Intake and Orchestration in procurement: How do the solution providers define its role? – Tonkean

Spend Matters chose Intake and Orchestration as its main research theme for this quarter because we believe it is the fastest-growing procurement tech market segment today. If you’d like to understand more about what intake management and orchestration mean for procurement, read our Guide to Intake and Orchestration.

As part of our research we are conducting analyst-led analysis/thought leadership, solution provider deep-dive analyses, webinars and interviews with both the practitioners who use this technology and the vendors who sell it.

Today’s niche vendor viewpoint providing thoughts on the need for this market segment and how the solution fulfils it comes from:

Matt Aaronson, Director of Product Marketing at AI process automation specialist Tonkean:

What was the gap in the market and the business need that Tonkean intended to fulfil?

“Tonkean was founded to address persistent challenges faced by enterprise companies, particularly shared service teams like procurement and legal, related to using software tools to manage complex processes. The market lacked solutions that could technologically unify siloed systems, operationally connect isolated teams, or enable internal teams to facilitate complex processes that adhere to organizational policies and business logic. Even with the rise of APIs, there were substantial hurdles involved in orchestrating such processes in house. Such integrations and workflow-building required advanced technical resources that were hard to come by, and the output was difficult to evolve once implemented. This left enterprise shared service teams struggling with inefficiencies caused by delays, uncertainty, inflexibility, and a lack of visibility for stakeholders.

“An experience problem had also emerged. As a general principle, processes should work for people, instead of making people work for the process. As tools proliferated, each with sophisticated capabilities that were enthusiastically adopted by core power users, the end users who only used these tools occasionally (e.g. the majority of users internally) found themselves increasingly confused and alienated. That led to poor system adoption and compliance as these users sought ‘side doors’ to get the support they needed – rendering the software much less useful.

“Tonkean addresses these challenges by providing a no-code orchestration platform that connects and allows you to utilize all these existing pieces more seamlessly together. It empowers non-technical users to manage and evolve processes that span all relevant technologies and people without heavy IT involvement, ensuring that processes are both intuitive and efficient. Moreover, by prioritizing the end-user experience, Tonkean ensures that processes are user-friendly and transparent, fostering higher adoption and compliance, and ultimately maximizing the overall efficiency and effectiveness of shared service teams.”

Why does procurement (and business) need this extra layer of tech?

“Procurement teams are under pressure to increase spend under management, accelerate cycle times, reduce risk and improve visibility and predictability for the business. Intake orchestration solutions can address two of the most significant challenges that get in the way.

“For requesters, procurement processes can be unwieldy and inefficient, leading requesters to bypass official channels. Unfamiliarity with complex procurement tools often drives employees to seek shortcuts, resulting in poor compliance and delayed engagement. Even with ‘no PO, no pay’ policies, the cumbersome nature of traditional systems deters proper usage. Solutions like Tonkean address this by creating a superior experience for requesters that is:

• Personalized: Tailored workflows that meet the unique needs of each user.
• Context-aware: Pulling in data from all relevant systems to streamline the process.
• AI-supported: Using Al to interpret intent, triage inbound requests, and then to assist during the intake process.
• Channel-agnostic: Enabling users to kick off intake where they already spend their time — email, Slack, Teams, etc.
• Centralized: Consolidating tasks into a single, user-friendly workflow.
• Transparent: Providing clear visibility into the status and progress of requests.

“Another challenge is the too-often siloed nature of procurement operations, with systems, departments and sub-processes isolated from one another in a way that hinders efficient and effective work. Without an intake-orchestration layer, procurement teams exert significant manual effort handling request triage, managing handoffs between functions and systems, pestering stakeholders for approvals, and doing tedious data entry.

“Facilitating procurement processes effectively, at scale and with requisite speed demands early engagement, consistent collaboration, integration and intelligent automation. That’s what intake orchestration provides. Orchestration technology wraps around all your organization’s existing databases, policies and systems so you can connect and pass data back and forth between these systems seamlessly and automatically

“Such capabilities not only reduce cycle times but increase spend under management. They transform procurement from a transactional silo into a strategic, collaborative nexus.”

Analyse the vendor

Read our full analysis of Tonkean’s solution in this Vendor Analysis, part of our members’ subscription service.

Get help

You can engage Spend Matters to help you find your best-fit solution (including a current assessment of your organization, RFx and selection advisory).

Learn more

To know more about the technology, watch a recording of our webinar, “Demystifying Intake and Orchestration in Procurement.” Our analysts define what Intake and Orchestration technologies are, showcase use cases and explain how investing in these technologies could benefit your business.