Marc Ofiara, Procurement Innovation Category Management, and Ryan Whitmore, Procurement GenAI, Process Orchestration, and S2P eConnectivity, make up two thirds of Bayer’s recently-founded procurement innovation department. Ofiara has been with the pharmaceutical and biotechnology company for nine years, focusing on driving digital strategies across sourcing roles, while Whitmore has been part of the company for a decade. The two conducted their own talk at ORO Imagine, an official side event preceding DPW Amsterdam 2024. The discussion – ‘Make procurement work for our people’ – delved into how procurement can be leveraged for business users, suppliers, and internal teams, and how ORO Labs’ orchestration solution has allowed Bayer to level up.
Bayer’s main driver for implementing orchestration has been improving the user experience. A common reason, certainly, but one that’s evergreen in terms of its necessity. “In the end, we want to make sure procurement works for our users,” Ofiara explains. “Procurement as a function has been very much focused inwardly on increasing internal tools, how we can improve the work of our procurement teams, and so on. Really, we wanted to bring the value of procurement to the business users, and process orchestration really came in as a great segue to tackle this end-to-end. We’re not focusing on a single element in the process, but tackling it from start to finish.”
“The users brought the problem to us,” Whitmore adds. “They gave us the feedback that there were too many procurement systems to access to figure out what to do. So really, the reason we brought ORO Labs into our company was due to that user need for a better solution. They wanted something that identified what they needed to buy and give them better transparency about procurement processes.”
Problem-solving with orchestration
Bayer is tackling a lot of major issues through leveraging orchestration. It is now solving problems it’s never been able to solve before. “One is the whole issue of supply onboarding, which is a huge pain point and a very complex process,” says Ofiara. “Another is identifying the right category for what the business user wants to buy. These are all little building blocks that need to be solved as a whole before you can make the entire end-to-end process work. By deconstructing the big problems we’re facing – and have been for decades in the procurement space – we’re now able to move at a much faster pace, tackling them one by one.”
In many cases, orchestration also helps with issues a business didn’t even know it had. As Whitmore mentioned, it was the users who brought Bayer’s problems to light. But the interesting thing is that Bayer thought it was already serving the users well. “We were living kind of a lie, because we thought what we had put in front of the business users was sufficient,” Ofiara says. “With good intentions, you can just find your way around the system. But we found that we were asking a lot of our stakeholders.
“By starting with process orchestration as the centrepiece and finding a solution where we can build into multiple use cases is really helping with our strategy. We now have building blocks on how we can plug in GenAI not only as a buzzword, but as something that makes a process work. At the same time, having the spectrum of conversational interface to orchestrate entire workflows gives us the whole toolbox that we need in order to tackle things capability by capability. Also, we have to make sure that we build internal capabilities with our people. Process orchestration, for us, is a great starting point towards digital transformation.”
Preparing for orchestration
Of course, as with any implementation, it’s important to know what you’re letting yourself in for with orchestration. Knowing whether it will solve your issues starts with understanding what your issues are. This requires reflection on your business and careful consideration, as well as management of expectations.
“The best advice I can give is to really map out the user journey of the inputs and outputs of what you expect,” says Whitmore. “At the start of this project, we thought we were starting at a very high level with a simple process. But what we’ve realised is our process is much more complicated than we realised. We even have to think about when we notify a user, how we do that, what the best channel is, and what information we should include. So my best advice is: think end-to-end before you start really designing the workflow.”
Ofiara adds: “Think of it in increments. You’ll discover many more issues and problems along the way, so be prepared. Nothing should be found to tight deadlines; give yourself the freedom to grow, to learn the capabilities to build that stack. This is a long-term transformation – not a short-term investment to fix something that’s urgent.”
In the future, orchestration will play more closely with AI. This will lead to even better problem-solving for Bayer, and for many other businesses, as the pace of technology continues to sprint on. “AI with process orchestration will allow us to really grab information out of documents in a way we’ve never been able to, and then summarise it” says Whitmore. Ofiara adds: “The biggest one for me is the combination of conversational interface to a workflow, and having almost endless possibilities on how to combine this. Like Ryan said, by solving problems that couldn’t be solved before GenAI, you can really bake this into a process. So it’s a great combination.”
