Yes, you can automate order entry into SAP without templates per customer. ENTR reads incoming orders from email, PDF and Excel, matches customer and items against the data in SAP, and prepares or posts the order. Your inside sales team only sees the orders that do not match.
Why does order entry in SAP take so much time?
SAP is strong at processing orders that are already structured, through EDI or IDocs. But many customers still send a PDF, an Excel list or an email with a few lines of text. Your inside sales team retypes those orders into the sales order, often across several screens and mandatory fields.
Typing is rarely the problem. The time goes into figuring things out: which customer is this, which item do they mean, is the price right and is the delivery date feasible. That is exactly the work to automate.
How does automated order entry into SAP work?
- Receive. Orders arrive in a shared mailbox, as an attachment or in the email body.
- Read. Generative AI reads the document the way a colleague does, without fixed templates per customer.
- Match. Customer, delivery address and items are looked up in the master data from SAP, even when the customer uses their own description.
- Check. Agreements per customer, such as minimum quantities or fixed prices, are written in plain language and checked on every order.
- Hand over. The checked order goes to SAP through the integration that fits your environment. Exceptions go to a colleague with an explanation of what does not match.
| Step | Manual or OCR | ENTR |
|---|---|---|
| New customer layout | New template or manual work | Read directly, no template |
| Customer's own item description | Look it up in the system | Matched to the item master |
| Customer agreements | From memory | Written in plain language, checked on every order |
| Processing in SAP | Retyping into the sales order | Checked and handed over through the integration |
Which SAP integration do you need?
That depends on your SAP version and how your IT team manages integrations. Existing EDI order flows keep running. ENTR covers everything that does not arrive through EDI. Together with your SAP administrator we choose the route through which orders come in.
Example: Voortman Steel Machinery
Voortman Steel Machinery runs SAP and now processes orders and quotes with ENTR. That saved more than 80% of the time spent on manual order and quote processing, live within 6 weeks. Read the Voortman case.
How do you start?
Start with one order flow, for example the orders in your inside sales shared mailbox. Run in shadow mode for a few weeks: ENTR processes the orders, your team checks the result. Only when it is right do orders flow into SAP automatically.
- How many orders arrive per day, and in which formats?
- Which customers use their own item numbers or descriptions?
- Which checks does your team now do from memory?
- Should the order land in SAP as a draft or as a confirmed order?
Want to see what this looks like for your SAP environment? Book a demo or read more about automated order processing.
