One of our customer recently contacted us regarding the procurement process. The initial situation was starting to create too much work and too many issue on the process. Basically each countries were using a different excel file as a catalog in order to identify the need. Then the person doing the Purchase Request needed to copy past the different information in the SAP GUI in order to create the PR.

As you can imagine, the work was taking too much time when the PR contains more than couple of lines, also taking a lot of time for the procurement team to ensure that all excel file are up-to-date and also make sure that the PR actually contains the correct information.

This customer did his due diligence and check five e-procurement catalog with SAP integration. The minimum price tag was around 15K EUR plus a monthly fee based on the volume (number) of PR/PO issue in the system (+/- 600 EUR / month) , without including the cost of the project. The solution at the lowest cost didn't match the requirement, but despite that we used the number to discuss the business case with the customer. Despite the pain and issue created with the actual process, they could not justify and find a ROI prior 36 months.

This customer is a full microsoft shop, using all the services in O365. Therefore they had explore the option of PowerApps and Flow in order to create a unique catalog, accessible for all users with different view based on access right, location, job profiles, .... the only missing piece was the connection between O365 and SAP.

There is a connector proposed by Microsoft in order to interconnect SAP and Flow, but that was not an option for this customer. I don't have enough O365 knowledge to really explain the reason, but license cost was part of it.

That's where we come into place. We proposed two solution with our Robot, either we exposed our Robot thru an API that could be contacted directly from PowerApps, or we pull the data from a csv file on a Sharepoint. The latest was chosen by the customer despite the latency added in comparison with the API approach. We are only talking about max 2 minutes latency, so it was more than acceptable in this process.

In a nutshell the new process looks like:

All together the development of the Power Apps and the rpfact robot costed less than 5K EUR, and we are at 75 EUR / month in running cost. The running cost can vary up and down as it depends on the number of minutes the robot is running per month, but as we have a max monthly cost cap, no surprise for our customer, and the running cost include the maintenance.

Once the PR is in SAP, the standard process continue including the release strategy.

Overall it's now easier for people to create PR, easier for Procurement team to maintain one catalog, and no more copy/paste.

If you would like more details and/or if you are interested in using this e-procurement solution with or without the Power Apps part, feel free to contact us at contact@rpfact.com