Talking with our partners about their products and the business problems they solve is one of the best aspects of my job. That was surely the case when I connected with Sean Sollitto of Relish to learn more about Relish Invoice AI and Relish Data Assure, two hot-selling solutions on SAP Store. His enthusiasm was infectious.

Sean told me that he’s been a big proponent of SAP Ariba software for over 20 years, long before Ariba was acquired by SAP. He became a fan while working in Global Procurement with British Petroleum, and then later in life while consulting with companies deploying SAP Ariba solutions to transform their procurement processes. “It’s not just the software,” he emphasized, “but the entire process.”

But no matter how well the SAP Ariba software worked – there were gaps. “I saw 6 million different extensibilities that procurement departments were building to handle company-specific tasks,” he remarked. One consulting project involved moving a major oil and gas company to the cloud. “They were starting from scratch, and by the time we were finished extending the software to meet all their needs, they felt as though it was their own,” he added. “But that was about the time we realized that this should no longer be a side project.” He and two colleagues had an idea to start a company focused on extending SAP software through APIs – and to simplify. “We wanted to help companies get the true value from this powerful software.”

The Relish team became obsessed with building a scalable platform to fill the enterprise software gaps, enhance the user experience, streamline workflows, and reduce the number of time-consuming manual tasks. “We looked for edge use cases with specialized processes,” Sean explained. “For example, in the airline industry, the procure-to-pay process had to accommodate shifting prices for fuel and other materials. We spent about a year building the platform with the preconfigured ability to do anything, to enable our customers to short-circuit the middleware.” They called the new company Relish, because users should relish their solutions – and add some relish to their enterprise software.

Relish Data Assure is an extension to the SAP Ariba Supplier Lifecycle and Performance solution that fully automates supplier data validation in one step, including bank routing details and tax IDs, compliance with sanctions lists, and so on, without human intervention. The results: faster supplier onboarding, reduced risk of fraud, and huge savings on tedious manual lookups and data entry.

Relish Invoice AI is designed to help companies process supplier-generated invoices. It uses artificial intelligence (AI) to read disparate documents – Word documents, PDFs, JPGs, CSV files, and more – and transform them into digital invoices ready for accounts payable to process in SAP Ariba software or SAP ERP. The supplier’s invoice is compared to the purchase order, contract, service agreement, and vendor reference data, and any anomalies are detected before submission. Errors are drastically reduced thanks to minimized re-keying. And because of fast payment processing, Sean noted, companies can realize big gains by taking advantage of vendors’ early-payment discounts.

Of course, the partnership with SAP has been a cornerstone of the Relish strategy since the beginning, given the focus on SAP Ariba software. “We have relationships with SAP up and down the organization, all with the same mission: to make customers using SAP software happier,” Sean said. “We have created a more unified product, and the SAP sales team is glad to share references with us, and vice versa.” The Relish solutions are tightly coupled with SAP Ariba software and thus can be implemented in about two weeks. As for SAP Store, Relish is receiving inquiries from all over the world. “They are excited about what they are finding on SAP Store,” he said.

Given the company’s current client roster which includes top names in consumer products, banking services, oil and gas, state governments, and more, I think many others will come to relish these innovations.

Why not satisfy your own appetite to simplify the procurement process? Check out solutions from Relish on SAP Store. See SAP blog.