer and more ‘spend efficient’ procurement process.

FEATURED COMPANY

Zip

Nick Heinzmann, Head of Research

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