As we step into 2026, procurement stands at a clear inflection point.
Every procurement transformation looks brilliant on a slide.
Clean future-state architecture. Harmonized processes. Legacy systems that have politely disappeared. AI everywhere it should be. And in the bottom-right corner, an arrow pointing confidently at 2029.
Then you sit down with an actual procurement team.
Supplier onboarding is broken and needs fixing this quarter. Invoices still land in a shared inbox. A category team has built a workaround nobody will admit exists. Three regions run three versions of the same policy. The ERP migration is underway, and it’s going to take a while.
And the business wants all of it solved before 2029. Ideally before Friday.
“I need to hire a market research agency.”
P2P systemService procurementERPEmail to procurementLegal intake formIT service deskRisk questionnaireSpreadsheet tracker
That gap, between the roadmap and the reality, is where I spend most of my time both with customers and in discussions with prospects, even as part of an RFP cycle.
But this is exactly why our news with SAP matters more than the average partnership announcement.
What we actually announced
ORO Labs Intake & Orchestration is now an SAP Solution Extension. Sold by SAP, on SAP paper, as the intake and orchestration layer for procurement. Available now.
“Partnership” is one of the most overused words in enterprise software, so let me be precise.
Plenty of vendors have a logo on a partner page. A Solution Extension is a different level: deeper, SAP-supported integration across current and next-generation SAP and Joule, and a decision SAP made after an extensive assessment of the market.
The simplest way I can put it: Joule is the front door. ORO is the brain behind it. Someone asks for what they need, and ORO works out the intent, applies the policy, and drives the request to completion across SAP and everything else the enterprise runs, with agents doing the work and people stepping in where judgment matters.
How it fits togetherAsk Joule once. ORO routes it across every system.
Every employee
FinanceEngineeringOperationsLegalITMarketing
Front door
Natural language intake, in the flow of work
Natural language intake, in the flow of workOrchestration
Agentic procurement orchestration, across every system
Agentic procurement orchestration, across every systemPolicyRoutingApprovalsAI agentsVisibility
NativelyAribaS/4HANAMDGFieldglassBusiness Network
Everything else you run
Other ERPsOther S2P suitesDocuSignIcertisSalesforceProcessUnityCustom tools
Available now on SAP MarketplaceOn SAP paper from Q4 2026One contractOne support model
The business isn’t waiting for the transformation roadmap
The time I have spent with the SAP Team notwithstanding, I’ve also been spending a lot of time recently working directly with customers leveraging our newly deployed ORO Studio.
The premise is deliberately simple: bring us a procurement problem and we will fix it live, in hours not weeks.
Not a requirements document. Not a perfectly mapped future-state process. The actual messy problem.
We sit down with the team, talk through what’s broken, turn that conversation into a workflow, and see how quickly we can get from “here’s the thing driving us mad” to “here’s how this could actually work.”
The problems people bring are revealing…
1
Sourcing · Rate validation
One of our customers wanted to help their sourcing team validate rates on proposals. They felt that the manual vlookups should be automated to save time. When we threw our Architect Agent at the problem, through ORO Studio, what we found was that actually the core rate card master data was not always accurate, with multiple rate cards even for the same vendor. Not only did we automate the process in our design, but we also simplified and identified gaps in data.
2
Roche · Invoice intake
Roche brought us an invoice intake problem, whereby they receive over 1M emails per year across 200 mailboxes and right now people have to triage what is a query versus what is an invoice and then route accordingly. When we gave the problem to ORO Studio, the Design Studio instantly amended the flow to only have a single inbox, and suggested an agentic workflow to triage, answer questions and route invoices – matching them to a PO where possible – into the flow. A wholesale simplification and delivery. (You can see this example on the ORO Studio website).
3
Contingent workforce
A customer was finally able to get all of their Contingent Workforce stakeholders in a room. HR, IT, Procurement, Finance, Risk… all around the same table. They spent 2-3 hours describing the problems and the issues they faced. Through a transcription of this conversation fed into ORO Studio, the process was designed, the Intake Agent for triaging Worker Type was built and all the controls around budget, risk and background checking were carefully orchestrated and demoed live.
Nobody has ever opened one of these sessions by asking me for “an agentic orchestration architecture.”
They ask:
-
Why does this take three weeks?
-
Why are six people touching this?
-
Why does the requester need to know which system to use?
-
Why can’t we change this without opening an IT project?
Those are much better questions. And none of them get answered by a go-live date three years out.
The problem isn’t the applications. It’s the gaps between them.
Enterprise technology has trained us to think in one direction: something isn’t working, so replace something.
Sometimes that’s right. But most of what I see isn’t caused by one bad application. It’s caused by the space between perfectly reasonable ones.
The gap – as I have said in prior articles – is in the seams.
- The handoff between procurement and finance.
- The risk check that happens somewhere else.
- The approval living in another workflow.
- The supplier data sitting in another system.
- The policy someone has to remember to look up.
- The email that kicks the whole thing off.
Replacing a system fixes none of that. Orchestrating across them does.
That’s the real story of this announcement with SAP. It isn’t a technology partnership so much as an acknowledgement of how enterprise transformation actually happens: you don’t get to stop the business while you modernize the architecture.
Your ERP roadmap and your business roadmap are not the same roadmap
Large organizations will keep modernizing their core systems. They should. But those programs run on a very different clock from the problems procurement is being asked to solve.
Your SAP transformation might be a multi-year journey but the supplier onboarding problem needs fixing this quarter.
Your AI strategy is still taking shape, but the business user who can’t work out where to submit a request has a meeting in ten minutes.
These things coexist. “Wait until the transformation is finished” is not an answer. It’s a delay with a slide deck.
““Wait until the transformation is finished” is not an answer. It’s a delay with a slide deck.
Chris Vessey, ORO Labs
Orchestration gives you another option. It works across the environment you have today (SAP, third-party applications, legacy systems, specialist tools, people and, increasingly, agents) while that environment keeps changing underneath.
One request, end to end
We need new plant machinery for the Leeds site.
Got it. This needs a sourcing event, a risk check, and a capex approval. I’ve started all three and will keep you posted here.
- 01Capture intent and classify the requestJoule
- 02Apply policy and plan the workflowORO Labs
- 03Run supplier risk screeningRisk tool
- 04Launch the sourcing eventSAP Ariba
- 05Capex approval by the finance leadHuman approver
- 06Sign the contractDocuSign
- 07Create the purchase orderS/4HANA
- Track status across the lifecycle
And because ORO sits above the systems of record rather than inside them, it does that cleanly: utilizing the broad depth of SAP APIs, no custom code in the core, no rip-and-replace.
Users get one consistent front door. Behind it, you can move from today’s SAP landscape to next-generation, or consolidate back ends, without retraining everyone who buys and requests every day. The orchestration layer absorbs the change and gives you flexibility for the future, not just moving you to yet another S2P suite which may look better now, but who knows in 2 years!
Today: an approver’s week
SAP AribaInbox · own login
Contract toolQueue · own login
Other ERPWorkflow · own login
Three places to look. No single view of status.One front door
Contractor extensionFieldglass
Contract reviewIcertis
New supplier recordOther ERP
Every approval, one inbox. Every request, one status.
We’re not designing around an imaginary future state. We’re designing around the enterprise you actually have.
Stop asking where to add AI
There’s something else we keep seeing in ORO Studio.
When you start with the problem rather than the existing process, you stop assuming every step deserves to survive. Most enterprise AI conversations still begin with: where can we add AI to this process? I think that’s the wrong question. The better one is:
If we were solving this problem today, knowing what agents can do, would we design this process this way at all?
Often the answer is no.
An agent triages the request. Three checks run in parallel instead of in sequence. The system gathers the information instead of asking the employee for it. A human only sees the exceptions. Five steps become two.
That’s very different from bolting a chatbot onto the front of the seven-step process you already had.
It’s also why the agent story in this partnership matters. ORO orchestrates agents built in ORO, agents built in SAP, and agents you build yourself or buy from someone else, in one flow rather than a collection of silos. The value of agents isn’t in how many you have. It’s in whether they work together on the actual problem.
“The value of agents isn’t in how many you have. It’s in whether they work together on the actual problem.
Chris Vessey, ORO Labs
ORO Studio was built around that idea. Describe a procurement problem in plain language, turn it into a visible workflow, inspect the decisions and assumptions, and generate deployable ORO configuration. The point isn’t to build the old thing faster. It’s to make change cheap enough that we’re willing to rethink the thing.
What “modernize at your own pace” actually means
That phrase can sound suspiciously like marketing. After enough customer conversations, I think it’s one of the most practical ideas in enterprise transformation.
It doesn’t mean moving slowly. It means not forcing every layer of the enterprise to move at the same speed.
Let the ERP evolve on the ERP roadmap. Let the application landscape consolidate where it makes sense. Let AI capabilities mature. But let the business process improve now.
So, if you’re wondering whether to wait until your long-term architecture is settled: don’t. The landscape will look very different in two years, and the solution you’d pick then may not exist yet. Fix the user experience, get agentic and get faster now, on a layer that keeps your options open whatever comes next.
The future enterprise isn’t going to arrive neatly packaged on a go-live date. It’s going to emerge one problem, one workflow and one better way of working at a time.
Based on what I’m seeing with customers, procurement teams are ready to start. With SAP alongside us, there’s even less reason to wait.
Chris VesseyVP Innovation & Customer Value, ORO Labs
