OrderSense
Turns emailed purchase orders into S/4HANA Sales Orders, with people reviewing only the exceptions.
OrderSense is a product idea that CNBS, Smart Data's sister company, is testing. Customer purchase orders arrive as email attachments: PDFs, scanned images, spreadsheets. OrderSense turns them into confirmed Sales Orders in SAP S/4HANA without anyone re-keying them, and brings a person in only when something genuinely needs attention.
Intake
A flow in SAP Integration Suite watches the order mailbox and sorts each attachment. PDFs and images go through SAP Document Information Extraction, which reads the header and the line items with AI. Spreadsheets go through a reader built for this that finds the order by its structure instead of fixed cells, so customers' different templates all work. Anything it cannot read goes to a person rather than being dropped.
Every order keeps its source document alongside it. Images and spreadsheets are rendered to PDF by converters written from scratch to run inside the integration runtime, so the reviewer always sees exactly what the customer sent.
Review
Orders land in a review list next to their source document. Every field checks itself against live SAP data as it is entered: customer, ship-to, material, sales area, unit, Incoterms, payment terms and currency. Problems show on the field itself, before anyone tries to save.
- Configurable products open a screen for their options, with a green, yellow or red check on whether the choices still fit the product.
- One purchase order can be split into two sales orders when it needs to be.
- Every code field has a lookup backed by live SAP data, 12 in all.
Posting
When the order is clean, one action builds the full SAP order and posts it, all or nothing. A simulate mode tries it first; any error rolls the whole thing back; on success the SAP order number is written back to the order. Orders are never posted without review.
One codebase, many customers
Each customer runs it in their own SAP system without a fork of the code. Settings tables decide which fields show and which checks run, spare fields can take on customer-specific meanings, standard SAP texts carry free text, and the validation and posting steps have extension points for anything else.