Invoice Automation for SAP ERP

SmartSoft has partnered with Cassini Technology Consulting to provide SAP users with a seamless intelligent capture solution for SAP – Vendor Invoice Management Solution for SAP.

The Challenge

Most SAP users are still entering invoices into SAP manually. This is an inefficient, time-consuming and labor-intensive process, that often proves to also be error-prone.

The Solution

To address this SmartSoft has partnered with the SAP integrator Cassini Technology Consulting to create an integrated accounts payable solution for SAP. The solution streamlines the invoice processing by automatically capturing the invoice information, and then exporting the data to SAP ERP.

The automatic process starts when invoices are scanned or fetched from an email account. They are then sent for OCR processing and automatic data extraction. The invoices are then optionally sent to verification operators and exported SAP ERP.

The solution routes vendor invoices using a custom-build, 2-step approval process to finally post the invoice into SAP at the click of a single button from a SAP UI5 application.

The system extracts the essential data from the vendor’s invoices, such as Issue date, amount, supplier, order number, etc as well as line item data – product description , SKU, unit price, quantity, line item total. Other fields can also be added by configuring the software as per the user’s requirements.

• SAP ERP integration

The Data Capture engine integrates with SAP using a custom designed accelerator via a custom UI5 application. Validations if any (ex : valid customer number, valid SKU etc.) are performed using ODATA services that are consumed by the UI5 application derived from SAP.

The UI can be designed, built and deployed either as a standalone application or as a UI5 application based on custom requirements while the workflows are already developed and fully customizable based on the levels of approvals required.

• Scalable

The system can be scaled out as necessary to achieve the desired volume and processing speed by adding additional machines or VMs. The system has been tested with more than 1,000,000 pages per day.

• Extensible

Very specific requirements, which are not available in the core system, can be implemented by adding plugins and custom components.

• Flexible Deployment

Each component can be deployed and scaled up independently, possibly in a remote location.

Training

Unlike many alternative document processing systems, where configuration is required for each vendor, SmartSoft Invoices features intelligent capture and learning abilities.

Most of the invoice data is extracted without prior training and no prior configuration is required for individual vendors invoice layouts. However, if a field is omitted or extracted incorrectly the operator can easily populate the correct field by clicking on the corresponding text region. This saves some time typing but more importantly, the system learns, so the next time an order comes in from the same vendor those fields will be populated correctly.

Training requires no special effort and is done as a side effect of the user populating any missing fields.