Published: 9/3/2021
Last updated: 10/14/2024
The enterprise is in the midst of a software renaissance. It’s powered by AI, automation, and a renewed excitement about what sort of large-scale problems software can be employed to solve.
Enterprise employees, however, aren’t feeling much improvement. They still spend too much of their time hacking through manual work—jumping between tabs, filling out forms, chasing stakeholders, and learning how to navigate other teams’ preferred systems.
Internal service teams, meanwhile—the folks who are supposed to be driving change—remain stuck facilitating processes that proceed far too slowly and remain too painfully complex. Despite the plethora of tools, technologies, and offerings designed for and now available to internal teams—such as procurement, legal, HR, and IT—their processes lag behind the businesses they support.
To properly kick off intake requests, for example, employees still have to log in to large P2P or ERP platforms that they aren’t comfortable with, hunt around for information they don’t have easy access to, and manually collaborate with stakeholders outside the initial workflow. If you remember the first time you went clicking around SAP, you have some sense of how your employees feel.
And don’t even get us started on Gen AI. What we’ve actually gotten out of Gen AI are chatbots that help users navigate siloed UIs and policy documents. Or, AI that’s good at making movies and writing blogs and code, but not so good at doing the work we actually want AI to do for us—the bureaucratic, time-consuming busywork.
Ineffective technology-use plagues organizations in other ways, too. Where internal service teams like procurement and legal strive to be proactive—brought into buying experiences early enough to add unique value, for example—they’re forced instead to be reactive. Where they work toward strategic initiatives, they find themselves spending all their time on lower impact manual work.
This translates directly into increased cycle times—requests simply take longer on average to complete—lower process adoption and deleterious user experiences… all of which hurts your internal team’s potential utility as a business partner and value driver. Why give procurement or legal a seat at the table if the functions are mere encumbrances?
New technologies like process automation and Gen AI were supposed to provide internal teams a solution to all this. In fact they’ve mostly exacerbated the underlying issues.
The preponderance of platforms available to us now fragments our working lives. In procurement’s case, as an example, processes are strung across supplier catalog and RFP tools, supplier relationship management, PO creation and approval tools, and AP automation. These are built on top of the core ERP and procurement tools offered by the likes of SAP and Coupa, too.
Now more than ever, internal service teams need a way of better leveraging, optimizing, and managing their organization’s unique mix of people, processes, and technology—including ERP platforms like SAP and Oracle—or, in other words, of orchestrating and simplifying the process experiences they provide, such that they can begin to help drive their organizations forward with greater velocity and scale.
That’s what makes process orchestration software so exciting. It’s the technology that, finally, offers exactly that.
Process orchestration refers to the strategy of coordinating automated business processes across teams and existing, integrated systems. AI-powered process orchestration software provides internal service teams like procurement, IT, and legal a means of better leveraging, optimizing, and managing their organization’s unique mix of people, processes, and technology investments—including ERP platforms like SAP.
With it, you can orchestrate entire business processes across teams and existing systems. Such processes can be initiated through channels where requesters already spend their time (Slack, email, Teams, etc.), and can orchestrate across systems, data sources, and teams all the handoffs, triggers, automations, and approvals required to resolve intake requests.
Process orchestration platforms effectively sit above your organization’s technology stack and org chart. One way to think of process orchestration is as a tool for the conductor of your company’s operational orchestra. That conductor doesn’t actually play the instruments, but they make sure the right instruments are being played at the right times.
Another way to think about process orchestration, conversely, is as your organization’s piping for better technology use: for automating tasks, collecting better data—and also surfacing for employees innovative capabilities, such as AI “Front Doors.”
Ultimately, process orchestration platforms allow you to orchestrate and optimize workflows that involve many steps across all your organization’s technological and human components in a way that extends the capacity of existing tools, connects formerly siloed technological environments, and empowers those humans to focus on high-value work for which they’re uniquely qualified.
Here at Tonkean, we’ve packaged our platform’s AI-powered process orchestration capabilities into what we call the Enterprise Copilot. The Enterprise Copilot is the most powerful process orchestration solution available today.
Because it wraps around and connects with all your organization's existing systems and nodes through end-to-end integration, it’s able to accommodate all your employees' many different working preferences and styles—as well as extends to employees many different intelligent functionalities throughout the lifecycle of internal requests, including:
What are the benefits of all this?
For employees, AI-powered process orchestration software effectively works behind the scenes doing everything they’ve long wanted AI and process automation to do for them—the bureaucratic, back-office busywork—so they can focus more completely on creating unique, strategic value that drives the business forward.
For internal service organizations, the ability to deliver such seamless experiences is only where the benefits begin.
Let’s take a real-world business example.
Semrush, providers of a popular digital marketing platform, needed a more efficient and seamless way to facilitate intake across their existing enterprise systems, including Oracle, Ironclad, and their various messaging tools.
They turned to Tonkean for help. The Semrush procurement team started leveraging Tonkean’s ability to connect with and orchestrate automated processes across their legacy systems. “Making sure that your P2P is natively talking to contract lifecycle management (CLM), that's just not something you can easily do and that's something that Tonkean is doing for us,” Alejandro Fernandez, Head of Global Procurement at Semrush, said.
The Results: The Semrush procurement team cut their cycle times in half—and now provides excellent internal experiences that meet employees where they are.
“There are many use cases now where Tonkean is really facilitating how our new process operates, even if you're jumping back and forth between tools,” Alejandro told us. “I think that has been one of the biggest achievements along with the fact that with the redesign and the deployment of all these new tools, we've taken our cycle time from 19 days to 10. We've dramatically reduced the time it takes to sift through all of these orders that are coming through via email, via Slack and other web forms. It's created all of that efficiency, allowing our teams to do more with a lot less. We're thrilled about having Tonkean in-house.”
Ready to learn more about what process orchestration can do for you? Check out our comprehensive guide, Process Orchestration 101, or sign up for a demo of Tonkean today.
