The Criticality of Automating Document Processing For SAP

Organizations invest heavily in their SAP S/4HANA transformation. However, when a critical process needs to leave the SAP system, it hits a world of supplier portals with no APIs, urgent customer emails with PDF attachments, legacy mainframe systems that are business-critical, and a maze of spreadsheets.  

This is due to the automation gap between the powerful SAP core and the rest of the organization’s heterogeneous enterprise. Traditionally, bridging this gap meant swivel-chair interfaces, manual data entry, and costly custom integrations. Now, the partnership between UiPath, as an SAP Solution Extension (SolEx) partner, and SAP Build Process Automation is designed to bridge this gap. The collaboration connects SAP to the organization’s entire business reality, creating seamless processes that flow across any system, document, or application. 

Why LLMs Alone Aren’t the Answer 

In a perfect world, every system would talk to every other system through clean, modern APIs. The truth is that many business-critical systems, especially those outside the SAP sphere, don’t have an API to call and require UI automation and Computer Vision to achieve them.  

Beyond systems, unstructured data is the other great chasm in enterprise processes. Invoices, purchase orders, contracts, bills of lading, or emails rarely arrive in a neat, structured format. 

Large Language Models (LLMs) are touted as an incredible advancement that can understand text. However, LLMs by themselves are not a silver bullet for enterprise-grade document processing because enterprises demand scale, accuracy, and ironclad governance that a standalone LLM struggles to provide. 

This is where a dedicated Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) solution is critical. UiPath provides these document understanding capabilities in the SolEx offering: 

• It uses specialized, pre-trained AI models for common documents like invoices and receipts. 
• It leverages Generative AI powered by UiPath’s own DocPath LLM to intelligently classify documents and extract data from complex, unstructured text. 
• Most importantly, it wraps these AI capabilities in an enterprise-grade framework for validation, human-in-the-loop review, and continuous learning, ensuring high accuracy. 

Automation in Action 

A real-world example of supplier onboarding illustrates how organizations can automate processes with UiPath and SAP: 

1. A prospective supplier submits their information via a web form or email, attaching supporting documents such as legal agreements, compliance certificates, and technical specification sheets. 
2. A UiPath Robot monitors the inbox, downloads attachments, and uses Document Understanding to classify each document type and extract key data—such as company name, tax ID, bank details, and compliance status. 
3. Using UI Automation, the robot logs into a third-party credit check portal and verifies the supplier’s financial standing. 
4. The robot connects to SAP S/4HANA to create a new Business Partner master record, attaching all the original documents for auditing purposes. The newly assigned Business Partner (BP) number is automatically shared back with the supplier. 
5. It then connects to SAP BTP to register the supplier as a trading partner in the B2B, EDI and API gateways.  
6. The robot retrieves the relevant security and certificate information from SAP BTP and emails them to the supplier’s IT team.
7. The robot tests the B2B/EDI/API connection to ensure it meets performance SLAs before go-live.
8. Finally, the robot can even generate a final package, pulling contract details from SAP S/4HANA, process documentation from SAP Signavio, and technical information from SAP BTP. 

This helps ensure business, legal and technical onboarding, with no drop-outs and safeguarding data quality. 

 AI You Can Trust 

Deploying AI complicates the security and governance processes for an organization. However, with UiPath’s approach AI and GenAI capabilities are not standalone black boxes; they are embedded components within a secure, auditable automation workflow. 

Organizations can determine what data the AI models see, what actions the robots can take, and how they interact with core systems like SAP. Every action is logged, providing a complete audit trail that satisfies even the most stringent compliance requirements. This is AI with guardrails, built for the enterprise from the ground up. 

What This Means for SAPinsiders 

• Don’t bet your business on raw LLMs for documents. While Generative AI is a phenomenal leap forward, it lacks the specialized framework for the high-volume, high-accuracy document processing the enterprise demands. Along with LLMs, enterprise-grade accuracy for invoices, contracts, and orders requires an Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) solution that provides the necessary validation rules, governance, and learning loops to protect your process integrity. 
• SAP SolEx for UiPath frees organizations from buying a separate IDP solution. The UiPath Document Understanding capability, which is part of the SAP SolEx offering uses a sophisticated mix of specialized AI models and embedded Generative AI to intelligently classify and extract data from the complex documents that fuel an organization’s SAP processes. It’s ready to tackle the paper and PDF chaos from day one. 
• The AI is purpose-built for enterprise challenges. The generative capabilities within Document Understanding are powered by UiPath’s own purpose-built LLM, DocPath. This model is specifically trained and optimized for the world of enterprise documents and communications. This ensures the AI delivers on the security, relevance, and accuracy needed when it interacts with the SAP system.