This is a preview of Ops Digest, our monthly newsletter for operations teams. This month, we're talking all things Procurement: how to reduce costly mistakes, increase efficiency, create guided buying experiences people actually follow, and make use of innovative tech, like automation and GPT. Subscribe and receive this newsletter in your inbox every month.
We’ve become somewhat obsessed with Procurement. An otherwise dry and frequently overlooked area, Procurement is actually critically important to every company, and it’s rife with opportunities for both risk and reward—not to mention process improvement.
Virtually everyone in an organization interacts with the procurement team in some form or fashion. (Need a laptop? Software license? Pencils? That’s all Procurement.) But almost nobody knows how to, uh, procure things. They don’t know what the policies and procedures are, so when they need something, they just kind of start asking around. Or they’ll go rogue (there’s literally a term for that) and find a way to get what they need outside of any existing systems, policies, and procedures. (And that’s if there are any existing systems, policies, and procedures to speak of in the first place!)
It’s a huge risk, legally and materially, when your company spend isn’t trackable. Not only do you lose insight into how much is being spent on what—an accounting nightmare—you lose the ability to audit. Fraud is all too easy.
And of course, it’s also a woefully inefficient way to handle spending.
Companies need to make it so that following Procurement procedures is easier than not following them. It's all about removing friction.
The more we learned about the stuff that keeps procurement pros up at night, the more we realized we have a solution for it.
So, Procurement. It’s hard. It’s hard to coordinate supply chains; it’s hard to juggle the wild diversity of requests; it’s hard to track and control rogue spending; and it’s hard to tussle with things like siloed systems and databases, and the need for approvals from multiple stakeholders.
It would be much, much simpler and easier if everyone would just follow the established guidelines. That would sharply curb risk and ensure better tracking, transparency, and auditability.
But people don’t, because it’s usually easier and simpler to work around or outside of those procedures. Most processes suck. To get higher process adoption, you need to improve the user experience such that following the guidelines is easier than not.
That user experience—that’s the heart of the problem. Tonkean is uniquely great at making processes of all kinds easier, more efficient, and more trackable, by using no-code automation and AI. We created a product suite aimed specifically at Procurement.
It’s called ProcurementWorks, and here are the highlights:
Super important to know: Tonkean doesn’t replace all your other apps; it just wraps around them all. That means you don’t have to blow up your tech stack. In this way, Tonkean enables you to get the most out of what you already have.
And most stakeholders don’t have to learn to use Tonkean at all. They may not even notice it’s there, because Tonkean seamlessly connects with the apps they use. All they know is that they automatically get the right form or document or question at the right time.
For more information on how this all works, read our Procurement 101 blog post and see our recent announcement. And head over here to try ProcurementWorks for free.
Exciting news! Starting April 17th, our AdaptivOps community will officially be merging with Tonkean.
What does that mean for you? Same awesome community, same content—new look.
Our mission in building the AdaptivOps community was to create a place for operations professionals to grow, learn, and MAKE in their careers. Now, three years later, we have 600 members, bi-weekly events, an awesome slack forum, and a top-ranked podcast.
With this merger, that mission remains the same, but with a closer connection to the Tonkean brand. This allows for larger stakeholder involvement from our parent company, meaning more attention and juice put behind making this an even better community for you.
Curious to see the rebrand? Sign up for AdaptivOps.
Having a coherent culture is a key ingredient in helping new employees jump in beside seasoned veterans, says Jaclyn Berger, VP, Operations - Global Support at Adyen.
In this episode, Jaclyn and host Sagi Eliyahu discuss:
Subscribe to the Modern Business Operations podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Thanks for checking out Ops Digest! If you’d like to learn more about who Tonkean is or what we do, we have a few different kinds of trials that you can sign up for. They walk users through our most powerful solutions, including Legal intake, Customer onboarding, Employee onboarding, and Email inbox automation. Sign up for one here!
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