Intelligent business document processes through embedded AI services for SMEs (from SAP Hyperautomation Webinar Series no. 2)

Credit to Dr. Tomasz Janasz with whom I executed the Hyperautomation webinar.

Tomasz Janasz and I recently participated in SAP’s second Hyperautomation webinar, during which we had the opportunity to show how SAP AI Business Services combined with SAP Business ByDesign and SAP Business One provide instant value to small and medium enterprises (SME) by speeding up and enhancing business document processing.

The vision of Intelligent Enterprise for SME consists of three main innovation pillars:

Intelligent automation supporting so-called hands-free ERP;
Decision assistance supporting the management of the processes through management by exception; and
Enhancing the user interface with the possibility of managing processes via voice and messaging.

These three points together contribute to smarter decisions, speeding up operations, fewer errors, better user experiences, and higher end-user satisfaction.

Given the billions and billions of invoices and other documents that companies of all sizes must handle every year, we focused on what SMEs must do to transform unstructured documents into structured information and to embed that information directly into business processes. By automating as many of these processes as possible, SMEs can reduce costs, speed up processing time, and increase accuracy.

Business document processing typically consists of three main steps:

Classifying incoming documents;
Extracting business-relevant information from those documents; and
Enriching that information with additional master data for further processing in the system of record.

Let me briefly tell you how SAP can help make this happen. Using SAP’s portfolio of AI Business Services for business document processing on SAP Business Technology Platform, business users have access to specially-created, easy-to-implement content packages, among which are Document Classification, Document Information Extraction, and Business Entity Recognition.

Document Classification classifies documents into customer-specific categories. It takes document images as input, and assigns a corresponding class to it, along with a confidence value.
Document Information Extraction extracts semantical information from business documents such as supplier invoices, and enriches the information by matching it to uploaded master data. This service can take document images as input, for example, non-machine-readable PDF files. Further, it comes with pretrained global models for invoices, payment advice notes, purchase orders, and business cards.
Finally, Business Entity Recognition takes text (such as an email body) as input, and detects any type of named entity in it.

In our session, we explain how some of these AI Business Services have been natively embedded into SAP business applications for SME. We present step-by-step demos of three common scenarios in SAP Business One and/or SAP Business ByDesign:

Intelligent Invoice Scanning;
Intelligent Business Partner data capturing from business cards; and
Intelligent Travel Receipts Scanning.

We encourage you to watch our session to see how SAP approaches the challenge of business document processing using AI. And if you would like additional information, please visit SAP Help Portal, the product roadmaps, or the blogs listed below.

SAP Business ByDesign