The power orchestration play: Supplier management

Procurement has long sought a strategic seat at the table. Today, it has earned it — but at a cost. As the bi-annual Deloitte CPO Survey makes clear, expectations have never been higher. The modern procurement leader must manage risk, drive ESG, deliver cost savings and enable innovation — often without additional headcount or budget. Against this backdrop, a new model is emerging: procurement as Orchestrator of Value.

This was the focus of a webinar that took place on March 26. In it, Pierre Mitchell and Bertrand Maltaverne from Spend Matters, Piotr Pierzak from Novartis and Sudhir Bhojwani from ORO Labs explored how orchestration is becoming a strategic imperative for procurement leaders and what it looks like in practice across technology and operations.

In a landscape shaped by inflation, supply chain fragility, regulatory pressure and digital transformation, orchestration is more than a buzzword. It represents a capability shift that empowers procurement to coordinate across people, platforms and partners to deliver enterprise value at scale.

From fragmentation to flow

Organizations today face pressure from two sides: internal complexity and external volatility. Fragmented systems, siloed processes and disconnected stakeholder experiences erode procurement’s ability to deliver value. Externally, risk and compliance obligations mount, supply chains are stretched and stakeholder expectations broaden.

This fragmentation is not just operational; it is strategic. Procurement teams are spread thin and have to manage everything from basic sourcing to board-level ESG compliance. Yet, according to Deloitte, top-performing organizations (‘Orchestrators of Value’) are thriving despite this. Why? Because they are embracing orchestration capabilities to coordinate supplier facing processes across business units and functions and adding value within those orchestrated workflows.

These leaders coordinate across functions, platforms and ecosystems — building intuitive processes and unified supplier experiences that reduce friction and increase transparency. Orchestration turns procurement into an agile partner, not a gatekeeper.

As Bertrand Maltaverne noted during the webinar, “Procurement has a peculiar and special spot in companies. It’s between the inside and the outside. It’s uniquely positioned to connect internal functions with the external ecosystem. That orchestration role, across people, processes and technology, is key to delivering enterprise value. Orchestration is not just about processes and systems — it’s about helping procurement become the interface between internal stakeholders and a dynamic, external ecosystem. That’s how value gets delivered consistently.”

Orchestration: A capability, not just a platform

As Pierre Mitchell of Spend Matters emphasized during the webinar, orchestration is not a technology stack — it is a mindset. The best procurement organizations think like conductors (the CPO is, in fact, the ‘Chief Externalization Officer’) and shape demand early, engage stakeholders proactively and dynamically adjust workflows based on context and risk.

Deloitte’s study reinforces this (Figure 1). Procurement must evolve into an Orchestrator of Value by building capabilities that support cross-functional collaboration, stakeholder engagement and integrated value delivery. 

Figure 1

Source: Deloitte

Top-performing procurement teams are increasingly working with business unit leaders, functional partners and suppliers to empower their teams to become Orchestrators of Value and have everyone play the same ‘score.’ This orchestration is built upon numerous capabilities that help drive improved performance and value ranging from operating model reconfiguration, e.g., increased leveraging of hybrid delivery models, to far higher rates of digital enablement and more advanced and sophisticated talent development strategies.

Several key imperatives drive this evolution:

• Integration of stakeholder needs: Procurement interacts with multiple internal functions. Understanding and incorporating their diverse requirements ensures that procurement remains aligned with broader business goals and responsive to stakeholder priorities.
• Streamlined processes: Orchestration helps unify fragmented workflows, optimizing procurement internally and integrating it across suppliers, IT, finance and operations.
• Enhanced engagement: A centralized, orchestrated approach improves user experience by minimizing tool sprawl and providing a single access point. This simplification enhances communication, trust and adoption.
• Value generation: Beyond savings, orchestrated procurement focuses on innovation, supplier enablement and enterprise agility. It becomes a catalyst for transformation.
• Proactive demand management: Orchestration allows procurement to anticipate rather than react. With better visibility and stakeholder alignment, procurement can manage requests more efficiently, reducing risk and boosting resilience.

In short, orchestration is how top CPOs elevate performance, even amid constrained resources.

Core capabilities that enable orchestration

Orchestration begins with intake, the moment a stakeholder initiates a request. Smart intake routes work based on business intent, geography, category or risk level. It blends internal and external data to create context-aware decisions. It also delivers a guided user experience that feels more like a platform than a process.

From there, workflows adapt in real time. Policy enforcement becomes dynamic. AI suggests actions. Suppliers are engaged automatically through intuitive, CRM-like experiences. Procurement becomes invisible to the user — but indispensable to the enterprise.

These capabilities are not hypothetical. Deloitte’s survey found that Orchestrators of Value apply flexible automation twice as often as peers, and they centralize policies while allowing decentralized execution, enabling both control and agility (Figure 2).

Figure 2

Source: Deloitte and Spend Matters, Chief Procurement Officer Study, 2023

Supplier onboarding: Use case — Novartis

Nowhere is orchestration more visible than in supplier management. Onboarding is more than a checklist; it is the first handshake between a company and its supply base. Done poorly, it delays operations and erodes trust. Done well, it enables collaboration and compliance from day one.

At Novartis, supplier onboarding prompted transformation. What began as a tactical fix for risk screening evolved into an enterprise-wide orchestration layer, now handling over 90,000 requests per year. “Our supplier onboarding process used to be fragmented and confusing,” said Piotr Pierzak, Director of Strategy and Digital Procurement at Novartis. “Now, with orchestration, we provide a unified experience across 30,000 users.”

In September 2024, Novartis launched its “Supplier 360” initiative using ORO Labs’ no-code orchestration platform. This replaced legacy SIM tools with an experience-driven solution designed to streamline onboarding and maintenance while reducing risk and operational burden. Previously, business users submitted tens of thousands of supplier-related tickets handled manually by risk and vendor teams. Supplier onboarding cycle times often exceeded 20 days, and data stewards spent weeks on research per request.

Today, the onboarding cycle takes less than five days. Risk-related callbacks have dropped from 100% of updates to just 1%–2%. Supplier fraud has been eliminated. User experience scores are now consistently above 4 out of 5.

He emphasized that orchestration is not about layering new tools on top of legacy systems but designing workflows around real user needs. “We stopped thinking in terms of systems and started thinking in terms of people and their journeys,” he noted.

Supplier onboarding is a foundational process encompassing supplier certification, onboarding and data management. It often determines whether procurement gains credibility with internal stakeholders and whether suppliers experience the organization as a modern, collaborative partner. By focusing on onboarding, organizations can quickly demonstrate tangible transformation outcomes — such as faster onboarding cycles, improved compliance and greater transparency — before expanding orchestration to other processes.

Orchestrated onboarding means suppliers can self-serve, buyers get real-time status updates and governance is maintained globally. It is foundational, not peripheral.

Risk and ESG: Embedded in all activities

Traditional procurement treated risk and ESG as separate tracks. Orchestration weaves them into the workflow. Whether it’s geopolitical volatility, regulatory change or sustainability targets, orchestrated systems flag risk in real time and adapt accordingly.

A significant megatrend is shaping the evolution of supplier onboarding: the need to qualify suppliers for risk and compliance reasons even before any sourcing process begins. Supplier onboarding today is often driven by regulatory, reputational and operational risk, so it is a critical orchestration use case.

Although some consider ‘orchestration’ jargon or a buzzword, it essentially manages and governs ‘on steroids.’ In this context, ‘supplier orchestration’ becomes a necessary foundation not just for supplier relationship management (SRM) but for broader third-party risk management (TPRM). Spend is what you pay, and supply is what [value] you get — so spend orchestration cannot succeed without supplier orchestration.

This supplier orchestration layer enables cross-functional integration of GRC, ESG, IT vendor risk, supplier performance and contract compliance systems. For large enterprises with fragmented tools, TPRM represents a strategic orchestration opportunity, which is why it was highlighted so prominently in the webinar.

Deloitte found that 83% of Orchestrators make risk core to sourcing — compared to just 30% of ‘Followers’ (its term for non-leading organizations). Similarly, ESG has surged to a top enterprise priority, with procurement playing a pivotal role in tracking emissions, enforcing supplier criteria and supporting regulatory compliance.

With orchestration, ESG is not an afterthought. It is embedded in how suppliers are selected, contracts are awarded and performance is measured.

Technology as enabler: ORO Labs

ORO Labs was created in response to an important realization. Most of the most significant challenges experienced in procurement today, e.g., long cycle times and low adoption rates by business users, are symptoms of a single root cause: poor user adoption due to poor user experience and high-friction across business systems.

“When we started ORO, it was to solve what we saw as the root cause of friction in enterprise procurement: bad user experience,” said Sudhir Bhojwani, co-founder and CEO of ORO Labs. “If you fix that, you unlock adoption, speed, compliance and, ultimately, value.”

ORO Labs does not replace existing systems. It serves as the connective tissue between them. Its orchestration layer uses intelligently configured UX, dynamic workflows and integration-ready architecture to adapt to business needs. It orchestrates teams, systems and processes so employees get exactly what they need without frustration. 

This is not about digitizing forms but about abstracting complexity. ORO Labs enables LLM-powered suggestions, API-driven validations and user-first design to drive adoption. It is designed to enable procurement act with agility while maintaining control.

It also helps free procurement professionals from manually coordinating tasks and delivers visibility so everyone knows how long a process will take and the current status of a particular request. This visibility helps identify and address bottlenecks on a no-code platform built for procurement.

Using our SolutionMap methodology, we have evaluated ORO Labs thoroughly. Our criteria include core intake and orchestration concepts, such as workflow configurability and integration support, as well as adjacent use cases, such as supplier onboarding that are usually supported by an orchestration solution (whether internally or via integration).

Our analysis reveals that ORO Labs is a high-performing provider in the intake and orchestration market, and it received top analyst scores among competitors in several of the areas relevant to the Novartis story, including in supplier qualification (and onboarding) and supplier risk monitoring (Figure 3). 

Figure 3

Source: Spend Matters

The Novartis transformation cited earlier also illustrates the transformative impact of having the right technology paired with the right implementation approach. ORO Labs enabled Novartis to reframe how procurement is perceived across the enterprise — from a compliance checkpoint to an enabler of business outcomes. The solution flipped the traditional paradigm: Supplier management is now initiated by the business user or relationship owner. At the same time, smart data triggers alert the right teams (from procurement and vendor management to risk and finance) to step in at critical steps. ORO Labs handles complex, heterogeneous data from multiple ERPs and systems while shielding end-users from that complexity. This reduces friction for business users and eases the burden on data stewards and compliance owners who no longer need to navigate highly country-specific playbooks.

Conclusion: From gatekeeper to platform-based enabler

The orchestration imperative is clear, and Deloitte’s data paints a clear picture:

• Orchestrators spend more time on strategy and less on transactions.
• They adopt hybrid talent models and invest in capability building.
• They prioritize analytics and insights over manual processes.

As procurement leaders face mounting complexity and shrinking resources, orchestration offers a path forward to efficiency and enterprise impact. The top-performing CPOs are not doing more with less; they are doing better with what they have. They are orchestrating people, platforms and data to deliver value that transcends cost savings. Novartis’ journey reflects this. It has built a scalable, resilient and user-centric procurement operation by starting small, solving real pain and expanding through modular orchestration.

“We didn’t start with a grand transformation plan,” Pierzak explained. “We started by solving a real compliance need with sensitive payment validation and expanded from there.”

Orchestration is not a future vision. It is happening now. And the gap between those who embrace it and those who do not will only widen. The next era of procurement leadership will be defined not by tools but by the ability to orchestrate value at scale.

You can watch a recording of the webinar by following this link.