How Tonkean is Revolutionising Procurement

Founded in 2015, Tonkean is an AI-powered orchestration platform, which helps internal service teams, like procurement, improve process adoption, reduce cycle times and demystify the procurement process. 

Tonkean achieves this by enabling internal teams to create processes that truly put people first, much as consumer-facing external processes do. Tonkean’s Co-Founder and CEO, Sagi Eliyahu, explains why that matters.

“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.

“In the enterprise, problems with inefficiency often stem from processes that force employees to change their behaviour and learn how to navigate systems they’re not used to,” Sagi explains. 

“They don’t know how to use it. You’re losing in both hands; you’re either losing compliance or you’re losing efficiency.”

Sagi explains the simplicity of Tonkean’s solution, which allows stakeholders to complete procurement processes from within whatever application environment they already spend time in, is one reason it has become a popular enterprise tool. 

“We have a lot of Fortune 500 companies using us for everything from purchase intake to invoice intake.

“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.”

Unique focuses foster a successful partnership

Tonkean’s partnership with Coupa, a leading cloud-based spend management platform, is an example of how valuable augmenting P2P platforms with intake orchestration technology can be.

Improving existing processes and meeting employees where they're at, as opposed to replacing processes entirely, is an important part of the modernisation process for Sagi.

“In many organisations the procurement process starts when you already have a requisition, when everyone involved is saying ‘we are ready to buy this now’,” Sagi explains. 

“That’s too late. Some people call it ‘intake to procure’, I call it ‘intent to procure’ because the procurement process really goes all the way back to someone just having a question about procurement.”

Procurement teams can use an intake orchestration tool like Tonkean to engage stakeholders at that ‘intent’ stage of buying processes—and to then coordinate approvals with power users in platforms like Coupa through resolution.

Sagi explains the partnership is successful because of the two companies’ unique, differing focuses within the industry: “The Venn diagram of what we [Tonkean and Coupa] do is very small as we focus on different areas of that process.”

Room for growth

Looking to the future, Tonkean hopes to grow into the large market their partnership with Coupa enables. 

It believes its intake orchestration is a must-have for existing Coupa customers to make the intake-to-procure process intuitive and to consistently create real business value from the procurement department. 

“I see no reason why this will not continue to be successful for many years,” Sagi concludes.

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