Given the constant barrage of AI-related news, are you sometimes baffled by the volume of manual tasks your procurement and accounts payable teams perform daily? Does that feel inconsistent with the amount of time, energy, and money you have invested in SAP technology?

The Simple Reality

The simple reality is that supplier management and invoice management are still very hard! Thankfully, SAP solutions make those processes feasible at scale. Even SAP customers find their teams burdened by non-strategic tasks that evade automation. Relish offers tools to extend SAP solutions and target these chronic challenges.

Supplier On-Boarding

First, let’s address supplier on-boarding, which requires a balance of expedience and risk mitigation. Relish Data Assure is a technology solution that addresses both of those goals in conjunction with your SAP Ariba SLP or S/4 HANA solution. Here’s how:

• Bank account status and ownership are verified, drastically reducing risk of bank account fraud. As frustrating and time consuming as they are, bank letter chasing and phone tag with bank representatives or vendor contacts are far from foolproof.
• Sanctions lists from around the globe are automatically checked for potential risks, both during on-boarding and through a daily monitoring process.
• Essential supplier data like Tax ID and addresses are verified at the source, reducing rounds of vendor revision and downstream process disruptions.
• Key data points regarding financial health, diversity, sustainability, and more can be retrieved from trusted, third-party data sources and assigned to your supplier records.
• All of these steps take about a minute and can be performed anywhere it makes sense to incorporate into a business process.

Invoice Automation

Next, invoice automation has been a favorite topic of Accounts Payable departments for ages. SAP solutions such as the SAP Business Network have changed the game in this area. Yet, an endless universe of vendors will always have a variety of invoicing preferences and appetites for technology.

Relish Invoice AI provides SAP S/4 HANA and SAP Ariba Buying & Invoicing customers an automation solution for those suppliers that simply want to send invoices using their own formats to your Accounts Payable department via email or paper.

The SAP Business Network and other technology-based channels are, with very good reason, preferred invoicing channels for the most strategic suppliers, but many customers grow frustrated by “wasted effort” put forth for suppliers that have no interest in adopting these invoicing technologies.

A Reasonable Compromise?

Is accepting the need to manually enter a large number of invoices a reasonable compromise? Or perhaps incorporating an OCR solution to at least reduce some keystrokes by capturing some fields from a PDF, which really should be table stakes by now? Here are a few ways that Relish Invoice AI goes beyond that:

• World-class learning capabilities incorporate user actions when handling exceptions to optimize future invoice processing.
• Integration with SAP master data and line-level PO data mitigates invoice integration challenges.
• An Invoice Assistant provides users the opportunity using natural language to modify exception invoices and propose similar changes for future invoices.
• A no-code, user-friendly rules engine allows customers to automate a tremendous amount of invoice logic beyond what is on the invoice itself. Examples include field values, line consolidation, tax handling, language translation, and more.
• Analytics related to exception handling, error volumes, supplier-specific details, etc. provide customers insights to target future optimization.
• For customers with complex SAP landscapes, multiple invoicing systems can be connected with advanced invoice traffic criteria.
• Invoicing compliance policies can enforce PO requirements, SAP Business Network usage, and more through auto-rejections or internal reviews.
• Complex flows for country-specific e-invoicing regulatory requirements can be accommodated.

To optimize your SAP investment, maybe it is time to sweeten your SAP solutions in the supplier and invoicing space with Relish, a proven SAP Spotlight Application partner.