AI Powered Invoice Management with SAP RAP and ABAP on Cloud

The era of Cloud computing for ABAP is here. And hence the power of AI / ML are also unleashed with newly created packages and tools developed for ABAP. Here you can find an example of it.

The main idea of using AI is to automate manual tasks or to help human in taking decisions. And this is the most debatable topic now 😶😶😶.

This blog series consists bunch of RAP developments, NodeJS developments, SAP AI Business Services – Document Information Extraction Service and much more. Also this will not only give you idea, but a bunch of several coding blocks which you can utilize in your day to day developments.

Scenario – 

This consists of end-to-end product scenario with RAP and AI enabled Vendor Invoicing OCR and Payment WF process.

• You can host this tool in ABAP on Cloud environment.
• Then there are some custom middleware hosted in SAP BTP CF environments
• If you are having on-premise S4 HANA, you can start Workflow processes designed inside the SAP S4 HANA on-premise.

What is AI and OCR?

Optical Character Recognition is abbreviated by OCR. This technology uses patterns to understand the text from an Image. Now this image extracted texts is very raw to understand the context. Here comes the AI by which all the texts can get Business relevance. SAP has a tool named Document Information Extraction service which can give process any jpg, pdf formats to structured format data by using internal AI and OCR techniques.

RAP Developments –

RAP is an essential element of ABAP Cloud, the ABAP development model for building cloud-ready
business apps, services, and extensions on SAP BTP, SAP S/4HANA Cloud, and SAP S/4HANA.

SAP BTP and CF –

The SAP BTP, Cloud Foundry runtime lets you develop polyglot cloud-native applications and run them on the SAP BTP Cloud Foundry environment. SAP Cloud Application Programming Model. Develop polyglot applications. Build on open standards with SAP Java, Node.

All Blogs in this Series –

AI Powered Invoice Management with SAP RAP and ABAP on Cloud

AI Powered Invoice Management with SAP RAP and ABAP on Cloud – Part 1

AI Powered Invoice Management with SAP RAP and ABAP on Cloud – Part 2

AI Powered Invoice Management with SAP RAP and ABAP on Cloud – Part 3

Architecture

Architecture: AI Powered Vendor Invoicing with RAP and ABAP on Cloud

Systems used –

1. ABAP on Cloud – Actual user Interface to upload Invoice and process Invoice Images through AI
2. NodeJS in SAP CF – Acts as a connector between SAP ABAP Cloud and ABAP on-premise
3. SAP AI Business Services – Document Information Extraction – SAP BTP based SaaS solution
4. SAP On-premises – Workflow approvals, payment process are done in this system

Lets have a demo….

Launch the RAP Application –

Attach the file

Save the document

Click on Analyze document to Extract the information from the Vendor Invoice –

You can find the data is inserted –

Go back to home page and come back to this screen – also the line items are visible

Then do the modifications in the line item and then select the line and click on “Send Payment
Process”.

Then You can see the workflow will be triggered in SAP S4 HANA on-premise Inbox application-

Inbox

From Inbox – Then click on approve

Email sent once approved

Building Wild

1. Customers are now having decoupled ABAP Cloud environment from the On-premise. Where they can use this as a reusable artifacts for cross company implementations keeping core clean and different for different LOBs
2. Robust NodeJS based frameworks to integrate and communicate with different SaaS solutions by sap and integrations of more complex AI tools for day to day activity.
3. Workflow related automations can be also achieved as a part of S4 Hana processes

Must Read References –

1. Install Eclipse and Git
2. Upload file in RAP
3. SAP CF AXIOS
4. Document information extraction service API