How Process Orchestration Can Help CPOs Better Leverage AI—And Supercharge Procurement

At PGi, we’re deeply committed to helping our clients solve their most difficult-to-solve problems—and achieve their most critical-to-achieve organizational goals. For most enterprise CPOs today, the most top-of-mind goals center around creating more consistent business value from within the procurement function—specifically by making smarter, more strategic use of technology. That means that’s our focus, too.

But what goes into that? Two things. First, using technology more strategically means leveraging your big existing technology investments—like SAP, Oracle, and Coupa—more efficiently. Second, it means tapping into the power of new, innovative technologies like AI as they come online.

There’s a way to do both at the same time. The key is AI-powered process orchestration.

Let's discover how AI-powered process orchestration transforms procurement for CPOs by integrating existing systems, automating workflows, and embedding AI capabilities. Learn how tools like Tonkean drive efficiency, innovation, and strategic decision-making in procurement operations.

What is AI-powered process orchestration?

AI-powered process orchestration helps companies use their existing mix of data, technology and people better together. It also allows you to surface for users innovative new technologies, like AI, where and when they could most use it.

Think of process orchestration as your organization’s piping for better technology use: for automating tasks, collecting better data, and better empowering employees.

And that’s just the start. In procurement specifically, CPOs can use AI-powered process orchestration technology to build and run process experiences that:

• Anticipate employees’ needs
• Guide employees through requests
• Unify processes that span many different systems and departments
• Provide intelligent support anywhere along those processes
• And automate manual steps.

With process orchestration, you can create and manage guided processes that are simplified, personalized, context-aware, highly intelligent, and that can be initiated through channels where requesters already spend their time: email, Microsoft Teams, etc.

On the flip side, process orchestration will also allow power users of your organization’s big ERP, CRM, and P2P platforms to continue using those tools as they see fit. Process orchestration technology integrates with all the different systems your organization might use, and can meet every user, in accordance with their needs and context, where they are.

In practice, this serves to mitigate technological fragmentation. It also allows you to eliminate the need for change management, more seamlessly facilitate collaboration across departments, and empower employees with new technological capabilities all at the same time, starting at the process level.

Why we’re bullish about process orchestration

Here at PGi, we’ve long been a trusted partner of the world’s best and most innovative technology providers, from data analytics to automation to AI.

That’s why we’re so excited about the potential of process orchestration—it combines all the above to give enterprise organizations by far their most powerful means yet of accelerating operational excellence while at the same time streamlining operations.

The best and most enterprise-grade process orchestration technology will:

• Seamlessly wrap around and accommodate all of your organization’s existing databases, policies, people, and systems.
• Create processes that always meet every individual employee, in accordance with their differing needs, contexts, and technological preferences, wherever they already are. (The days of relying on employee knowledge or willingness to comply with your policies and strategies to improve results are over. Instead, you can meet them where they are. In the context of SAP, for example, licensed requesters don’t even have to remember how to log in to SAP.)
• Integrate your organization’s many different teams and systems—including ERP and P2P platforms and all the various messaging apps and tools employees like spending time in—such that processes can be more seamlessly weaved in and out of them, data passed automatically back and forth, and innovative, powerful technologies, such as AI in its various forms, can be surfaced for employees most strategically.

We’re proud to partner with a process orchestration vendor whose platform delivers all this, and more: Tonkean.

Tonkean: A Leading Solution in Process Orchestration

PGi partners with Tonkean, a pioneer in process orchestration technology, to deliver:

• No-code workflow creation with customizable templates.
• Automated request intake, triage, and resolution using AI.
• Full governance controls to ensure compliance.
• Proven results, including halving cycle times and boosting adoption rates to nearly 100%.

Founded in 2015 with headquarters in Palo Alto and R&D in Tel Aviv, Tonkean was the first process orchestration platform to hit the market. Its platform is beloved by internal service teams of all kinds across the Global F500—though it’s a particular hit with legal and procurement, where internal processes are inherently cross-functional, and where the potential value of imbuing AI functionality at the process level is immense.

Tonkean comes with a variety of benefits not yet mentioned. With Tonkean, you can build processes that are personalized for each requester, and that use AI to automate the intake, triage, and resolution of every request. Plus, with a library of preconfigured process templates and a 100% no-code workflow editor, Tonkean is easy to use—giving procurement teams agency in their work. What’s more, the platform comes with full governance controls, meaning enterprises can guarantee compliance while leveraging the platform to supercharge performance.

Benefits for CPOs

With process orchestration, CPOs can:

• Optimize the use of existing and new technologies.
• Foster collaboration and operational excellence.
• Empower teams to work more strategically, enhancing business outcomes.

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Tonkean delivers for partners. Here at PGI, we’ve seen Tonkean clients leverage the company’s process orchestration technology to cut cycle times in half, achieve nearly 100% internal process adoption, and elevate their internal operations teams into strategic business partners.

We’re proud to offer Tonkean to the CPOs we partner with. For our money, there’s nothing else on the market that better serves to help you operate more efficiently and strategically invest in new and innovative technologies, like AI, all at the same time. We firmly believe that innovation and operational improvements you can scale must start at the process level. It pays, then, to invest in tools that allow you to invest in your processes. Improvements to your processes, we find, translate into investments in your people.