Sagi Eliyahu, Co-Founder and CEO at Tonkean and Alejandro Fernandez, Head of Global Procurement at Semrush, discuss the power of intake orchestration and procurement’s rise to the top of the agenda in the c-suite.

In a world with almost endless possibilities, why waste time on manual or outdated processes?

Technology is an enabler in everyday and business life. It is there as a vehicle of change and a weapon of efficiency. When used correctly, AI can help people focus on higher-value and more fulfilling work – which is what an entire generation of people crave today. The problem is, technology is not leveraged as efficiently or as strategically as it could be today — especially in enterprise back-office operations, like procurement. 

This is where Tonkean comes in. Tonkean is a first-of-its-kind intake orchestration platform. Powered by AI, Tonkean helps enterprise internal service teams like procurement and legal create process experiences that transform how businesses operate. In part by changing how internal teams leverage smart technology to empower the employees they serve to do better, higher value work.

Process orchestration

Process orchestration refers to the strategy — enabled by process orchestration platforms — of coordinating automated business processes across teams and existing, integrated systems. These processes can facilitate all procurement-related activities. Importantly, they can also wrap around an organisation’s existing systems and accommodate employees’ many different working preferences and styles.

Instead of simply adding to an organisation’s existing tech stack, process orchestration allows companies to use their existing mix of people, data, and tech better together. The true promise of process orchestration is to finally put internal shared service teams like procurement in charge of the tools they deploy.

This goes a long way towards solving one of the enterprise’s most vexing operational challenges: the inefficiency of over-complexity born of too much new technology. It also allows procurement teams to truly make their technology work for them and the employees they serve. As opposed to making people work for technology. Process orchestration breaks down the silos that typically separate working environments. No longer do stakeholders have to log in to an ERP or P2P platform to submit or approve intake requests. The technology will meet them wherever they are.

All in one place

Enter Sagi Eliyahu, Co-Founder and CEO at Tonkean. He explains that over the past few years, Tonkean has focused more on procurement specifically. In part because the challenges the procurement function faces day-in and day-out represent perfect orchestration use-cases. Procurement processes touch so many different teams, tools, and departments. Poor procurement performance can often be traced back to the fact that all these moving parts otherwise aren’t able to communicate easily with each other. Tonkean was built to address exactly that problem. 

“We saw that our procurement customers were having great success with it, but the market started to heat up as well,” he reveals. “It made sense because it happened for us on the procurement and legal side. They are teams that are very central to an organisation and their process is never just siloed into their tools and department. You need that idea of orchestrating all the different moving parts for it to have high adoption, faster cycles, better quality and compliance.”

Tonkean and Semrush partnership

One of Tonkean’s biggest customers is Semrush. Semrush, in turn, understands the potential of orchestration in procurement well. As a result of Tonkean’s intake orchestration capabilities, they’ve almost halved cycle times for intake requests — from 19 days to just 10. Alejandro Fernandez, Head of Global Procurement at Semrush, works closely with Eliyahu and Tonkean and couldn’t be happier about the collaboration…

Read the full story here!

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