THE PROCUREMENT INTERVIEW
Sudhir says that was the problem the team kept returning to after years inside SAP Ariba. He believes that the issue was never just software capability, but the underlying design assumption.“ They were built to do an approval flow,” he says.
Rethinking procurement design Lalitha explains that ORO began with a simple question: what was not working in procurement technology? The answer was that legacy systems were built for transactions, not for the full engagement journey across employees, suppliers and internal stakeholders.
Lalitha says procurement teams often end up acting like traffic controllers. They are forced to manage compliance, governance and stakeholder involvement through tools that do not naturally support the way work actually happens.
“ We are moving from labour arbitrage and business process outsourcing to a world of experts, AI and humans working together”
Sudhir Bhojwani Co-founder and CEO ORO Labs
That, she says, creates a poor employee experience and a poor supplier experience at the same time.“ People avoid procurement,” Lalitha says. She argues that ORO’ s orchestration layer is designed to do more than capture a request at the front door. It is intended to coordinate the full process, using workflow and AI to make trust easier to establish and maintain.
For procurement leaders, that matters because trust is what approvals are really about – the point of multiple checks is not bureaucracy for its own sake, but confidence that spending, compliance and policy all align.
Why orchestration matters Yuan’ s role focuses on the architecture underneath that experience. Traditional procurement suites were built as separate modules – such as sourcing, contracts, procure-to-pay, invoicing and risk assessment – each expected to integrate in sequence, but the ORO team believes that procurement does not follow a neat linear path. A buying journey may start in one system, require information from several others and then loop back again depending on the context. That is why the integration challenge becomes exponential rather than simple.“ Each module needs to orchestrate the whole process,” Yuan says.
ORO’ s answer is to make the system context-aware, so it can determine what should happen next rather than forcing users through fixed paths. That approach is especially relevant in complex enterprises where legal, finance, supply chain and risk functions all touch the same request.
28 May 2026