We recently spoke to TCS about its proprietary integrated source-to-pay platform, TAP^TM, which offers a modular solution across sourcing, contract management, purchasing operations, accounts payable, and supplier hub. This blog examines the use of AI and GenAI within TAP, the potential benefits, and its commercial models.

Overview

Key modular offerings and capabilities include:

• Sourcing – quick events, RFx events, auctions, supplier evaluations, bid comparison and award decisions
• Contract management – creation, negotiation, and lifecycle tracking of contracts
• Purchasing – catalog, requisition, purchase order, goods receipt
• Accounts payable – inflow and capture, invoice validation, invoice matching, invoice exception and posting, and special requests
• Supplier hub – supplier information management and supplier self-service.

TAP currently has global customers across ten industry verticals, where it processes ~30m invoices, ~5m POs annually, 600k suppliers, and ~150k business users. The platform caters for client customization, allowing clients to tailor key features to address their specific organizational requirements.

One recent client example is the deployment of TAP for a multinational electronics company's MRO program, which covers 41 business units across six countries. The operations complexity includes ~6.8m catalog items across ~31k suppliers hosted on TAP and two punchout catalogs that offer a unified MRO procurement solution including seamless integration with SAP and Oracle. With TAP, the client has been able to create purchase orders for ~800k items successfully with their suppliers while reducing complexity.

AI & GenAI in TAP

TAP incorporates various technology enablers to enhance its ability to offer agile and lean procurement solutions. These include identifying GL code and detecting duplicate invoices, OCR to capture header and line-level fields in ~20 languages, reporting with role-specific dashboards, automation for exception handling, and rule-based matching.

Unlike legacy systems, which often require integrating separate reporting tools and AI/ML to address such challenges, TAP’s inbuilt technology enablers streamline the process and deliver end-to-end capability. Other important features designed for ease of use include seamless integration with ERPs, third-party, and legacy systems, notifications for processing saved documents, an intuitive interface with convenient quick links, and tools for buyer-supplier collaboration and query management. Combined with the intuitive UI and quick links, these provide a compelling value proposition for non-core business users and vendors, significantly helping to drive adoption across organizations.

TCS has embedded multiple prebuilt AI/ML models within TAP to increase process efficiency, enhance the user experience, drive user adoption through a simplified and more intuitive user interface, and minimize manual interventions.

This includes the use of AI models to provide AI-based GL code suggestions for invoice processing which can improve the spend classification, sourcing event type suggestion & cloning of events, AI-based supplier suggestion on supplier search (Free text req, Manual PO) and supplier selection, AI-based duplicate invoice checks, invoice outlier detection.

Additionally, TAP leverages GenAI to enhance strategic decision-making while reducing manual effort and enhancing accuracy by automating complex tasks such as supplier notifications/emails for suppliers, auto-creation of RFx events with detailed RFx documents, tailored evaluation questionnaires, and assigning appropriate weights. It also provides a quick summary of contract clauses and a contract comparison, highlighting differences and similarities across clauses. Most of these functionalities will help procurement teams gain efficiencies, reducing overall cycle time and improve user experience with business stakeholders.

Potential benefits include reduced maverick buying & improved compliance

Some of the key potential benefits from TAP adoption include:

• Improved spend under control up to ~90%
• 30%-40% reduction in operating cost
• ~50% reduction in processing cycle time.

Other KPIs that TAP has been focused on include PO processing time reduction, tracking and reporting savings, invoice exception reduction, helpdesk query reduction, and user adoption improvement.

Flexible commercial models across implementation & operation

While TAP focuses on impacting various operational KPIs, the platform also offers flexible commercial and engagement models from flexibility in deployment cost, which can be distributed over the deployment period, to operating costs. Deployment times to integrate with existing ERPs such as SAP, Oracle, and PeopleSoft are also relatively rapid at ~12-16 weeks.

The pricing models for ongoing operations can be fixed monthly recurring charges (MRC) for smaller customers and monthly transaction volume-based charges (price per invoice, per PO, per contract, or a per-sourcing event-based processing fee) which can be based on overall volumes, for larger customers.

TAP is provided to clients as SaaS or BPaaS models and offers single point of accountability starting from implementation, hosting of application, infrastructure, application support & maintenance and BPS services.