ORO has added Smart Procurement Workflows to its procurement fabric. The new solution is targeted at assisting large enterprises with existing procurement issues and fast-growing mid-sized companies that need to scale procurement.
With supply chains more disrupted than ever, the new workflows aim to assist organisations through their challenges. Importantly the solution enables employees within the organisation to make more purchasing decisions compliantly. The announcement came on the first day of the NetSuite SuiteWorld 2022 event in Las Vegas.
Sudhir Bhojwani, ORO co-founder and CEO, commented: “My big realization while leading the product team at SAP Ariba was how much of business-critical purchasing is still manual, before requisition. For mature procurement organizations, this could still be 30-40% of the spend, and for mid-sized companies, it could be as high as 60-70% of the spend. We started ORO to make it easier and faster for business users to engage with procurement and other stakeholders to deliver business results fast.”
What is ORO
The ORO platform is built for NetSuite, and this is the first events it is attending as emerges from stealth. It is so new that product details are currently absent from its site. However, there is more information about its Procurement and Supplier platform in its SuiteApp entry.
The platform delivers users with a supplier management platform that the company describes as a CRM system for suppliers (perhaps Supplier Relationship Management might be a term to use). With readily available details, ORO should consider updating their homepage with more information.
The platform delivers an end-to-end supplier management platform. It is built on a no-code/low-code platform that is now opening up for customers to build their own workflows. The solution includes a real-time integration with NetSuite to ensure that supplier information is updated in real-time. The in-built processes automate much of the onboarding process and include the ability to collect supplier documents, share scope details, and trigger real-time risk verification checks for AML, OFAC and other debarred lists.
The workflow process designer enables users to create workflows for approvals, review and document collection. It integrates into a forms builder that users can customise. There is also support for integrations to third-party solutions, though ORO does not declare which ones.
Early Adopters seeing benefits
ORO is already in use in several companies. One, Optimizely, whose CEO Alexander Atzberger is a non-exec Director at ORO, sees the benefits of using the platform.
Radhika Samant, VP of Finance and Head of Global Procurement at Optimizely, notes, “Our stakeholders were getting increasingly frustrated with a system that did not recognize the differences between marketing, software and other purchase flows. This was causing a large part of the work to happen outside of our existing spend management platform, impacting agility and causing significant duplication in effort.
“ORO helped us build custom purchase flows within a centralized system, allowing us to take into account the unique purchasing needs of each department. It provides visibility to all stakeholders, enables collaboration and makes it easy to make timely decisions. The simple UI drives a smart workflow, and the supplier information is right there. This shortens time to purchase and ensures we buy only what we truly need at an optimal price.”
Oro identifies five key benefits of its platform:
- Provide an incredibly easy-to-use procurement front-end for business users.
- Bring clarity and visibility into the end-to-end process for all stakeholders.
- Reduce the time and manual effort to onboard and work with suppliers.
- Give budget owners and finance view into up-to-date spend pipeline and commitments.
- Scale operations to meet legal, compliance, finance and regulatory requirements.
Supplier Management platforms are in vogue
Supplier Management platforms such as ORO are emerging everywhere. What is interesting about ORO is how they have approached the task from an enterprise perspective. However, they have also built a platform suitable for the mid-market. The growing challenges faced by procurement and the importance of the supply chain means organisations must invest in such platforms
Lalitha Rajagopalan, ORO co-founder and Head of Strategy and GTM, commented: “Today, employees pick the supplier, after which it still takes weeks to complete the supplier onboarding. The process may be stuck waiting for legal or IT or security to approve but the procurement team gets blamed by all.
“The result is awful NPS scores for procurement, and very frustrated employees who cannot get what they need to do their jobs. Simply put, in modern organizations, procurement is a more collaborative process with the supplier and many stakeholders. Legacy procure-to-pay systems are not designed to do this.”
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
ORO is not the only supplier management platform attending SuiteWorld; Sourceday is another. Several Accounts Payable solutions come with a different approach but include elements of supplier management, including Tipalti and MineralTree. Gatekeeper approaches the challenge from a contractual perspective. There are other platforms in the wider ecosystem, such as Vizibl. It is a competitive market for ORO, and it will need to find a suitable niche to succeed.
An approach that relies on delivering flexibility through its workflow and low code platform may give it that market niche. It should also partner with CLM, Payments and AP Automation vendors or risk being sidelined. It should also update its website to provide far more information than it does currently. ORO has emerged, ironically, at an Oracle NetSuite event rather than an SAP event, where most of its leaders once worked.
