Leadership knows, and the frustration is real: Though the organizations take on different digital initiatives, manual tasks still slow down many processes. Across industries, organizations are still dealing with scanning manual documents, such as invoices, contracts, and forms.
According to a Gartner report, 70 to 80 percent of enterprise information lacks structure. This poses challenges for organizations that must unlock the potential and mitigate the risks of content to ensure data-driven decisions.
Take a simple, one-document example: It can cost up to $30 to process a single purchase order by hand. While this number seems small at first, it grows significantly when thousands of documents are processed every month over the years. And it doesn’t stop there—each manual processing increases the risk of errors and potential loss of hours on the mundane job, hence missed opportunities. This leads to a high cost of running “business as usual” and a drag on innovation.
SAP Document AI: rescue business process
Manually processing documents is not just error-prone; it is also slowing down the response to market shifts, dragging down the creativity of skilled workers, and posing real threats to businesses.
SAP Document AI enables efficient and agile paperless business processes. AI-powered solutions can speed up business document processing by up to 70 percent through automating the extraction, classification, and processing of data—imagine the boost in productivity, agility, and resilience.
This is not only theory. SAP Document AI is enabling leaders to deliver reliable answers because it is grounded in the comprehensive and up-to-date training data of actual quality certificates:
- More than 180,000 annotated document pages
- Over 105 million annotated characters
- 28 countries in the data set
- More than half a billion unstructured documents processed each year
That is equivalent to approximately 8.5 years of manual information extraction and auditing, now available as a standard SAP cloud product.
Take De Agostini Publishing as an example. With SAP Document AI, the company is now saving around 500 hours per month, and more than 91 percent of purchase order-referred invoices are automatically processed. Read more about De Agostini here.
FRoSTA AG is one of the largest manufacturers of frozen foods in Europe. The company leveraged SAP Build Process Automation together with SAP Document AI, and it takes less than a minute to process an invoice from arrival to posting. Seventy percent of the invoices processed through automation are booked without any touch. What is even more interesting to note is that it took three months from project ideation to the go-live event. Read more about FRoSTA here.
More than 34,000 customers are already using SAP Business AI to transform the way they work.
From procurement and finance to HR and supply chain, SAP Document AI is changing how work gets done. It is natively embedded in SAP’s key platforms, making it easier for leaders to orchestrate truly intelligent workflows.
The road ahead: leading with certainty
Leaders know that change is the only constant. Digitizing more paper is not the future of document management. It’s about using unstructured data to our advantage. Looking at the road map, SAP Document AI will soon be able to handle even more types of documents. Enhancements such as vision-enabled information extraction, custom large language models (LLMs), and prompting are not too far off either.
Executive takeaway
Winning organizations do have one thing in common, and it is not the use of technology. They recognize that people drive business forward. By removing the manual burden, teams can be empowered to focus on what matters most: customers, strategy, and growth.
Leaders owe it to their teams to let them do what they do best, spending their time coming up with new ideas, making plans, and talking to customers. If employees are still buried in paperwork, it’s time to find out how much it really costs to wait. With SAP Document AI, companies can develop the kind of flexibility and strength that today’s markets need.
Learn more about the benefits and new possibilities for business with SAP Document AI.
Rashmi Kumari is a principal solution advisor at SAP.
