By Kate Jeter, Director of Field Marketing
Enterprise procurement leaders are frequently wrestling with global technology and process sprawl: policies bent by local nuances, fragmented systems, and manual effort spread across silos. ORO’s agentic procurement orchestration changes this narrative, layering intelligent, adaptive flows over existing technology and systems to automate processes and workflows that rigid legacy platforms simply cannot support.
In this edition of Inside the Implementation, we spotlight Gareth Davies, Implementation Leader at ORO Labs, based in London. With years of experience as a procurement practitioner, subject matter expert, and consultant on major platform implementations, Gareth now helps drive ORO’s challenger edge: flexible designs that adapt to client visions, not the other way around. His current project: a phased rollout to more than 40,000 users across 100 countries, demonstrates how orchestration is delivering ambitious transformation where legacy tools have historically forced significant compromise.
A Vision Ignited by Blue-Sky Design
Clients frequently engage with ORO having a considerable ambition but a less clear path, and Gareth’s current engagement with a high-maturity global organization is no exception. The company is working to reduce reliance on subjective, offline processes, and at the same time, working through a complete business restructuring with ORO as a primary partner in their business transformation, with digitalisation as a key driver.
“They have established procurement software and systems, and a mature procurement function but quite a lot remains fragmented, in different countries, and policy and process is followed subjectively,” Gareth explains.
What feels different with ORO is the initial starting point. “Coming from legacy, fixed software, where clients must adapt to the tool, the excitement with ORO is that we’re able to design around the client’s ambition” he says. Workshops began with a blank canvas: core policies and anchor points were captured first, and then enriched with inputs from interviews, case studies, and detailed technology audits.
On top of this landscape, ORO’s orchestration layer brings procurement operations to life. Natural-language intake, routing users based on factors including spend, category, and country, is configured to steer requests intelligently into the right combination of systems, tools, and teams automating policy and compliance. This kind of adaptive, cross-system design, driven by rules, policies, and agents, is only possible with ORO’s flexible, orchestration-first architecture.
“We’re guiding the buyer journey, unlocking efficiencies that had not previously been imagined, including the deployment of complex agents and automated workflows,” Gareth notes. Rather than enforcing a single global template, ORO adapts globally enabling a balance between standardization and local flexibility, while enforcing centralized rules.
Quick Wins: Prioritizing High-Impact Rollouts
For a transformation program of this scale, the scope alone can be daunting, and to avoid delays and decision fatigue, the team has focused on disciplined prioritization.
“At the start, we defined together what would be possible, and set out timeframes that focused first on delivering the highest ROI projects for the greatest number of users providing the biggest impact for the business,” he says.
The initial phase centers on a core intake-to-order experience for everyday requesters, rolled out in waves across the global organization. “The highest-touch part of ORO will deliver massive efficiency, a key lever underpinning the wider organizational change,” Gareth explains. While sourcing and more strategic workflows are being developed in parallel, this first phase ensures that a non-procurement user can describe what they need, and allow orchestration to handle routing, data validation, and integrations, removing the long, manual email chains and ad hoc approvals that characterise the current process.
Unlike point solutions, ORO’s orchestrated design behaves like a tree: a strong trunk established at the start, with additional branches and roots growing further and deeper over time as functionality is added. Follow-on phases introduce more advanced pathways and co-developed capabilities, but the core experience for the requester remains familiar. “Useres se their path expand without change management and retraining,” Gareth says. “Their inputs remain the same, and automation increases in the background.” The result is early, visible ROI, with time saved globally, and compliance enforced automatically and consistently.
Staying the Course: Focus in the Face of Expanding Scope
As the possibilities of orchestration become clearer, stakeholders naturally want to add additional functionality. Managing this enthusiasm without impacting timelines has been a key part of Gareth’s ongoing client engagements.
“We are always very clear on scope,” he says. “Once clients understand what ORO can do, it’s obvious they want to move faster and add more, but every additional piece comes with data cleansing, data sourcing, integrations, and testing, which must be accounted for.”
The team uses these expansion conversations to revisit priorities and consider trade-offs with the clients, who are eager to go live and deploy the solution. Proposed additions are thus assessed against timelines and value, and then either incorporated with clarity on impact, or scheduled for later phases. “It actually helps to keep the project dynamic, because we continue to revisit the goals and focus on what will be the most impactful for the greatest number of users” Gareth notes.
ORO’s low-code configuration model supports this approach and the team has established a robust baseline “trunk” for the initial phase; intake that guides users that “just need to buy something” through a compliant, orchestrated process, while designing branches that will introduce richer risk controls, strategic sourcing flows, and deeper integrations later. “The system grows around their needs, without requiring a new wave of change management every time a new capability is added,” Gareth says. His background as a procurement practitioner helps him to keep the team focused on the users and commitments already made, before expanding further.
Diagnosing Fragmentation: From Policies to Ground Truth
To design something truly impactful, Gareth and the team begin with a structured diagnostic approach to understand current processes and technologies being leveraged.
“Early diagnostics blends three pillars,” he explains. “Existing policies and processes, including local nuances; country interviews documenting what actually happens on the ground; and a full review of the technology landscape, with an aim for using ORO to orchestrate, not fully replace, the tech stack.”
With that foundation in place, the team runs structured workshops to map the future state. “We effectively say: What would you like this to be, and then start building it” Gareth notes. The results reflect an agreed blueprint for a full end-to-end process, broken into phased deliveries so that value can be realized early and often, while still building towards the long-term, evolving vision.
As the design matures, the role of orchestration becomes more visible. Intake experiences being parsing requests into different workflows automatically, pulling key data from ERPs and other systems, and orchestrating communication between teams. “ORO handles natural language and automates communication,” Gareth says. Instead of requests bouncing between teams and inboxes, a global spiderweb of policies and processes is routed through a single, coherent layer, allowing the organization to scale to more than 100 countries without adding proportional complexity for users.
The Rush of Automation Breakthroughs
For Gareth, the most gratifying moments come when complex logic moves from concept to reality.
“Building a global routing workflow; based on spend, category, and location, connected to the right teams and applications, and seeing it execute flawlessly, is incredibly satisfying,” he says. Watching inputs route correctly, integrations fire as expected, and manual steps disappear into orchestrated flows is, for him, the clearest expression of ROI.
Those wins can be quiet but powerful. “People get on with their jobs, rather than circling around trying to find the right contact,” he notes. In the weeks following go-live, stories from the business; about time saved, fewer handoffs, and smoother experiences, are what matter the most. The fact that end users so rarely see the complexity behind the scenes is a sign that orchestration is working exactly as intended.
Implementation as a Catalyst for Orchestrated Change
Gareth’s work illustrates what makes ORO’s implementation approach different. Rather than asking clients to adapt to rigid templates, ORO molds to the client’s vision, using natural-language intake and configurable logic to orchestrate agent-driven paths across countries and systems. Data flows without manual re-entry, policies are enforced dynamically, and new capabilities are introduced in phases that respect both ambition and operational reality.
“Seeing it work, and seeing people be able to focus on more complex problem solving instead of manual email or chat replies, is exactly what we’ve set out to achieve,” Gareth says.
With experts like Gareth leading the way, implementation isn’t just a deployment milestone, but an ongoing evaluation, uniquely powered by orchestration’s flexibility and scale.
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