Tonkean has announced a new partnership with SAP. This partnership sees the launch of Tonkean Procureworks, its Intake Orchestration solution on the SAP Store. For SAP Ariba the AI-powered intake and orchestration application provides a user interface that allows a user to use natural language throughout their day.
The Tonkean Procureworks application will work with SAP Ariba Catalog, SAP Ariba Buying and Invoicing, and SAP ERP, private cloud edition. Its features enable internal teams to build and orchestrate frictionless intake experiences for users. It will also accelerate the intake to procure process, integrate previously fragmented applications and promote proactive procurement engagement.
How does Tonkean Procureworks function?
For example, using Tonkean, a user could make a simple, plain English request such as “I need a caterer for an event in London”. The Tonkean AI will then analyse the request, interpreting the intent and any data associated with it. It will then present the best solutions available on the marketplace solution.
The intake orchestration also works where people work, in Slack, Teams and email. The system will understand who the requestor is and will create the procurement request with all known details. It will provide pre-approved candidate suppliers for the user to select from. If none of the suppliers are appropriate, the user can add more information to narrow down their search.
Besides a simple request, Tonkean also supports guided templates for more complex requirements, walking the user through the different criteria they should consider, for example, for a software purchase. Tonkean uses knowledge of the user and their department to personalise the experience. Once created, it can assist with creating the approval workflows with organisations able to create the appropriate approval paths using its no-code editor.
Where actions need to take place outside of SAP Ariba, the Tonkean platform orchestrates these connections, initiating workflows in a large number of different applications.
Sagi Eliyahu, Tonkean Co-Founder and CEO, commented, “Integrating Tonkean with SAP Ariba solutions gives our customers an even more complete and unified set of intake orchestration capabilities. We are proud to have our solution listed on SAP Store and to be a partner in the SAP PartnerEdge program. We look forward to working with SAP to help customers transform process experience and delivery.”
Automating Procurement
Whether users have to use Ariba or SAP ERP, they can be presented with customised workflow solutions that are streamlined for the business and present personalised forms that take away the pain of using what can be a clunky standard experience for many.
Once approved, a purchase request can be turned into a purchase order and ultimately have the invoice matched against the purchase order automatically.
Once created, Tonkean provides visibility of the existing purchase requests without having to login into the SAP system. The purchase request tracker surfaces a real time view of the request and specific information such as a risk score, estimated delivery dates and the current approval status of the request.
Where users, such as procurement teams, make multiple requests, Tonkean provides a customisable dashboard that surfaces all relevant requests with their status and a summary of performance across all requests.
While Tonkean comes with a library of standard procurement workflows, customers are able to modify or create their own using a modern drag-and-drop interface. Users can add notifications, approval gates and far more.
The details
Available now Tonkean for SAP is available in two editions for SAP. The starter edition costs $15,000 to set up and has an annual cost of $100,000 for 100 active users. This edition includes:
- All platform intake & experience capabilities (Custom Forms, Ticketing, Apps, custom branding, etc.)
- All platform AI capabilities (AI Front door, NLP, OCR, etc.)
- All platform automation capabilities (No-code workflows, Approvals, Notifications, Conditional logic, Formulas, etc.)
- All out-of-the-box integrations (Email, Chat, ERP, HRIS, CRM, eSignature, CLM, etc.) in addition to SAP Ariba Buying and Invoicing, SAP S/4HANA
- All core enterprise features (SSO, Role & Permissions, etc.)
- Multi-tenant Cloud Deployment
There is also an Enterprise Edition, which includes an unlimited number of users and several other capabilities, including:
- Advanced integrations (In-house tools, Databases, On-premise systems)
- Advanced enterprise features (Active directory, Business Groups, Guest users, etc.)
- Options for single-tenant cloud and self-hosted (cloud or on-premise) deployment
Price is available by request from Tonkean, for this edition.
Tonkean Procureworks is available in multiple languages, supports multiple currencies and is localised for several regions. Though the information on the SAP Store does not reveal which languages are supported.
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
For organisations that use SAP Ariba, Tonkean Procureworks can provide users with guided workflows that take the pain out of learning how to use SAP Ariba internally. While this is targeted at larger organisations, it will be interesting to see whether Tonkean offers a mid-market version. Procurement for many organisations is complex and time-consuming. While there are undoubtedly time savings that can be achieved for global organisations, for some mid-market companies, procurement processes can also be burdensome.
Currently, Tonkean customer quotes focus on its LegalWorks solutions. Procureworks was first launched in March 2023. Back then, Stagecoach, the UK’s largest bus operator, was planning to use the solution. Mike Humphreys, Group Chief Technical Officer at Stagecoach, commented, “Tonkean is going to play a core role in our efforts to digitally transform our internal legacy processes. We plan to use it to automate our legacy invoicing processes, and we anticipate it will create accelerated value in other areas, as well.”
There is no indication of how that deployment went. This new announcement with the SAP relationship should bring it to the attention of a much wider audience. Hopefully, Tonkean can start producing case studies that demonstrate the delivery of the promised benefits.
