Accelerate Intelligent Document Processing for SAP with Adobe Acrobat Services | by Saranya Nadathur | Dec, 2023

Using Pillir — powered by AWS and Adobe APIs — to vastly improve your workflows and intelligent document processing

Organizations must deal with documents in every department. In a large organization, documents number in the millions, and many are business critical.

These documents should integrate and be updated in ERP systems like SAP, such as data entry of invoices, inventory, remittances, purchase orders, and proof of delivery documents.

A Sapio Research survey shows that 90% of employees in an organization spend up to 8 hours a week searching sorting and managing documents for information they need to serve customers.

Today, organizations can accelerate paper-based documentation by making use of digital document processing. However, proper experience cannot be delivered by simply digitizing existing processes.

In order to comply with customers’ evolving expectations for an innovative, seamless and personalized digital experience, organizations need to redesign manual and paper document-driven workflows.

Not all document processing challenges can be solved by automation. For many organizations, it can be difficult to automate custom clauses and insert data based on conditional elements such as those required for sales proposals and legal contracts into ERP systems.

Development teams must deal with lot of heavy lifting, such as working on document generation (PDF, Word, PowerPoint), merging documents, metadata-tagging, and eventually extracting information from scanned documents to post transaction in their ERP systems such as SAP.

The integration between interconnected systems and SAP can be challenging. Enterprises want to minimize the customization and modifications to the core ERP system, and use pre-built integrations or API-driven extensions outside SAP for a clean core approach.

This, however, may require expertise in cloud development or in the traditional SAP Advanced Business Application Programming (ABAP) language, which can delay digital transformation.

There is a viable solution that can help businesses accelerate their digital and intelligent processing efforts right now.

It is amazing just how much information we have today stored in PDF format. According to the PDF association, approximately 2.5 trillion PDFs are created every year, making up 6 percent of the web. Now when all these data are buried in your PDF documents, it presents challenges to automate a workflow.

Adobe Document Cloud features a suite of cloud-based APIs, Acrobat Services that enables developers to easily embed Acrobat magic in any application and automate document processes.

This post outlines how Pillir is leveraging Adobe PDF Extract API (part of Acrobat Services) to unlock rich data from PDFs and achieve intelligent document transformation.

The PDF Extract API is a cloud-based web service that uses Adobe’s proprietary AI technology to automatically extract content and structural information from PDF documents — native or scanned — and to output it in a structured JSON format.

The API provides a method for developers to extract and structure content for use in a number of downstream applications including content republishing, content processing, data analysis, and content aggregation, management, and search. (Try the interactive demo with your PDF file).

In the previous post, we demonstrated how organizations can use a variety of Adobe Acrobat Services to help automate and streamline the end-to-end process of document generation, approval and e-signature.

This post outlines how Pillir’s EdgeReady Cloud rapid application development platform, hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS), can help you to accelerate digital processing techniques and automate document workflows between Adobe Acrobat Services (not limited to just PDF Extract API) and interconnected systems such as SAP.

This could be applied to use cases such as:

● Automating SAP Goods Receipt Workflow: In many industries, carriers record the delivery of raw materials with a paper copy of the shipment. Organizations can digitize and automate the paper receipt with Intelligent Document Processing. Users can capture the paper receipt to a standardized PDF document, even when offline, and extract product type, quantity and delivery date from the PDF to automatically update the company’s inventory management system.

● Optimizing Advanced Shipping Notice (ASN) Transactions: Suppliers often create and transmit ASNs in PDF format. The SAP system can be automatically updated with documents such as shipment details, ship-to and bill-to information, carrier details, packaging information and item details. Adobe Extract APIs and the Pillir Edge Ready platform can streamline the supply-chain process, improving the visibility of business processes.

● Increasing order accuracy and reduce errors: Purchase orders can come in various formats and data trapped in paper documents often requires re-keying data by hand. Users can use Pillir application to receive purchase orders as email attachments and use Adobe Acrobat Services to extract information to create sales orders and complete the delivery with Adobe’s e-signature flow. Incoming documents are processed automatically and the extracted data can be sent to SAP in near real-time.

Pillir stands at the forefront as the premier source of application development solutions tailored for SAP-centric enterprises. The Edge Ready Cloud platform offered by Pillir empowers businesses to enhance their operational efficiency, promptly respond to dynamic market requirements, revolutionize their core processes, and accelerate the realization of value at remarkable velocities.

Pillir’s Low-Code/No-Code Platform: The Cornerstone of Intelligent Document Processing for SAP

Pillir offers a robust low-code/no-code platform designed to bridge the gap between Adobe’s Intelligent Document Processing and SAP’s ERP systems. Using a visual development environment modeled after Lego blocks, Pillir facilitates the rapid creation and deployment of applications that extend SAP functionalities, without requiring extensive knowledge in development or even SAP’s ABAP language.

At a technical level, Pillir seamlessly integrates with both Adobe Acrobat APIs and SAP ERPs (SAP ECC, SAP Suite-on-Hana and SAP S/4HANA) using its unique, composable-API adapters for SAP, enabling real-time data transfer and process automation. Whether it’s the use of Adobe Acrobat API for document data capture or invoking SAP custom BAPI/RFC for transaction updates, Pillir’s platform manages it effortlessly, without having to write a single line of code and ensuring a clean digital core for your SAP ERP. and ensuring a clean digital core for your SAP ERP.

The integration of Pillir’s EdgeReady Cloud with Adobe’s IDP technologies offers multiple benefits:

• Digital Transformation with Embedded Document Workflow: Pillir enables rapid development and deployment of document processing applications, Simplifying the complexity involved in handling various document formats and structures, offering an integrated solution to manage all types of documents from invoices to purchase orders and more.
• Enhanced Compliance and Data Accuracy: Pillir’s solutions offer built-in validations of document data against SAP business rules, ensuring data captured through Intelligent Document Processing is both accurate and compliant ensuring rapid postings into SAP ERP
• Scalability and Flexibility: Pillir’s platform is highly scalable, accommodating an organization’s growing data and document processing needs. Its flexibility allows easy adaptation to different types of documents and processes, whether it’s invoices, purchase orders, shipment notifications, or any other documents in the workflow or any other documents in the workflow
• Seamless Integration with SAP: Pillir provides out-of-the-box connectors with composable API’s for SAP ERP, facilitating real-time data exchange, irrespective of SAP ERP’s version or how customized the SAP ERP may be, reducing the complexities of building and managing integrations. This means less time and resources are spent on development and more focus on core business operations, reducing the complexities of building and managing integrations. This means less time and resources are spent on development and more focus on core business operations.
• Cost-effective Solution: The low-code/no-code nature of Pillir’s platform reduces the total cost of ownership (TCO) by minimizing the need for specialized development skills and additional moving parts in the solution. Organizations can easily build and adapt their Intelligent Document Processing solutions more cost-effectively, yielding a faster ROI on their digital transformation and document processing needs.

Human loops

Depending on the business use case, you may want to undertake a human review of ML predictions. For example, extracting information from a scanned purchase or invoice documents and updating SAP system might require human review of certain fields due to regulatory requirements for hazardous item, approving high value purchase orders or invoices or potentially low-quality scans.

Amazon Augmented AI (Amazon A2I) allows you to build and manage such human review workflows. With Amazon A2I integrate human judgement and AI into any ML application, regardless of whether it’s run on AWS or another platform.

This allows human review of ML predictions when needed, based on a confidence score threshold, and you can audit the predictions on an ongoing basis.

Manual document processing is time-consuming and error-prone. The Pillir and Adobe Acrobat Services can help you to automate solution extracts data from documents, classify them, and transfer them to your enterprise system. This enables your employees to work faster, smarter, and more efficiently.

By adding AI and analytics to document workflows, you can replace previously disconnected, manual, and paper-based processes and pave the pathway to an Intelligent Enterprise. This lets you focus on the aspects of your business that really matter.

Authors:

Adobe: Saranya Nadathur — Enterprise Solutions Architect

AWS: Kenny Rajan and Vikram Mehto — Principal Solutions Architect

Pillir: Vaidya Aiyer — CEO & Founder