Technology has been fomenting rapid changes in procurement. The procurement tech stack has grown in size and diversity. This year, there was specifically a huge rise in appreciation for the importance of process orchestration, particularly around intake orchestration and process experience. That’s our headline procurement story for 2023. For example:
…and so on. Some of this is driven by necessity—the need to do more with less, and a renewed focus on culling things like rogue spending as budgets tighten. And some is driven by the presence of new tools—particularly as generative AI exploded this past year.
And that’s the second big story.
There’s an eminently human side of using technology to make work easier and more efficient. As we look at automating manual and time-consuming work, it’s a reminder that people, and their unique and deep skill sets, are more important than ever. And that’s more important in procurement perhaps than anywhere else. Why squander your hard-earned financial and logistical acumen trying to cajole everyone in your company to follow painstaking, static procurement processes? These are tasks that can be improved or fully automated with AI. 2023 was the year that organizations awoke to this reality en masse.
That’s partly because 2023 proved, in terms both tangible and irrefutable, the business value of using new, innovative technologies like LLMs at the process level to finally, actually put people first.
At Tonkean, this was music to our ears, because using technology at the process level to put people first has been our cardinal mission since Sagi Eliyahu and Offir Talmor started the company in 2015.
It’s long been our opinion that AI’s most game-changing promise is to provide internal teams new opportunities for creating newly intelligent and adaptive process experiences that truly empower employees by putting people first. So we focused our own efforts this year on cutting through the hype and finding ways to help organizations employ AI at the process level of their operations in order to deliver tangible, human-centric benefits.
We’ll dig into what our work this year wrought below. But first, here are some of the most interesting, notable, or memorable stories from the world of procurement we came across this year. And—why not—let’s look back at 12, one for each month of the year that was.
If you have some insightful news or knowledge about the world of procurement to share, let us know!
At Tonkean, our twin themes of 2023 were “fit” and “focus.” Specifically, we focused our efforts—technologically, communally, and otherwise—on serving two specific operational verticals: legal and procurement.
For the latter, we launched ProcurementWorks, a product suite that gives procurement teams what they need to create guided internal buying experiences that reduce risk, increase efficiency, and create net-new business value, via internal processes that people will actually follow.
To superpower ProcurementWorks, we also created a new generative AI-based tool, called the AI Front Door—an AI-powered intake experience for submitting (and proactively resolving) internal requests.
And we continued to upgrade and add to our core platform offering. And we won awards and the attention of media outlets, influencers, and research outfits.
So yeah, it was a busy and productive year! Here’s a short summary (for more details, check out this end-of-year blog recap post!):
In closing, here are some eye-popping 2023 Tonkean stats:
Read the whole story here. On to 2024…
And to learn more about what process orchestration can do for your procurement team, download our updated Procurement Handbook!
On this episode of Modern Business Operations, host Seth Colaner is joined by Mark Raffan, Head of Training at Negotiations Ninja. Mark shares insights on procurement negotiations and discusses the importance of aligning negotiation strategy to overall business goals.
Seth and Mark's discussion yielded these key takeaways:
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Here’s everything we did in this month’s Tonkean release notes:
Module Builder:
Custom Item Interfaces and Workspace Apps:
Enterprise Components: Users can now integrate the OnSolve data source with their Tonkean solutions. Additionally, the Coupa data source has been enhanced with the following updates:
Bug fixes:
Also, Tonkean was featured in the ProcureTech100 2023 Yearbook, which identifies and champions the 100 pioneering digital procurement technology, data, and analytics solutions that are supercharging procurement and the enterprise. (Click here to download a copy and read up on Tonkean and our procurement pioneer peers!) We were also included in the 2023 ProcureTech100, a list of pioneering digital procurement solutions, and we were named one of the Top 50 Procurement Providers to Watch by Spend Matters. You should also read Supply Chain Digital’s feature about how Tonkean understands that compliance requires high adoption, and adoption requires a great experience.
ICYMI: Last week’s webinar—a joint effort between Art of Procurement and Tonkean. Titled “Signs Your Intake-to-Procure Process May Be Broken, And How to Fix It,” this panel discussed how improving the intake-to-procure process can resolve myriad symptoms, and deliver additional benefits as well.It featured Tonkean co-founder and CEO Sagi Eliyahu and Head of Procurement Dan Coor. You’ll learn:
Thanks for checking out Procurement Ops Digest! 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 salient solutions, including Legal intake, Purchasing Approval, Invoice Intake, and Email inbox automation. Sign up for one here!
