Category Archives: Procurement Orchestration

Tonkean: Making Enterprise Procurement work with ProcurementWorks, Part 1

Tonkean was founded in 2015 to transform the enterprise back office. Tonkean leverages smart technology to bring people, process, and technology together in a manner that revolutionizes how businesses operate, allowing people to focus on high value work that gets results, and not redundant data processing, unnecessary application usage (which requires unnecessary training and unnecessary time), or unnecessary emails. One of the big problems Tonkean saw with traditional enterprise systems is that anyone who didn’t need to use the system daily was resistant to learning yet another system they saw as difficult or cumbersome (which applied to any system that didn’t use their terminology), adoption was a major problem, and employees would constantly look for ways to circumvent the system. Tonkean’s goal was to solve the adoption problem by providing users a superior intake experience, that could be as simple as a standard form-based or natural language interface like they’d find on the web, that didn’t require any training and that helped these employees make their requests through official channels instead of sneaking through back doors and dark hallways.

After a few custom projects, they found an initial niche in the Legal department and created Tonkean LegalWorks to help Legal Teams with legal mail routing, legal matter intake, matter lifecycle management, legal discipline and category classification, conflict waiver processing, law firm onboarding, contract routing and review, and even legal risk monitoring. It brought together the systems used by Legal (email, word processors, specialized Legal Billing Management solution, etc.), any risk and compliance applications they use to ensure their lawyers and firms dot all the ies and cross all the tees they need to take on every case and practice in every state they are taking legal matters in, and any other enterprise applications the team used to work and communicate internally (Slack, Teams, etc.).

And while we’re not here to discuss LegalWorks, it is through the development of LegalWorks that they learned how to bridge the gap between people, process, and technology in a in a way that empowered their clients to spend more time on strategic (legal) work instead of redundant data entry and system usage, get more value out of the tools they already purchased, and be more productive and satisfied with their technology. They learned how to enable a department to use the tools they have in ways that went beyond the original use cases, and learned they could do more and set out to identify where the biggest needs were and where they could do more. And once they found Procurement, and realized that Procurement had a lot of the same challenges as Legal, but considerably more amplified (with more systems, more complexity, and higher stakes), they knew they had found an area where they could provide their enterprise clients with the most value (and especially those that were using the major S2P suites but getting low utilization rates due to lack of intake support and a lack of integration with other internal systems).

When investigating Procurement in their enterprise customers, they found that while the major suites were reasonably suited for, and well used by, the Procurement team in strategic projects, they weren’t used much in tactical purchasing, especially in tail spend, as most of the organizational users found the system too complicated and bypassed it whenever possible (as the P2P tool lives on the long tail of enterprise applications of choice for the average enterprise employee).

So, as with some of the new breed of vendors who started specifically with the goal of Procurement intake and/or orchestration, one of their first goals was to help their Enterprise customers get more value out of their big S2P suites (and Ariba and Coupa in particular; for example, they have Intake Orchestration for Ariba and the Coupa Intake Experience to help the organization route all indirect spend, no matter how far down the tail, through Ariba or Coupa). While that’s where they are still focussed (given their current Enterprise customer base), they’ve expanded their ProcurementWorks to be a full Procurement lifecycle orchestration solution, from intake to resolution, regardless of what solutions the customers have or don’t have, what enterprise applications the teams use to communicate, what external catalogs or data sources they need to integrate with, and what policies and procedures need to be followed. In this way, ProcurementWorks is a system-agnostic solution that wraps around the customer’s existing process and applications to orchestrate and better coordinate that process.

However, one major difference is that, to Tonkean, full orchestration means creating a solution that solves all of the Procurement related problems an organization’s employees have, not just Procurement requisitions or catalog buying. That means answering all of their Procurement related questions in addition to taking their product and service requests, guiding them to the right systems if needed, or being the one interface of choice if Tonkean can be that. That means a much smarter intake process that can take any Procurement related natural language request, interface with all of the organizational data sources, and provide an appropriate answer.

For Tonkean, that starts with a smart AI interface, that they call the AI Front Door. The AI Front Door, unlike many other LLM-based products, is not just ChatGPT in a shiny wrapper, but a hybrid solution based on in-house engineering, the client organization’s preferred LLM, and knowledge systems owned by the client. It’s a very sophisticated “chatbot” compared to most offerings on the market, a technical definition would be very extensive (and lose non-PhDs), but we can illustrate much of the uniqueness of the capability with a high level overview and an example or four.

For example, when a user inputs a request, the general approach the system takes is:

  • use their AI to process the question for the type, intent, and goal
    and inform the user if they have no information (or are unable to process it) while simultaneously
    redirecting any unanswerable query to a human expert for review
  • use internal, trusted, knowledge bases to get initial information and potential answers
  • feed the question, processed clarification, and internally retrieved knowledge into the organization’s LLM to provide Natural Language feedback to the user, which could be the answer, or a refinement question if ambiguity existed in the question or potential answers from organizational data sources, which causes (an extension of) this 3-step loop to repeat
  • verify the response is sensible before presenting to the user (and, if not confident, route to a human for feedback for future internal Tonkean model training while informing the user no relevant information can be found)

Thus, if the user asks if there is an agreement with Vendor V:

  • their AI Front Door will process the query and determine that the user is asking if there is a signed contractual agreement with Vendor V that is currently active, and potentially what that agreement is
  • create the appropriate queries for each organizational system that stores contracts and agreements
  • take the responses and construct a carefully engineered prompt for the LLM that will return an answer indicating if there are agreements, and, if so, what they are and where they can be found (possibly including a direct link if the document can be accessed through the Tonkean platform)

If the user asks if she can purchase a license for SaaS app S:

  • their AI Front Door processes the request, determines that the user wants to make a purchase, it falls in the software category, and asks a few clarifying questions about the type and purpose of the product and, if it discovers the organization already has a license for a tool of that type, asks why the other tool won’t do
  • the system takes the responses and prompts the user with a link to launch a purchase request, where the system then pre-populates key fields of the organization’s software license purchase request form based on its learnings from the AI Front Door interaction and data attributes from other relevant systems (such as budget information in the ERP)
  • the system bundles the appropriate information and prompts the LLM to create grammatically correct responses that not only explain the request to the Procurement Buyer, but a Supplier if an RFP is required
  • the draft form is then presented to the user to verify, and one click puts it into the Procurement Request queue (where it can be accessed from the ProcurementWorks My Requests page at any time)

If the user asks for the procurement policy for SWAG for the marketing event she is attending:

  • their AI FrontDoor processes the requests and determines its a policy question
  • it creates the appropriate pattern match, DQL, or index query for each of the organization’s policy document data stores and collects the appropriate responses and documents
  • creates an appropriate prompt for the LLM that appropriately forms the question while asking the LLM to use only the inputs fed to it to create the response
  • ensures the response that comes back has a decent similarity to a subset of the text from the documents and then presents the natural language summary to the user

If the user asks the system for the results of the hockey game he missed working late:

  • the system processes the requests, realizes it doesn’t have that information (unless, of course, the enterprise is a sports news outfit), informs the user it doesn’t have that information and ends that interaction there

In other words, it’s built to be the central information source and jumping-off point for all types of inquiries and tasks a Procurement professional or employee with Procurement needs is likely to have, with the intent of cutting out 90% of unnecessary emails, texts, questions, and requests an augmented intelligence system can answer or guide a user through.

Moving on, the core of the Tonkean Intake Orchestration Platform that their Procurement solutions were built on is a workflow automation platform with extensive built in workflow customization, data integration, and form creation capability. In the platform, the customer can build forms (using a no-code form editor) they need to power any Procurement process (which can be created and modelled using a no-code process editor) they have, and customize them for requesters, buyers, risk & compliance, IT, or any other department as needed. They used this capability as the foundation not only for their Coupa Intake Experience and Intake Orchestration for SAP Ariba (as organizations never replace major investments, but innovative organizations look to improve and expand upon them), but their guided buying experience, supplier onboarding, and tail spend automation (among others).

One key differentiator is that any workflow can be updated at any time, something which is generally not possible in your traditional Procurement Suite such as Coupa, Ariba, and Jaggaer. For example, many of their customers now require an additional AI Review of any platform that uses AI to determine the nature of the AI and any direct and indirect risks in its proposed application to the business from a technical, legal, and brand perspective. For example, if the vendor is using Open Gen AI (such as ChatGPT), there are technical risks in that these platforms have been repeatedly demonstrated to have biased, harmful (and even murderous), hallucinatory, thieving, and sleeper behaviour. There are direct legal risks in that you could be sued (and on the hook) if the AI makes a recommendation that ends up causing personal or business harm, and indirect legal risks if the technology was trained on stolen data or data that contained copyrighted, illegal, or national secret material. There are brand risks if the Open Gen AI product you are using all of a sudden suffers extreme public backlash for its actions (or your software results in a decision that tanks shareholder value or increases environmental harm). However, they have found that most of the suites they work with do not yet have many of these new “standard” compliance checks in their relatively rigid product workflows (and telling their customers to just include it in the InfoSec review), which increases the likelihood a key check will be missed. [Considering the attention that AI is getting and the fact that legal frameworks will need to come soon, not the best idea for a large organization NOT to be assessing AI risks now.] However, with Tonkean, it takes minutes to add a compliance check and ensure it gets done by the right people before a decision is made on any Software purchase or use.

In our next article, we will dive deep into the major components of the Tonkean ProcurementWorks offering.

Orchestrate with ORO and Solve Your Source-to-Pay-Plus Challenges!

Yesterday we indicated that while 2023 was the year for intake, 2024 may be the year of orchestration. The reason? Including the buyer in the process and making it simple for them to get information on policies, do their own tactical purchasing, and engage with Sourcing and Procurement is only the first step to successful Source-to-Pay+ in your organization. The next step is simplifying the life of a Sourcing and Procurement professional whose job has become considerably more difficult with all the regulations they need to adhere to, the risks they have to identify and manage, the sanctions they have to comply with, the (knee-)jerk policies the organization has in place, the supply risks they have to consider, the supply assurance that has become as important as cost, and the collaborations across half a dozen departments or more just to get the job done.

ORO was built to be that next step. More specifically, ORO was built to be the orchestration platform for procurement workflows, enabling an organization to build as many Procurement workflows as needed, involving as many stakeholders as needed, while integrating as many systems as needed, to support the organization in acquiring whatever products and services it needs to do business. There are two key words here:

orchestration
as it was designed to ensure that all parties who needed to collaborate could collaborate and get the job done quickly and efficiently; and
workflows
there is no ONE procurement workflow; there is one workflow per product or service the organization needs, which varies based upon the value of the purchase, the supplier, the location (of the supplier), how the product or service is to be used, and so on; e.g. there might be a typical workflow for 10,000 t-shirts for re-sale, a quick-purchase workflow for 100 t-shirts for an event, and a lengthened workflow for onboarding a new supplier to produce the next 100,000 t-shirts you plan to purchase

In the example above, a typical workflow might be sending an RFQ out to your already on-boarded and approved suppliers and asking them for a cost and delivery date. In the second example, it might be allowing your marketer to just get 3 quotes from local print shops, verifying the quotes are valid, allowing the marketer to buy from the lowest quote on the P-Card, and that’s that. In the third example, it might be subjecting the supplier to an extensive compliance and risk analysis to ensure there is no slave labour in the supply chain, unsafe working conditions at the factory, counterfeit materials, denied party associations, and so on … and only then onboarding the supplier of interest for a full sourcing event.

ORO can do this because they have built a no-code platform with fully customizable workflows that can be built from scratch using any capability of, or data in, the product and connect with, pulling data in and pushing data out, any integrated solution through the APIs. This can be used to orchestrate intake requests (because intake is just another Source-to-Pay+ module, which they provide as part of their orchestration, configured to your liking), processes, forms, and organizational master data (which can be grouped into projects).

When an end user logs in, they see their home screen where they can start a new process (be it a purchase request, supplier onboarding, evaluation form, and so on), see all their current tasks (as well as the estimated duration and status), and an easy smart NLP-based AI-enabled search capability that can take questions and guide the user to appropriate processes.

For example, all they need to do is enter their business request in plain English, and then the platform will ask them clarifying questions to guide them to the right process. For example, if they say they want a 3D printer for pharmaceutical research, it will know that the buyer is looking for laboratory equipment and not a mass-market resin 3D printer for 3D part models for manufacturing and then ask the user if it’s small laboratory equipment (as they are doing preliminary research) or large laboratory equipment (as they are testing suitability for mass production). (If the details are sufficient, they can go down to level 4 in a category tree.) They can then identify the most likely suppliers, including those the company has done business with in the past, and if the approximate spend is known, bubble up the best fit to the top (and allow the user to click into recent transactions). If the right supplier (and product) is identified, the user can then kick off a procurement request, and based on the value, the system will either guide them through the process of purchasing it themselves or kicking it off to Procurement (because the amount is over their spending limit). It will also tell them how long the process typically takes and the steps they, or the buyer, will need to go through.

When the request gets to the buyer, they can review all of the information entered by the requester and stored by the system, see the process they need to go through, send the required RFPs and forms to the supplier, get alerted when the response comes back, if the response and price is right, kick off the order, and it’s done. Moreover, they can jump into their sourcing system if they choose to edit the default RFP or go through its built-in processes, or just wait for everything to come back through the API integration and never leave ORO for a predefined process. (This also means that the ORO platform can use the APIs to fully create the necessary event/process in the integrated tool and, if SSO is enabled, ORO can jump you right into the third party application, and if the third-party application has a fine-grained API, into the screen that is appropriate for the current process step.)

Processes are very powerful and can contain as many tasks (which can be built in-system, third party, or data collection tasks), approvals, (stakeholder) reviews, forms, documents, notifications, requests, and sub-processes as necessary, in any order. This means that as soon as an event is kicked off for a software product that may need a security review and privacy review, IT and the Data Protection Officer can be notified, they can let the buyer know if they have any particular concerns not covered in the standard onboarding processes that they want to address and data they want collected, reviews can be staggered or split so as to prevent a process from getting too far when non-compliance or unacceptable risk can be decided early, or to prevent risk and compliance analysis from slowing a process down when the perceived risk is low or a supplier can always be subbed out last minute. Processes that can be done in parallel, including approvals, can be kicked off in parallel to minimize time. And allowances for send-backs can be made to collect more information or correct situations without cancelling and restarting the entire process and losing the history. And an impacted party cannot only see their current task in each process but see the entire process at a glance and the progress to date. They can also access any associated forms, documents, and see the milestones that have been completed at various steps (which could be for future steps if they are stuck in an approval or something was sent back to them for further review).

ORO is highly configurable and in addition to typical settings you’d find in any old SaaS app, you can also configure the assets available to be used in the application by the users who have access to workflow / process construction, modification, and utilization. This means you can select the apps they have access to, the data in those apps they have access to, and so on. And it’s very easy to use with an extremely intuitive user interface.

When it comes to process creation, the conditions that can be used to drive the logic can be defined on any data element in the system, or any system ORO connects to, as well as any derived data or measure on that data element in the system, or any system ORO connects to. ORO makes it possible for you to find those data elements and statuses by grouping them into categories (custom fields, department, ERP, invoice amount, suppliers, users, working capital, assessment risks, etc.) and making selection easy. For example, if in the ERP Supplier Status Info, you might have “new supplier”, “activation required”, “currency enabled”, “new country”, etc. Furthermore, the processes can be configured to monitor the status (and data) at all times and automatically jump back to a specific step if any conditions change that would require reviews to be conducted again or new approvals. For example, if during an assessment, IT decided that additional security is required, and kicks it back to the vendor who indicates they will add it for an additional fee, and that causes the overall sourcing event to cross a certain threshold, approvals can be revoked and a new approval chain executed (if approval from the CIO in addition to the buyer’s manager is now required).

In other words, ORO is the orchestration platform you didn’t know you needed when you are stuck trying to manage disparate processes across different systems, track when things change, and ensure things get done.

 

2023 was the year of Intake. Will 2024 be the Year of Orchestration?

Orchestrate the feeds
Pave the way for meeting needs
Phase one is initiated,
there’s no more paper chase, eh?
Set the space ablaze
Case closed, we did rephrase
Workflows for phase by phase
Gets you through the hard days

To the tune of “Orchestrate” by Eliozie
(Outtro NSFW)

2023 may have been the year of Intake with Zip raising 100M to do Procurement intake management for the layperson, but 2024 will be the year of Orchestration. The reason is that while it’s great to manage intake and give the organizational end-users and stakeholders insight into where their request is in the process at all times, allowing them to interact with Sourcing and Procurement where needed, it’s even greater to give Sourcing and Procurement the orchestration engine they need to get their job done and fulfill those organizational requests efficiently and effectively – across people, processes, and platforms.

With so many challenges for an average buyer to fulfill a request from an organizational employee or stakeholder:

  • identify potential suppliers
  • identify potential products
  • verify products
  • for suppliers not onboarded, verify supplier eligibility for onboarding
  • onboard the required suppliers for the sourcing event
  • conduct the sourcing event
  • identify the winner
  • conduct negotiations and …
  • collaboratively develop a contract for signature
  • (e-)sign the contract
  • identify and track the performance obligations
  • identify and track the compliance obligations
  • import the pricing into the e-Procurement system
  • send out the (first) PO
  • track the order acknowledgement and the shipment
  • ensure and record delivery
  • etc. etc. etc.

Doing all of this often involves

  • using a third party supplier discovery service to identify potential solutions
  • searching product specs in a third party marketplace that integrates with your catalog management application
  • using a TPRM (third party risk management) to make sure the supplier doesn’t have any obvious red flags
  • onboarding the supplier in your supplier management solution to collect organizational specific data requirements in order for you to potentially transact with the supplier
  • switching to an e-Sourcing tool to do the RFP/RFQ (as appropriate)
  • running a (weighted) analysis on the bids to select a winner …
    possibly in an analytics solution
  • conducting negotiations in a negotiation management tool (that may or may not be integrated with the CLM)
  • managing the contract drafting processing in the CLM
  • … and the signing in the e-Signature tool
  • and then run the the contract through a contract analysis solution to push the performance and compliance obligations into the governance module
  • … and extract and push the pricing into the e-Procurement system(‘s integrated catalog)
  • … where the PO is cut and the Ack received before …
  • they have to manage the invoice in the I2P (Invoice to Pay) / AP (Accounts Payable) system as well as verify the goods receipt
  • etc. etc. etc.

Furthermore, even if the organization has a “suite”, chances are it’s not that “sweet” and many of the core modules aren’t tightly integrated (as most of today’s S2P “suites” were assembled through acquisition and while the UX has been cleaned up to look consistent at first glance and there is some “endpoint” integration, chances are that it’s minimal data push and pull between process endpoints). It’s also often the case that if the required workflow doesn’t exactly match a very specific use case, the integration just doesn’t work seamlessly and it’s a lot of effort. That’s for the modules in the suite. Not all modules are in the suite. Most suites don’t have full TPRM, extensive compliance management, negotiation support, inventory management, etc. and that is through non-integrated third party solutions. A simple process that should take a few hours of effort to check all the boxes can take days of effort as buyers have to switch between multiple systems, check status, re-enter data, switch back to the intake platform to update the requester, make changes, and so on. Just like the introduction of “modern solutions” has taken onboarding from a 2-day fax and email process to a 2-week gated process with multiple, disjointed, approvals, the proliferation of disjoint, specialized, Source-to-Pay-Plus solutions has taken simple processes that take hours of person-work and days in real-time to complex processes that take days of person-work and weeks in real-time.

The solution? Procurement orchestration. Something that integrates, to the extent possible, all of the modules together in the right process with the right steps in the right seamless flow that requires any piece of data to be entered once and only once in a consistent user interface … and works for all parties, the requester, the buyer, and any stakeholder involved in the process.

Does Your Procurement Process Take Too Long, Maybe You Need to Zip Through It!

Zip is an interesting player. Started in 2020 to innovate the (lack of) intake in the Procurement world, they managed, through sheer ease of use and organizational friendliness, to embed themselves in a number of large organizations, get major investor attention, and, in less than four years, catapult themselves to a unicorn valuation.

However, as a result of those investments, they’ve been hiring good engineers as fast as they can find them, beefing up the orchestration, extending the product footprint (with baseline source-to-contract as well as some procure-to-pay capability), and launching a new integration platform, which is essential for source-to-pay-plus orchestration. They are making quite rapid progress in a space where many (but not all) larger companies have considerably slowed in their introduction of new innovation.

Marketing itself as procurement orchestration, Zip was founded to address the facts that:

  • purchasing is now distributed across numerous departments, and individuals, in today’s organizations,
  • (significantly) more cross functional approvals are required to control cost and risk, and
  • the ERP is not enough, and the plethora of apps and systems a modern organization needs are disconnected.

Now that they have powerful workflow creation capability, integration capability, and overall orchestration capability that can enable whatever you have (including Workday, Ariba, and Coupa), they now address the core problems they were formed to solve.

With the Zip platform, you can:

  • connect all individuals who need to purchase with all departments that need to be involved and vice-versa,
  • integrate all of the departments that need to review and approve purchasing (related) decisions, and
  • get visibility into each stage of the process across ALL of the organization’s systems (and even complete some tasks in the Zip platform where it has the corresponding Source-to-Pay capability).

On top of this you can:

  • integrate third party data feeds as well as applications to get insights and power analytics you need at any step of the process,
  • run cross-platform reports across performance and timelines as well as all spend, risk, and related data in the system,
  • manage your vendors and their data (which could be spread across a dozen systems) from one central viewpoint, and
  • manage your organizations (and subsidiaries) by department, category, etc.

The two-fold reason that you can do all this is because the Zip platform is really good at:

  • workflow management and
  • platform, and most importantly, data integration.

We’ll start with workflow management.

In the Zip platform, workflows are incredibly customizable. Workflows can:

  • have as many steps as required
  • which can be defined as sequential or parallel … and the workflow will not advance until all parallel steps are completed
  • have as many states as is needed (though most will only need a few states: locked, ready, in progress, approved, rejected (and sent back), rejected [and process terminated], etc.)
  • have as many sub-tasks and/or associated approvers as needed (so if the Legal Review needs two sign offs due to different policies that have to be met or the Finance Review needs two sign offs to ensure transparency, no problem)
  • have as many conditions as necessary for workflow selection / triggering (so you can have different procurement workflows by sub-category by geography if need be)
  • have as many triggers and dynamic data pulls defined as needed to instantiate a step once unlocked (e.g. bring up all vendors associated with a product, all approvers associated with a role, etc.)
  • link to as many external systems as required, with each (sub)task associated with the app/system in which the integrated party may perform his or her task
  • have as many details and associated documents as necessary
  • for Procurement, link to associated products, vendors, and / or contracts
  • etc.

And this is why the Zip Platform is so easy to use by, and attractive to, the average purchaser / requisitioner in an organization.

When an average user wants to buy, all they have to do is

  1. log into Zip via SSO (which can be configured to orchestrate organizational workflows beyond Procurement),
  2. indicate they want to purchase something
  3. select what they want to purchase
  4. make a few category/specification sub-selections to help the platform narrow in to the appropriate workflow (e.g. Facility Services, Janitorial; Computing and Electronics, Laptop;)
  5. if there are pre-approved vendors and/or products, the vendors/products; if not, they can select their own vendors/products
  6. answer a few [sub]-category dependent associated questions on the contract type, corporate or personal data that will be shared, etc.
  7. indicate the budget (amount) they wish to use (if appropriate)
  8. and submit the request …

The process is kicked off, the requisite data / document / survey collection is begun, those involved in the process are notified (and have visibility into the tasks they (potentially) have (coming), and the requester has full visibility into where the process is at all times (as the system will synch with external systems on predefined intervals between 15 minutes and 24 hours, usually depending on how often the external systems are used and what restrictions there are on access [e.g. some systems don’t have an API and do daily exports, and for systems with real-time APIs, the user can force synch anytime they want). But, most importantly, events that used to take hours to create and weeks to coordinate, can be created in minutes and the coordination effort is non-existent — the system handles everything for you.

When a user logs in, they can go to their (task) dashboard and see all the projects they are involved in, all the tasks they are assigned in those projects, and drill into all of the open tasks they need to work on now. They can also see how long the task has been open, when it is/was due, the average time taken on a task of that type, and the average time the user takes to do the task (if they drill into the appropriate report).

Moreover, if vendors are involved, vendors are invited and taken to their own portal where they see the event and only see what additional information is required (as anything requested upon onboarding is already available.

It’s also very easy to setup and administer, which is also critical for a modern platform. At any time, a user with appropriate authority can:

  • define, modify, and even inactivate workflows, as appropriate using a very easy to use no-code workflow builder where the users visually define the steps; select the actions; define the rules, actions, and triggers, etc.
  • define or modify (approval) statuses
  • define or modify the organization’s category hierarchy
  • define or modify new or existing survey templates which allow the user to add sections, questions, selection lists, etc.
  • create new system fields and documents and associate them with the appropriate system objects
  • create or modify the lookup types
  • add or modify user access rights, down to geographies, departments, workflows, function access rights
  • define or modify the organizational hierarchy (subsidiaries, departments, queues, locations, GL entities)
  • define roles, users, and permissions
  • define bank accounts and vendor (virtual) cards
  • add (out-of-the-box) or modify integrations, or launch the new low-code Zip Integration Platform that allows customers to build their own connector to any system with an Open (REST) API
  • define the default reports (vendor, spend, performance, etc.)

While we’re not covering them in this post, we should note that Zip has a P2P module (that 42% of its customers use) and a new Sourcing Module, and that Zip is actively working on new capabilities and module(s).

The new capabilities we can discuss now, on the Q1/Q2 roadmap, are:

  • NLP-based intake for even easier usability and up-front integration of Slack, Teams, and other collaboration platforms to allow workflows to be kicked off in those platforms
  • predictive analytics — the analytics module is being upgraded and it will include recommendations for spend management and process improvement using trend analysis, machine learning, and other techniques that can be used to provide the user with additional insight

In other words, Zip, which has well over 300 enterprise customers, is zipping along and intends to keep doing so. The great thing is that you don’t need to replace any of your enterprise systems, including any best of breed systems you have for sourcing or procurement, but instead connect them together to maximize the value you get out of them. Zip is an(other) I20 — intake to orchestrate — system that is certainly worth being aware of and checking out if system, process, or stakeholder orchestration and collaboration is a challenge in your enterprise.