Tonkean: Business process automation to maximise adoption

Sagi Eliyahu is CEO and Co-founder of California-based Tonkean –  a first-of-its-kind experience platform with the purpose of developing internal processes that employees actually follow.

“We started the company about eight years ago with a very simple goal in theory, very hard in practice, which is empowering companies to leverage software better,” he says.

The key to this is making sure that the approved and compliant in-house processes are optimised and intelligent—such that following internal processes is both easier and more valuable than circumventing them.

What do valuable, easy-to-follow processes look like? Eliyahu believes they must be intelligent and adaptive, capable of meeting employees where they are, and capable of resolving their requests quickly. 

Tonkean, which operates in what Eliyahu describes as the “orchestration layer” of business operations, gives organisations what they need to tailor their processes in precisely this kind of way. He believes this is the platform’s biggest strength, as it helps procurement teams create and orchestrate  personalised process experiences that maximise the chances of adoption—and with that, compliance and efficiency. 

“We wrap around the things that you already have–your P2P system, your finance system, your sales systems and your legal systems–to create that orchestration layer,” he says.  

Eliyahu considers the relationship between internal teams and internal systems to be just as important as that of the relationship between your customers and your external facing operations.  

“When you think about where consumer expectations are right now, everyone knows that if you go on a website and there are twenty fields for you to fill in versus one field, the conversion rate is going to be poor. So why do we expect people within the company to fill in a twenty step process?” he says.

Tonkean has been working with Claroty to modernise the way internal teams engage with the company’s processes and systems, with the aim of increasing adoption, compliance and satisfaction.

“They came with that mindset of, ‘we want to be able to iterate, we want to be able to adapt our process and personalise it, so the satisfaction is going to be high’,” explains Eliyahu. “That is our way to do our job better and create value for the organisation.”

This mindset of knowing the role of a procurement team within a business to help create leverage and advantages for different business functions has resulted in a successful partnership.

“They were a great partner to work with, and we are very excited to see the results and the value they've been getting through the platform and the experience-centric approach they took to really revamp their internal processes,” Eliyahu adds.

The influence of AI is something that excites Eliyahu, and not simply because of the immediate advances that it will help facilitate across the industry in the next 12 to 18 months. What he finds equally exciting is how it will change the mindset of people, encouraging them to analyse why they follow certain processes and open their imagination to the potential of improved experiences. 

“I think one thing that is very clear is that it has reinvigorated the minds and the imagination of people into asking ‘wait a second, why do I do it manually?’ They will ask ‘why is this something that I need to take 10 clicks to do? Why can't this be smarter? Why can't this be more intelligent?”  

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