Procurement today faces a rising but often overlooked cost. It isn’t measured in duties or taxes. Instead, it's measured in lost time, broken workflows, and friction between stakeholders. It’s the internal ‘tariff’ that organizations impose on themselves when their processes fail to keep pace with business demands.
This invisible tariff manifests in sluggish supplier onboarding cycles, scattered intake systems, disconnected teams, and a persistent lack of visibility. Each of these inefficiencies places a toll on speed, stakeholder trust, compliance posture, and ultimately, the strategic value that procurement can deliver.
Enterprise procurement has grown increasingly complex. With multi-regional supplier networks, evolving ESG and regulatory requirements, and a proliferation of disconnected tools, the challenge is no longer simply about sourcing goods at the right price—it’s about navigating a maze of approvals, systems, and manual steps to deliver outcomes efficiently.
Yet, in many organizations, attempts to tackle this complexity often take the form of more policy layers, additional approval gates, or makeshift workflows that only serve to complicate the experience further. The result? Business users get lost, procurement spends time chasing instead of guiding, and critical projects slow down or miss opportunities altogether.
This growing complexity is frustrating. And it costs. Time to contract increases. Visibility shrinks. Stakeholder trust erodes. And procurement’s influence wanes.
Much of this friction stems from the very first mile: intake. It’s where business needs first enter the procurement process. If the entry point is hard to find, opaque, or overly complex, users will find ways around it. This leads to shadow procurement, incomplete records, compliance gaps, and missed opportunities for leverage and governance.
Where once intake was considered simply a form or static portal, modern procurement leaders are rethinking intake as a strategic inflection point. Done right, intake becomes a guided, intuitive path that directs requests to the right workflows, routes stakeholders appropriately, and collects data upfront to streamline the rest of the process.
Effective intake reduces not only the administrative burden but also the cognitive burden on users. That’s critical to improving adoption and increasing procurement’s ability to manage what matters.
Many transformation efforts focus on optimizing individual processes. They focus on streamlining approvals, automating contract generation, or digitizing supplier onboarding. But isolated optimization doesn’t address the root issue: disjointedness. That’s where orchestration comes in.
Orchestration connects fragmented steps across departments and tools, aligning legal, finance, IT, and procurement into coherent workflows. It creates a process layer that ensures requests flow through the system without stalls or rework.
This is especially crucial when no single team owns the full lifecycle of a procurement event. A sourcing manager may initiate a request, legal may approve a contract, risk may validate a supplier, and finance may review the budget. Without orchestration, each handoff is a point of delay. With it, these stakeholders become participants in a shared, automated journey.
The toll of inefficiency is nowhere more visible than in high-complexity sourcing events. According to the Hackett Group, these events can take up to 95 business days to complete. That’s nearly a quarter of the business year, and that's before a single good or service is delivered.
Source: The Hackett Group 2024 Spend Orchestration Study
It’s not that one or two steps that drive the delay. It’s all of them. Contract negotiation alone accounts for 21% of the cycle. Supplier evaluation and selection take another 17%. Even the early phases (i.e., defining requirements and developing strategy) consume 20 business days on average.
What this signals is that inefficiency is not something that just occurs at the margins. It’s systemic, with slowdowns compounding as work moves across the business.
This challenge is not lost on procurement leaders. In Hackett’s 2024 Key Issues Study, 65% of executives ranked “Digital Procurement and Automation” and “Artificial Intelligence and Gen AI” as their top two transformational priorities—the highest of any initiative.
Source: The Hackett Group 2025 Procurement Agenda and Key Issues Study
That alignment between technology and transformation is a clear sign: procurement is ready for a new operating model. It's ready to move beyond digitizing transactions to orchestrating outcomes.
Despite strong interest in modernization, adoption of critical procurement technologies remains uneven. A closer look reveals that many organizations are still underinvested in areas essential to operational agility and strategic value creation.
For example, according to The Hackett Group's 2025 Procurement Agenda and Key Issues Study, fewer than one in five organizations have implemented guided intake solutions. This is a foundational capability that directly improves user experience, boosts adoption, and reduces maverick spend. And yet, nearly half of organizations haven’t even started evaluating it.
Supplier onboarding solutions, which can dramatically reduce cycle times and improve data quality, are similarly under-deployed, with only 17% of organizations having fully implemented them.
Other strategic capabilities—like supply risk management, contract lifecycle management (CLM), and stakeholder engagement tools—are also lagging. In some cases, fewer than 15% of organizations have mature solutions in place, even as procurement faces increasing pressure to manage third-party risk, demonstrate ROI, and align with internal partners.
These figures underscore a broader truth: while many companies have invested in sourcing, analytics, or ERP platforms, the connective tissue that links people, processes, and systems is still missing. That’s the role orchestration is designed to play.
Procurement is evolving from a compliance enforcer to a strategic partner that enables the business to move faster, smarter, and more responsibly. But that shift requires a different posture.
It means building workflows that guide rather than block. It means delivering transparency, not just oversight. And it means automating repetitive tasks to free teams for more strategic work.
This is where orchestration delivers. It allows procurement to focus less on fixing broken steps and more on designing experiences that drive better decisions and results. Whether that’s surfacing the right supplier at the right moment, aligning risk reviews with sourcing decisions, or enabling contract automation, orchestration empowers procurement to lead, not just manage.
In the end, the most expensive outcome isn’t overpayment. It’s delay. It’s the lost time spent waiting for approvals, duplicating information, correcting errors, or clarifying ownership. It’s the opportunity cost of friction.
Leading organizations are flipping that dynamic. They’re reducing friction by integrating systems, automating decisions, and delivering experiences that people actually want to use.
They aren’t replacing all their tools—they’re connecting them. And they’re doing it in a way that scales across categories, geographies, and use cases. That’s how procurement becomes more than a cost center—it becomes a strategic advantage.
This is the new procurement imperative: reduce the hidden tariff of inefficiency and orchestrate the outcomes the business needs.