Video: Why Procurement Teams Need AI-infused Process Automation And A Centralized Procurement Portal

Seth Colaner
Seth Colaner
September 12, 2023
September 12, 2023
5
min read
Video: Why Procurement Teams Need AI-infused Process Automation And A Centralized Procurement Portal

Let’s be honest. There are probably only a few people in your organization who know how to follow your procurement processes. That’s because—again, let’s be honest—too often, the processes themselves are hard to follow. So people skip them, preferring to find workarounds that have less friction. 

In other words, low process adoption is a process experience problem. 

And it’s a big problem. Low process adoption leads to rogue spending, a lack of auditability, and potentially even fraud. 

The solution: Your processes need to be straightforward and easy for your end users to follow. 

You improve your processes in this way with Tonkean ProcurementWorks, which includes: 

  • The incredibly simple-to-use AI Front Door
  • A unified back end that wraps around your organization’s apps and communications systems
  • A workflow builder that allows you to build and deploy automated, guided-buying experiences across your organization. 
  • A centralized procurement portal where all relevant procurement data is funneled and where statuses can be tracked
  • Intelligent intake that automatically and often proactively resolves employee-requests

These features facilitate high process adoption because they serve to vastly improve process experiences. 

Here’s what it looks like in action.

How ProcurementWorks can empower your procurement team

Alright so, what are we looking at here?

First, you know that in your day-to-day, requests of the procurement team come in from lots of places, like emails, Slack, and Teams. Tonkean triages them for you using AI; in the hub, they’re automatically sorted, and you can see how they’re organized and categorized for easy viewing.

For example, it shows SLAs and sorts sourcing requests by type, category, status, contract type, and so on. You can even drill down on specific requests like swag requests. 

And when there are incoming questions that can’t be readily solved automatically, they’re routed to a human who can dive in and handle it.

You can get details on all of your requests—including their progress. In the video example above, you’re looking at software purchase requests for an Apple product. When you click the request in the list, it will open a “pizza tracker” for the purchase request, so you can see which step in the process it’s on.

The workspace shows basic details like the point of contact, date of purchase approval, vendor name, and more at a glance. Below that you’ll see all of the relevant parts and pieces, like documentation in Drive, the purchase order in Netsuite, and the contract in DocuSign.

If you need to communicate with the stakeholders involved in the PO, just add a note in the Comments section to ping them. 

Making procurement easier

In order to ensure that people follow your procurement processes, they need to be easier to find and follow than not.  

By putting the whole process into one place, procurement teams instantly overcome the difficulties of keeping track of communications, loose ends, and documents. And instead of having to switch between apps constantly, they’re all in there in the Workflow Hub; Drive, Netsuite, and DocuSign are just a few examples of the apps that you can include for a given process. 

You don’t need to tussle with a poor user experience around your procurement processes anymore. An AI-infused process experience platform can increase process adoption among users, make processes easier to track, and save ops teams hours and hours of rote work.  

Try Tonkean for yourself with a free trial! For more, check out our ProcurementWorks product offerings. Get more insights and information about operations, no-code, and generative AI tools from our newsletter, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

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