The word of 2024 in procurement so far is “process orchestration.”
Everybody—from procurement experts to executives at Goldman Sachs—is talking about it.
But… why? What are they so excited about?
As Daniel Barnes, author of World of Procurement, wrote recently, it’s about “the removal of complexity from procurement for everyone who interacts with procurement.”
Which is certainly part of it. But the promise of process orchestration, which we’ve been writing about for some time now, goes far beyond removing complexity.
Ultimately, it has to do with creating and curating for employees (requesters and approvers alike!) guided, end-to-end procurement experiences that are not only seamless, but are integrated and personalized. (Any process orchestration platform worth its salt will wrap around and accommodate all your organization’s existing databases, policies, people, and systems.)
With process orchestration technology, procurement can connect and pass data back and forth between your organization’s mix of people and tools, including ERP and P2P platforms, seamlessly and automatically. This seamless integration allows you to automate the process both of triaging requests and of “orchestrating” all the moving parts required to reach resolution. This, in turn, allows you to resolve requests in a fraction of the time… and with minimal headache for everyone involved.
It’s all about tailoring automated experiences to your specific mix of process, systems, and, more importantly, your people.
This setup is rapidly turning into a new norm. As Barnes also writes, process orchestration represents “a new model of procurement technology.” It is something of a paradigm shift for procurement teams who understand the power of organic process adoption.
There’s a tendency when talking about process orchestration and its potential, however, to remain too high-level. (We’re probably doing it right now!) So, if you’re still a bit unsure of what this looks like in practice, below, we provide the concrete use case of intake orchestration—pulled from a recently published essay by our CEO, Sagi Eliyahu, in Future of Sourcing.
But first, here’s some news from around the industry.
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Okay, intake orchestration software. What exactly is it, what does it look like in practice, and what makes it so exciting?(This is pulled from a new essay by Tonkean CEO and co-founder Sagi Eliyahu in Future of Sourcing. Read the full piece here.)
First, let’s define intake orchestration. One way is by separating the root words. Intake, of course, refers to the challenge faced by every internal department—as well as just about every working professional—of effectively fielding, reviewing, responding to, and ultimately resolving requests that are made of them and their time.
This is much more complicated than it might seem, especially in procurement. Intake requests often come to procurement from a wide array of sources—employees, vendors, renewals—and from across an even wider array of channels. (This is especially true if people don’t follow your procurement processes as they’re supposed to, which they often don’t).
Then comes the hard part: coordinating the various requests and action items across stakeholders and systems to resolution. This entails—for each request—triaging the request to determine its relative risk, expense, and urgency; sourcing the item or service (potentially tricky if it’s a new vendor or something off the wall); handling the contract, PO, invoice; and actually getting things paid for and finalized—it’s a lot to manage.
In most organizations, procurement teams have to do all this work manually—manually combing through channels to find all the submitted intake materials, manually pestering stakeholders for approvals, going back and pestering requesters for more information, manually updating systems along the way, etc.
But that’s where our second word—orchestration—comes in.
Orchestration technology wraps around and accommodates all your organization’s existing databases, policies, people, and systems. Meaning, you can connect and pass data back and forth between your organization’s mix of people and tools, including ERP and P2P platforms, seamlessly and automatically. This allows you to automate the process both of triaging requests and of “orchestrating” all the moving parts required to reach resolution.
Orchestration also allows you to create intake and approval processes that are differentiated and personalized for each team and employee’s needs and context. And that funnel all the captured data back to the procurement team.
In other words, intake orchestration is not just about automatically generating requisitions and POs. It’s about tailoring automated experiences to your specific mix of process, systems, and, more importantly, your people.
What makes this so exciting? Well, think about how most procurement teams facilitate intake today. Most use P2P/ERP platforms. These are powerful tools, but even so, they’re not perfect. For example, some don’t easily integrate with other tools (some intentionally so). Intake and approval processes that rely solely on them remain complex and arduous, with long cycle times.
Much of this stems from the fact that, for all they’re great at, big P2P and ERP platforms are typically designed for the procurement team, not for the requester or approver.
There’s some logic in that, of course, but at the end of the day, what matters most—in terms of how effectively procurement is able to do its job and create business value—is the experience that procurement provides. When your processes require that employees use platforms that aren’t designed with their aptitudes and preferences in mind, you risk making your processes too hard to follow, which often results in low process adoption, rogue spend, even longer cycle times, and more manual work for the procurement team.
Intake orchestration offers a way to solve this problem, and without forcing employees to learn how to navigate yet another tool, or requiring that you rip out and replace any of the tools you already have…
Read the full essay.
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On this episode of Modern Business Operations, host Seth Colaner is joined by Philip Lakin, Co-Founder and CEO of NoCodeOps. In this discussion, Philip asks, “Why don't we treat internal processes the same way we treat customer-facing processes?”
Their discussion yielded these takeaways:
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Here’s everything we did in the most recent Tonkean release notes:
Module Builder
Custom Item Interfaces and Workspace Apps
Board Settings Theme
Enterprise Components
You can now integrate the following new data sources with your Tonkean solutions:
Additionally, a Create Text/PDF File action was added to the SharePoint Online data source.
Bug Fixes
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