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.
Coupa turned to ProcurementWorks, Tonkean's AI-Powered Intake Orchestration solution, for help.
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.”
This is the story of what happened next.
Today, 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.
Want to learn how? Download this in-depth eBook that breaks it all down.
In addition to exclusive interviews with van Keulen, you'll also find full-length webinars featuring van Keuelen and Tonkean CEO Sagi Eliyahu, along with links to customer stories showcasing intake orchestration in action.
Download the eBook now!