To paraphrase Mugatu from the movie Zoolander: “Intake and orchestration. So hot right now!”
When Anuj Agarwal talks about implementation, he doesn’t start with timelines or templates, rather he starts with a simple challenge: if you take a fragmented, over-engineered procurement process and just “lift and shift” it into a new tool, you haven’t transformed anything, you’ve just made the mess digital.
As a Senior Director of Delivery at ORO Labs, Anuj leads implementations for some of the world’s most complex enterprises. Over a 25-year career that has taken him from Deloitte to SAP Ariba to his own consulting projects, he has seen nearly every version of large-scale procurement change: the monolithic ERPs, the waterfall programs, the endless current-state mapping exercises that never quite deliver on their promise.
He joined ORO, he says, because he wanted to do it differently, and at speed.
From Mapping the Mess to Designing the Future
When new customers first sit down with Anuj and the team, they often arrive with a similar expectation: weeks or months spent documenting every detail of the current process before anything changes. For Anuj, that’s one of many things that needs to change.
“The first thing I resist is the urge to map the exact current state,” he explains. “If we try to do that, we’ll be sitting with them for months, and all we’ll have done is digitize today’s problems.”
Instead, he starts with three simple questions:
- What is the enterprise really trying to achieve?
- What are the opportunities for quick wins?
- How will procurement work in the future?
That shift may seem subtle, but it’s fundamental. The goal is not to migrate an existing process, but to design a better one. Rather than spending time documenting every exception path and workaround, ORO focuses on outcomes and uses working software with playback sessions to help customers discover the optimum path quickly.
Implementation as a Mindset Shift
This approach also requires a different mindset from the customer. Many of the organizations Anuj works with have spent years in waterfall programs, where nothing has moved or changed until everything is specified.
“There’s a real mindshift required,” he says. “Customers are used to having every step specified before they even touch the system. We’re asking them instead to see what we build - in real time, provide feedback, and iterate together in an agile working session.
ORO structures early implementation around a pre-established rhythm:
- Understand the lifecycle of requests, pain points, and the biggest process gaps. Establish the target outcomes and leadership vision.
- Lock in the functional design and begin integrations. Start putting real flows in front of users, especially around intake and contracting.
- Deliver an MVP-plus go-live, not a theoretical design. Use real data, real scenarios, and iterative demos so stakeholders can see and refine the future state before it becomes the new normal.
For one large financial services customer, this approach translated into a live, working solution in just three months, complete with an intake layer, risk workflows, and integrations into their existing stack. The team, Anuj recalls, were “stunned” by how quickly they could see and touch a new way of working.
Fragmented Systems, Unified Experience
Most of the enterprises Anuj works with share the same structural challenge: fragmentation. Legal operates in one system, risk in another, procurement in a third, finance in a fourth. Each team has its own forms, its own definitions, and its own way of asking the same questions.
“The fragmentation is paramount,” he says. “Processes were designed in isolation, owned by different teams in different systems. There’s no real connectivity. The user experience suffers because people are left to navigate all that complexity on their own.”
ORO’s answer is orchestration rather than replacement. Instead of ripping out existing tools, the platform sits on top of them and connects the journey end-to-end.
- A unified intake experience, where users can submit a request once without knowing which teams or systems will be involved.
- An orchestration layer that fans out the request to legal, risk, procurement, IT, or finance in the right sequence or in parallel, based on rules.
- A single view of progress and ownership, so requestors no longer have to chase multiple teams for status.
Anuj describes this in very human terms: “The key is to find the moment of handoff, when one team’s output becomes another team’s input. On the back end, that’s integration. On the front, it’s just a seamless handoff. The user submits, and the system takes care of routing to the right experts with the right context.”
That framing is important when working with teams who worry that a new platform might threaten their existing systems or ways of working. Anuj is careful to stress that ORO isn’t arriving to replace everything. It’s arriving to make everything work together.
Designing for “Aha” Moments
One of the most powerful outcomes of this approach is what Anuj calls the “aha” moments. These are the points in an implementation where a stakeholder suddenly sees a better way of working - and can’t imagine going back.
A few of those moments come up again and again:
- Realizing that one simplified form can replace multiple, conflicting intake processes owned by different teams.
- Seeing that the same supplier details no longer have to be collected by three different groups at three different times.
- Watching a live demo of an end-to-end journey; intake, risk, contacting, onboarding, running off their own data, instead of just static slides or generic screenshots.
“These moments aren’t accidental,” Anuj notes. “We design the implementation to create them. When a customer sees the system orchestrating across different teams, systems which they themselves rarely interact with, that’s when it dawns on them the Art Of Possible.”
AI as the New Front Door to Procurement
Looking ahead, Anuj sees procurement shifting from a process executor to an intelligent layer sitting across the enterprise. Orchestration provides the structure, but AI is increasingly becoming the interface.
ORO’s AI experience is built around natural language; instead of choosing from long lists or navigating multiple portals, users simply describe what they need:
- I need to onboard a new software vendor.
- We’re renewing a marketing agency.
- We need catering services for an event.
The system interprets the intent, identifies the right path: intake, legal review, risk assessment, onboarding, purchase requests, and guides the user through it. The same agentic capabilities can run in the background for leaders, assembling and executing executive summaries, budget views, or risk insights that previously required pulling data from multiple systems.
For Anuj, this is the logical next step in the journey he’s been on for two decades: from manual disconnected processes to orchestrated workflows - and now to an experience where users can simply state what they want to achieve and let the system handle the complexity.
“People are used to clicking and selecting,” he says. “Now they’ll be typing what they need and getting guided responses. That’s a massive change in how procurement will work.”
Implementation as Proof that a Better Model Works
In many ways, Anuj’s work is where ORO’s product vision is tested and proven. It’s one thing to talk about orchestration and AI, but another to sit with a fragmented, legacy-heavy enterprise and show, within just months, that procurement can be simpler, more connected, and more intelligent.
That’s what makes this conversation different from typical implementation stories. It isn’t just about getting to the go live. It’s about using implementation itself as a vehicle to redesign how procurement operates, and giving teams the confidence to leave old patterns behind.
Want to learn about how ORO can transform procurement at your organization? Book a demo with one of our experts.
By Kate Jeter, Director of Global Field Marketing
Kate Jeter is a strategic B2B procurement tech marketing leader 25+ years of experience specializing in field marketing, events, and demand generation for SaaS and enterprise platforms. Before ORO, she was the Head of Marketing, Community, and Growth at ProcureTech. She is an expert in aligning marketing and sales for revenue acceleration, pipeline growth, and global brand positioning.
