Everyone's talking about AI disrupting procurement. They're focused on the wrong thing. The real problem isn't that procurement software is outdated. It's that most procurement software was never built for how Southeast Asian enterprises actually operate.

SAP. Coupa. Ariba. These tools are real, and they work, but they were engineered for Fortune 500 companies with 3-year implementation budgets and IT teams of 50.

A Malaysian conglomerate managing 12 subsidiaries, 4 procurement managers, and approvals still running on WhatsApp? Good luck.

I know this because we made every mistake in the book. When we started building Borong's procurement platform, we tried to serve everyone. SMEs. Mid-market. Enterprise. All at once. We thought broader coverage meant faster growth. It actually meant slower in everything.

We also massively underestimated enterprise integration complexity. We'd get into a PETRONAS or Shell conversation and realise our system couldn't talk to theirs cleanly. PunchOut. ERP connectors. GRN-triggered invoicing. Payment status flows. None of it was trivial.

We were building a product. They needed infrastructure, and that gap almost killed us.

Here's what changed: We started sitting in the rooms where procurement decisions actually get made. Not product demos. Real working sessions with the procurement managers at those MNCs, and we stopped asking “what features do you want?”

We started asking, “Tell us your biggest headache next quarter.”

Different question. Completely different answers.

What we learned:

Fact #1: The bottleneck was never technology. It was trust. No enterprise procurement manager changes how their company buys because your UI is clean. They change because someone inside is willing to stake their career on you.

Fact #2: But the window to earn that trust is collapsing. Procurement teams are under more pressure than ever. ESG compliance. Supply chain visibility. Cost scrutiny at the board level. Smaller teams, higher stakes.

They need partners who understand the weight of that. So now, every major product decision at Borong goes through one filter first:

Does this make our procurement manager look like a hero to their CFO? Not “does this check a feature box”, and obviously not “does this look good on a slide.”

That shift changed everything about how we build. The companies that will win enterprise procurement in Southeast Asia aren't the ones with the most features. They're the ones that earn trust on day one and make the person who signed off on them look smart.

Sharing what actually works :)

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