The following is a case study originally published by CPO Strategy. Read the case study in full below, or watch Semrush discuss their use of Tonkean and how they cut their cycle times in half with intake orchestration here:
Executive Summary:
Technology is an enabler in everyday and business life. It is there as a vehicle of change and a weapon of efficiency. When used correctly, AI and intake orchestration can help people focus on higher-value and more fulfilling work. This is as true of enterprise procurement as it is any other enterprise function.
The problem is, technology is not leveraged as efficiently or as strategically as it could be today — especially in enterprise back-office operations, like procurement. This is where Tonkean comes in.
Now enter Semrush—a perfect example of what process orchestration technology can do for enterprise procurement teams.
That’s when he found Tonkean’s Procurement Works, an intake orchestration solution.
Thanks to Tonkean, Semrush cut cycle times for intake requests from 19 days to just 10.
In an exclusive interview with CPO Strategy, Fernandez explains how this happened, and what the impact has been.
“We’re thrilled about working with Tonkean,” explains Fernandez. “I am a big proponent of mirroring what our products and our marketing people are doing, which is creating an experience for the end user that's memorable, enjoyable, and smooth where you don't have to train people. In procurement, that is sometimes very difficult if you're dealing with legacy software. Creating or having access to this intermediate layer would then be that easy window, that wizard that would handhold our users throughout all the complexities and all the code findings that we need in order to process or keep controls in order to protect ourselves as a company.
“The flexibility was one of the things that drew me to the product first, the ability to create that user experience that we wanted, but at the same time plug into all of these other tools so you're not forced to rip and replace your legacy stuff.”
Fernandez goes on to highlight the importance of that capacity for connection and control that orchestration provides. “That orchestration piece becomes really key, for example, when you talk about controls because you don't want to sign a contract for which you don't have financial approval for, and you also don't want to issue a purchase order if you don't have a signed contract.
“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. There are many of these use cases where Tonkean is really facilitating how our new process operates, even if you're jumping back and forth between tools. 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.”
Sagi Eliyahu, Tonkean’s co-founder and CEO, who spoke with Fernandez and CPO Strategy about their partnership, agrees. He adds that Semrush knew what they wanted from the beginning – making the process easy.
“I think we're fortunate to have gained Semrush’s trust in order for us to partner together and for them to leverage our platform,” explains Eliyahu. “I think that when people are trying to solve for experience and efficiency, they need to have their ducks in a row first to understand what actually needs to be done and in what order. You don’t want to automate a bad process. It's really important to be able to actually understand this is the stuff we are happy about and we don't want to change them, but we don't have the rest of the organization necessarily aligned with it yet. Can we improve this area but keep this area the same?
“From our side, that experience with Semrush was amazing where I think they really knew what they were. They could understand what was working and what wasn’t. At Tonkean, we are such a flexible platform to allow any company to take our best practices and standards, but then morph and mold them into what each organization needs. That was an amazing partnership right from the beginning because it's a very easy conversation once you establish the criteria. You know what you need and we know what we can deliver.”
Another important benefit of process orchestration is that it enables procurement to provide for the employees it serves—be it end-users trying to buy a laptop, IT conducting security checks, or legal teams conducting approvals—a simpler, truly people-first experience.
For a long time, procurement has been a necessary, but not-necessarily-valued back-office function. This has something to do with the traditional experience of engaging with procurement, which has tended to be complex and time-consuming at best and frustrating and confusing at worst.
Process orchestration gives procurement teams the ability to change that, and to emphasize instead the unique, net-new business value they alone are able to provide—in part by empowering procurement to spend more time delivering that value, but also by giving them the means to provide categorically more enjoyable and easy buying and approval experiences.
Procurement processes of the future, thanks to this ‘one app to rule them all,’ will be definitively dynamic, integrated, smart, flexible, and streamlined—for all stakeholders. The entire procurement process will be less complex—and more successful.
Eliyahu explains that the reason why orchestration is important is because of the way individual teams have their own apps and systems, which means their own way of doing things. “If you could live in your own stack, you'll be happy, but you can't because you need to interact with everyone else's tools,” he explains. “Instead of enjoying being a power user in your own stack, you now need to be a power or intermediate user in everyone else's tools. This is where things break down massively and it breaks down in multiple levels when it comes to procurement. One is because procurement interacts with the entire company. Everyone in the company can be a requester who comes in and asks for help, a renewal, needs a new seat, or needs to buy something new. Now we are forcing everyone else to be a power user in our tool.
“The second thing is the stakeholders that are involved in the procurement process, whether it's legal and IT, finance, compliance and privacy and they are now forced to be power users. But you also need to be power users in their tools. It is a problem that exists in every department in the organization, but I think for central teams like procurement, it is far more extreme.”
Recently, Tonkean released the Tonkean Enterprise Copilot. The Copilot is a transformative AI and advanced orchestration solution that makes good on AI’s true, initial promise: to eliminate back-office busywork.
The Tonkean Enterprise Copilot, builds on Tonkean’s prior advancements in AI and orchestration, including the AI Front Door.
“The latest AI innovation around large language models (LLMs) have been incredibly interesting,” reveals Eliyahu. “The first one we introduced is the Tonkean AI Front Door. It is this one place for everyone to go without necessarily knowing what it is they are looking for. They have a very general question and we think a lot about processes again from what the end result looks like so we think about it in a structured way, but the way people work is very unstructured. Someone might come to procurement and say something like, ‘Hey, do I need to get a Chief Financial Officer's approval for a $50,000 purchase?’
“Now obviously we understand that if someone asks that they are probably looking to buy something that is $50,000. And if you're a procurement person, you'll be like, ‘Wait, what project is that? I'm not aware of a project but maybe I can help you’. If you have a document in Confluence or Wikipedia, whatever it is, and they search for that, but you have no insight and it was just happening in the background. The Tonkean AI Front Door allows the person to literally ask the question and the AI would understand, pull policy information so it can even answer it, but also direct people to a process.”
Fernandez believes that the potential of AI within procurement is massively exciting.
“It's a fascinating innovation, software publishers who have taken advantage of the GPT models and plugged them into their tools,” explains Fernandez. “Instead of having to read through a policy, which we know most people don't, you only get to ask a question and you're going to get a finite answer. That is the ultimate place we want to be because it doesn't only create that memorable experience but it also saves my team a ton of time. It's not humans wasting or investing time building those relationships and saying, ‘Hey, I'll guide you and this is what you need to do and let's share screens to get there’.
“Now you have the AI and it's available. It is that handholding and both sides are efficient. There's the experience side, but there's also all that time that we're saving. When Sagi talks about all these other tools doing things in the space, you think about evaluating the market, finding suppliers, creating and answering questionnaires, analyzing proposals, finding and comparing those proposals technically, quantitatively, and qualitatively. What are the strengths and weaknesses of these vendors? And not having to actually read, and digest all those proposals, which in some cases we have to invite up to 10 suppliers to create because we know that we might lose some along the way. We have to start with a healthy number and it is a lot of work. The efficiency that the AI is bringing in in terms of finding and interpreting data and getting to the point a lot quicker is super clear.”
Against the backdrop of technological innovation, the impossible has been given a major shove into the possible as a result of AI acceleration. For Fernandez, he believes companies like Tonkean are reshaping the game. “I think if we look at what change Tonkean has really brought to the table it is about breaking the paradigm of having to rip and replace,” he reveals. “For me, that is one of the biggest changes. A few years ago, we were all talking about changing legacy P2P tools without necessarily thinking about just using it as a backend and creating this layer on top of it which is the usability layer. You could even have it where your procurement people are not touching the backend and just leveraging the layer like Tonkean. To me, it has been revolutionary in the procurement space to the point that some other companies are trying to replicate Tonkean.”
With all this in mind, Fernandez is full of optimism about what the next few years could hold for the procurement function. “It really is the most exciting time to be in procurement,” he reveals. “With the evolution of technology having the flexibility that we have now, the space has seen a lot of newcomers and a lot of innovation in general. As a procurement professional, if the software companies that manage your tools are not innovating and creating a better experience, then you should look at companies like Tonkean because they might not be the ones that are going to help you create the experience you want. But without breaking the house down, you could renovate certain rooms. I would greatly suggest trying Tonkean.”
Eliyahu, for his part, insists the procurement landscape will be completely unrecognizable in 10 years. “I believe it's the most exciting time for procurement, at least in the past decade if not more, because you have all of those new things that allow you to elevate the role of procurement,” he explains. “We are plugged into a lot of different departments and there are only a few that are going through transformation right now. Procurement is probably the leader of those, and that is very exciting. 10 years ago, procurement looked very different and in a decade it will have changed again.
“This is the time where you define that. I think that's exciting in any situation where you're able to ask what the future responsibilities of procurement will be and determine how you spend your time. There's not going to be one person that defines the future. Every leader in every company of a procurement team is going to start measuring performance and they're going to measure their focus and KPIs and figure out where they are going to spend their time. Technology is an enabler for you to stop old habits and define new ways of working. I’m looking forward to the future.”
Want to learn more about how Tonkean's Process Orchestration technologies can help your procurement team move at the speed of business? Let's talk.
