What is Tonkean?

A board is the highest point in the Tonkean hierarchy and can contain many solutions. Boards are usually specific to an entire enterprise, with one board containing all the solutions for that enterprise. If your organization has unique needs surrounding business unit structure, reporting needs, or governance, you can organize your content into multiple boards.

The solution is the core of the Tonkean platform: it contains the description of a business problem, the planned and ongoing approach to solve that problem, and all the logic (that is, the modules and enterprise components) that address the business problem. Solutions also include the workspace app and business report, which allow users to gain important insights into the overall process.

Put simply, a solution allows you to accurately describe a business problem, flesh out and iterate on a solution to that problem, and respond to ongoing changes. You can create a solution from the ground up or find ready-to-go solution blueprints in the Component Library, giving you a jump-start on common use cases.

Because they can be endlessly customized, solutions can vary greatly from use case to use case, but many address common problems, such as automatically handling requests from multiple channels or coordinating processes between departments. Below are some of the most common solutions:

Each solution is made of modules. Modules house all the custom workflows, connect all of your data sources together, and give you the power to take actions based on the criteria you set up. Within each module, Tonkean provides you the ability to say "when" an event happens, the module takes specific actions.

Modules are typically built and organized as distinct, operational workflows or automations that orchestrate business processes between people, systems, and applications. This organization allows modules to remain simple to understand as they are iterated on and enhanced over time.

For example, a new employee onboarding solution could have the following modules:

Often, a solution will have a process broken out into several modules, effectively componentizing the workflow. For example, a legal request intake and triage solution may have the following modules:

In these kinds of processes, distinct parts of the process are separated to simplify updates and make troubleshooting easier.

You can create modules from the ground up or find ready-to-go module templates in the Component Library, giving you a jump-start on common use cases.

Within each board, admins have access to various enterprise components, the building blocks that support and enable your workflows. The most important of these enterprise components are data sources. These include over 150 native cloud applications you can connect using OAuth, service account, or API key. Popular data sources include Google Drive, Gmail, Salesforce, Jira, Zendesk, and Slack. For any non-SaaS or non-cloud-based data source you want to connect (such as custom databases or internal APIs), you can leverage webhooks to integrate them as custom data sources or even create your own no-code data sources.

Tonkean monitors these connected data sources for any changes and responds based on the business logic you configure. By integrating directly with your data sources, you can orchestrate complex workflows across multiple systems.

Triggers function like "when" statements. At least one trigger must be created for a module to work, but the trigger can range in complexity from beginning a process when a new item is created (such as a new Salesforce opportunity) to containing numerous "if" statements that target specific conditions (such as only opportunities that fit certain parameters).

Actions are the "then" statements that respond to triggers and represent various processes in Tonkean—everything from updating fields in a connected system or sending a message to a stakeholder.

Many records in your applications and systems are related. Matched entities take a piece of data from one system and match it to a piece of data in another system to create a link between those records (for example, you might connect a user name in a Google sheet to a username database to move data between the two places). Once the match has been made, you’re then able to pull in all respective data and metadata from your connected data sources. Matched entities is one of the most flexible and powerful features of Tonkean.

Custom item interfaces (or, simply, custom interfaces) provide a way to display and interact with an item (request). Interfaces can provide form experiences that you can combine into a sequence to create form flows for request intake or review processes; they can also provide read-only views of an item that provide important information to the people involved in your business process. Custom interfaces are built using a drag-and-drop, widget-based builder, and can include a wide variety of elements like fields, status trackers, charts, line items, and much more.

Workspace apps are the face of a Tonkean solution, providing a user experience for all the actions, data, and business logic at work within that solution. Across multiple pages, workspace apps not only provide a way to interact with your solutions, but also illustrate their value to process contributors, helping to highlight process improvements, cost savings, or other key metrics that are important to your team and organization.

Workspace apps are often designed as central dashboards for shared services teams that provide a way for users to submit requests and track those requests through to resolution. Additionally, you can create specialized metrics that provide valuable insight into your various processes.

Each module has its own business report, which consists of data columns and the items your module is monitoring—they can also provide key metrics, which are aggregate fields that provide a holistic view of important values.

Business reports pull in data from various data sources, providing constant monitoring, and can also provide direct access to module actions. For example, if your module intake source is a request form, you can submit that form directly from the business report.

Items are the pieces of data that the module will take action on, and inner items are simply children of items. This is the important data you are constantly monitoring. In most cases, items are the requests submitted by internal users for service, such as purchase requests for the procurement team or contract requests for the legal team. Another way to think of items is as a row in a spreadsheet, with columns providing important pieces of information about each item. It might have a customer name pulled from Salesforce, that same customer's total payments made amount from Stripe, and their NPS score from Zendesk, all pulled within a single report in Tonkean.

Fields are individual pieces of data used in your workflow. Fields can be pulled in from a connected data source (like Salesforce opportunity name, Salesforce opportunity amount, Intercom Tags, Zendesk ticket number, and so on) or created in Tonkean and their values populated during a workflow (for example, a user entering a purchase price into a Price field.

These are the formulas and calculations you can aggregate for the data in your data set. Continuing with the spreadsheet example, you might want to do a sum of all the tail spend under a certain dollar amount, or a count of all your open Zendesk tickets. These are metrics that dynamically calculate for your entire data set, for which you can then create a report or create modules to take action based on the values of the metrics.