A version of this showcase first appeared in the July Edition of Procurement Magazine.
Executive Summary:
Michael van Keulen is a member of The Board Of Advisors for SIG and the former Global Procurement Director for Lululemon. He’s also the CPO of Coupa, which, according to Procurement Magazine, has helped its many thousands of global customers collectively save more than $194 billion.
Coupa achieves this by providing its customers with powerful P2P solutions that procurement teams love. Yet, heading into 2024, Coupa customers—among them some of the world’s leading enterprises—were running into a complicated problem. Employees outside procurement were not using Coupa regularly. Power users—such as members of the procurement team—still loved Coupa, but other employees found it unfamiliar, especially those who only needed to use it occasionally to make purchase requests, and so they worked around it, relying on emails and one-off communications to do things like submit intake requests.
Recognizing an opportunity to create more intuitive and accessible process experiences for all users, Coupa sought a more flexible upstream intake orchestration tool that could integrate with employees’ existing workflows and meet employees where they already work, facilitating more seamless process adoption across the entire organization.
Process adoption matters to procurement teams for the same reason it matters for every internal service team. In many ways, an organization is the product of its processes. They are the means by which you increase efficiency, make key strategic adjustments, and respond to large external risks at scale.
As van Keuelen puts it, enterprise procurement teams have been working to manage lots of external risks, of late, among them rising inflation and interest rates and supply chain disruptions. “When we think about surviving all these external business challenges, we must be able to move quickly and decisively with a high level of confidence to optimize the opportunities that we have no matter what the external environment is,” van Keulen told Procurement Magazine. “You have two choices. Either you don't invest and just let that environment impact your business or you start to think about what the art of possible is.”
Another of their goals with intake orchestration: helping customers simplify their procurement processes.
“It is improvements to your operating model that, in aggregation, compound to deliver outsized positive impacts to your margin,” van Keulen said. “Removing complexity is where you can optimize the outcomes for your business.”
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Coupa turned to ProcurementWorks, Tonkean's AI-Powered Intake Orchestration solution, for help.
First, last January, Coupa certified Tonkean Intake Orchestration for use within the Coupa Business Spend Management (BSM) platform.
Next, Coupa partnered with Tonkean to make a “Tonkean Intake Orchestration for Coupa” solution available in the Coupa App Marketplace.
The idea, van Keulen said, was to augment Coupa’s intake experience with Tonkean’s innovative and holistically integrated orchestration capabilities.
In essence, they wanted to provide Coupa customers a different, easier way to facilitate intake across their existing stakeholders and systems, but that’d still feed requests and data back to the procurement team in Coupa. Call it upstream innovation.
“Where Tonkean is critical for us is the upstream side of the procurement journey,” van Keulen said. “They are important for us because they allow our customers to drive even higher adoption through their app on the Coupa Marketplace. They support customers and drive higher adoption through the architecture of their platform.”
As Tonkean CEO and co-founder Sagi Eliyahu told Procurement Magazine in a follow-up interview, Tonkean helps internal service teams like procurement improve process adoption by enabling them to create processes that are intelligent, integrated, and that eliminate the need for change management. This, Eliyahu argues, is what modern procurement processes need to look like.
“The purchases employees make are very important and often urgent; these purchases are not for leisure, they can actually impact the business. Yet the processes and technologies that they experience are pretty archaic. There’s lots of red tape,” Eliyahu said. “In the enterprise, problems with inefficiency often stem from processes that force employees to change their behavior and learn how to navigate systems they’re not used to. They don’t know how to use it. You’re losing in both hands; you’re either losing compliance or you’re losing efficiency.”
Tonkean Intake Orchestration for Coupa allows stakeholders to complete procurement processes from within whatever application environment they already spend time in. ProcurementWorks is accessible to all employees through Slack, Teams, email, and/or custom portals, and enables requesters to initiate requests—and get basic questions answered—through plain language prompts.
“We have a lot of Fortune 500 companies using us for everything from purchase intake to invoice intake,” Eliyahu said. “This is in part because we leverage the tech stack, policies, and processes that a company already has in place to improve adoption, speed, and compliance, all without a lot of change.”
Tonkean guides requesters through dynamic form sequences buttressed by integrated catalog and non-catalog buying options, automatically handles FAQs, and routes requests to the right approvers in Coupa.
Importantly, Tonkean also provides the Tonkean Enterprise Copilot, which facilitates guided experiences and automation across all of an organization’s technologies and datasets, in accordance with defined policies.
“With the increasing complexity of modern procurement workflows and the strategic importance of the procurement function, solutions that simplify and unify the intake-to-procure phase are of great benefit to our customers,” Nigel Pegg, VP & GM of Coupa Platform and App Marketplace, told us earlier this year. “We’re proud to have Tonkean Intake Orchestration on the Coupa App Marketplace to give our customers a seamless, personalized intake experience that will boost both process adoption and compliance.”
Though boosting adoption and compliance is just the start. When you bring together an organization’s various systems, from the core procurement platform to the supplier catalog and PO creation app, etc., and create an experience that’s easy to follow and that can automate steps across those systems, the process actually gets followed. And as more employees follow the process, procurement pulls more spend under management and improves performance, but can also focus more on the aspects of their work that create more unique business value. AAs Alejandro Fernandez, Head of Global Procurement at Semrush, recently told CPOStrategy Magazine, “With the deployment of Tonkean, 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.”
Some Coupa customers leveraging Tonkean to augment procurement intake have seen massive increases in spend under management, in addition to the reduced cycle times. But they’re also seeing something else that’s interesting: they’re getting involved uniformly earlier in buying experiences.
“In many organizations, the procurement process starts when you already have a requisition,” Eliyahu says. “When everyone involved is saying ‘we are ready to buy this now.’ That’s too late. Some people call it ‘intake to procure.’ Tonkean allows you to engage at ‘intent to procure’ because the procurement process really goes all the way back to someone just having a question about procurement.”
Coupa customers use Tonkean to engage stakeholders at that ‘intent’ stage of buying processes—and to then coordinate approvals with power users in Coupa through resolution.
Recently van Keulen connected with Eliyahu for a separate conversation about what Coupa customers can expect from the Coupa-Tonkean partnership moving forward. As van Keulen put it, he believes the potential of innovative technology broadly is to enable you “To go from where you're operating today, to where you could be operating," Michael says. "To discover ‘the art of possible.’"
Van Keulen and Eliyahu both believe Tonkean and Coupa together enable Coupa customers to discover precisely that, at least in the procurement context. “I see no reason why this will not continue to be successful for many years,” Eliyahu said.
Want to learn more about Tonkean Intake Orchestration for Coupa? See it in action, or sign up for a demo.
