From a customer PO to a confirmed SAP SD order.

40,000 customer orders a year — with 92% created touchlessly.

A global aerospace composite manufacturer receives customer purchase orders that must become accurate SAP SD sales orders. Before an order can be created, the business needs to identify the correct sold-to and ship-to context, resolve customer material references to SAP materials, interpret quantities and requested dates, and validate pricing and availability.

Artificio automates that path from incoming customer PO to confirmed SAP order. The platform captures the PO, extracts header and line-item data, resolves customer and material context against SAP, and retrieves the commercial evidence behind the order. Where configured, the incoming PO is matched to the quotation previously issued to the customer and checked against the applicable signed contract and company policies before pricing and availability are validated line by line. Clean orders are then created in SAP SD. Orders that satisfy the configured rules move straight through; exceptions are presented to the order desk with the affected line, conflicting source, and reason already identified.

This adds an important control between document extraction and SAP posting: Artificio can verify that what the customer is ordering is consistent with what the company quoted, what the parties contracted, and what internal policy permits before the transaction reaches SAP.

At the stated production scale, the manufacturer processes 40,000 orders per year, with 92% created touchlessly. Processing time for a clean order moved from approximately 8 minutes to 30 seconds.

A customer PO is readable to a person. SAP needs exact master-data context.

Customer purchase orders arrive in layouts designed by the customer, not by SAP. A PO may contain the customer's own material number and description, customer-specific units, requested delivery dates, free-text shipping instructions, multiple ship-to locations, and commercial references that do not map one-to-one to SAP fields.

Order-entry staff therefore do more than type. They interpret the PO and translate it into SAP context: Which customer account? Which ship-to? Which SAP material corresponds to the customer's part number? Is the quantity and unit valid? What price should apply? Can the requested date be confirmed?

They may also need to reconstruct the commercial history behind the order. A PO received today can relate to a quotation issued months earlier and a customer contract signed even earlier. The order desk may need to verify quoted price, validity period, Incoterms, payment terms, minimum quantities, delivery commitments, customer-specific terms, or other agreed conditions — and then determine whether the requested transaction complies with current company policy.

In this customer's process, quotation matching is also a mandatory SAP control: a sales order must be created with reference to a sales quotation. That means a PO cannot simply be converted into a standalone sales order because the customer and material are known. The automation must first identify the correct quotation. When it cannot, the business requires approval before order creation can continue.

At 40,000 orders per year, even a few minutes of repetitive interpretation per order creates a substantial operational workload and makes clean orders wait behind exceptions.

The order desk was spending time on clean orders and difficult orders alike.

Traditional order entry gives nearly every PO the same manual treatment. An order containing known customer references, standard materials, valid pricing, and available supply can consume almost as much entry effort as an order with a genuine commercial or master-data exception.

That is the core automation opportunity. Artificio does not try to eliminate the order desk. It separates orders that can safely follow configured rules from the smaller population that requires commercial judgment or master-data investigation.

The result is a queue organized around exceptions rather than document arrival time.

A customer-PO-to-SAP-SD workflow that completes the transaction.

1. Customer PO capture

Incoming purchase orders are associated with the configured sales-order workflow and preserved as source evidence. Artificio identifies the document and extracts the customer PO number, dates, commercial references, addresses, currency where present, and line-item data.

2. Customer resolution

The extracted PO must be connected to the correct SAP customer context before an order can be created. Artificio uses configured identifiers and SAP data to resolve the appropriate customer and related sales-area or ship-to context. Ambiguous matches become exceptions instead of assumptions.

3. Material resolution

Customer POs may use customer part numbers rather than internal SAP material numbers. Artificio resolves each line to the appropriate SAP material using available customer-material references, descriptions, mappings, and configured business rules.

4. Mandatory SAP quotation resolution

For this customer, every SAP sales order must be created with reference to the applicable sales quotation. Artificio therefore searches the available quotation context using the incoming PO evidence and SAP/commercial data — for example customer, quotation reference where supplied, material or customer part number, quoted quantity, price, currency, dates, and other configured identifiers.

When a single valid quotation is resolved, Artificio compares the incoming PO with that quotation and uses the quotation as the reference document for downstream SAP sales-order creation. The comparison can include customer, materials, quantities, price, currency, quotation validity, requested dates, delivery terms, payment terms, and other configured commercial conditions.

No quotation found is a controlled exception. If no quotation exists, the referenced quotation cannot be found, multiple quotations are plausible, or the quotation is no longer valid for the requested order, Artificio does not silently create a standalone sales order. It starts the configured approval workflow and presents the PO, quotation-search evidence, SAP context, contract information, and reason for the exception to the appropriate approver.

5. Contract validation

After quotation resolution, the workflow can retrieve the applicable signed customer contract or agreement and evaluate the commercial terms the business has chosen to control. Artificio does not assume every contract clause can or should be interpreted autonomously. Ambiguous, conflicting, or policy-sensitive conditions remain human-in-the-loop.

6. Company-policy validation

Artificio can also evaluate the proposed order against internal business policies and approval rules. Examples can include price-tolerance limits, discount authority, minimum-order requirements, payment-term deviations, restricted products or customers, delivery commitments, credit or approval requirements, and other customer-specific controls defined by the enterprise.

This creates a governed decision chain: customer request → prior quotation → contractual commitment → company policy → current SAP data. A clean order proceeds only when the configured controls agree or the required exception approval has been obtained.

7. Pricing and availability validation

Once the master-data and commercial context is established, the workflow checks the information required for a clean SAP order. Pricing and availability are validated line by line before straight-through creation, with any variance explained against the relevant source.

Every PO line has to become a valid SAP order line.

The important measure is not extraction accuracy by itself. A field can be read correctly from the PO and still be invalid for the intended SAP transaction. Artificio therefore separates document understanding from SAP business validation.

The order desk sees the problem — not just a failed order.

The remaining 8% of orders are not treated as automation failures. They are the work that needs human attention. Artificio presents exceptions at the relevant header or line-item level so the order desk can see what was extracted, what SAP returned, and why the configured rule did not permit straight-through processing.

After the reviewer resolves the exception, the workflow can continue without re-keying the rest of the order.

Validated orders are created in SAP — then confirmed back to the customer.

When the customer, material, quantity, pricing, availability, quotation, contract, and other configured checks satisfy the straight-through policy, Artificio sends the sales-order transaction through the approved SAP integration layer. For this customer, the sales order is created with reference to the resolved SAP sales quotation. The SAP response and created order reference are returned to the workflow.

If the quotation gating rule fails, Artificio does not bypass it. The workflow moves to approval. The approver receives the incoming PO, the quotation search or mismatch result, relevant contract/policy evidence, and SAP context. Only after the required approval is recorded can the workflow continue under the customer's configured process.

The workflow then uses the resulting SAP order and confirmation data to continue the customer-facing process, including automated confirmation back to the customer where configured.

Orders that fail an SAP validation or return an unexpected system response remain in a controlled exception state rather than disappearing into a technical log.

Document intelligence in front. SAP SD remains the system of record.

The integration pattern is designed around standard enterprise interfaces appropriate to the customer's SAP landscape. Artificio orchestrates the document-driven workflow while SAP remains authoritative for master data, pricing, availability, and the resulting sales order.

Touchless does not mean uncontrolled.

The 92% touchless rate represents orders that satisfy the configured automation policy. Customer resolution, material mapping, quotation and contract checks, company-policy rules, pricing, availability, duplicate checks, and other business controls determine whether an order can proceed automatically.

For document-based commercial controls, Artificio retains the quotation or contract evidence used in the decision together with the relevant extracted terms and rule outcome. Contract or policy interpretation that is ambiguous or requires legal/commercial judgment remains human-in-the-loop.

Artificio retains the source PO, extracted values, resolved quotation and quotation-reference evidence, contract/policy checks, SAP validation context, approval history, exception history, reviewer corrections, transaction request, SAP response, and resulting order reference. Low-confidence or policy-sensitive cases remain human-in-the-loop.

Automate the repeatable order patterns first.

A practical sales-order automation rollout starts by understanding the customer's real order population: top customers, PO layouts, customer-material mappings, sales areas, ship-to logic, units of measure, quotation repositories and reference patterns, contract sources and relevant terms, company policies and approval thresholds, pricing behavior, requested-date rules, availability checks, order types, duplicate controls, and the exceptions currently handled by the order desk.

High-volume customers with stable master-data relationships are natural candidates for early straight-through processing. Difficult or unusual orders remain reviewable while the automation coverage expands.

The production result in this case study demonstrates that approach at scale:

The order desk shifted from data entry to exception management.

At 40,000 orders per year and a 92% touchless creation rate, approximately 36,800 orders per year can flow through without manual order creation, while approximately 3,200 orders remain for exception handling based on the stated case-study metrics.

Reducing clean-order processing from 8 minutes to 30 seconds removes approximately 7.5 minutes of processing time per touchless order. Applied to 36,800 touchless orders, that is approximately 4,600 hours of gross order-processing time per year. This is a mathematical implication of the provided metrics, not a separately measured labor-savings claim; actual capacity benefit depends on staffing, review effort, workload distribution, and operating model.

The operational benefit is also qualitative: clean orders no longer wait for manual entry, and order-desk attention is concentrated on the customer, material, price, quantity, availability, and duplicate issues that actually require judgment.

Sales-order automation is a master-data and validation problem as much as a document problem.

The customer PO starts the process, but extraction alone cannot safely create an SAP order. Straight-through automation depends on reliable customer resolution, customer-to-material mapping, commercial validation, quotation and contract context, company-policy controls, availability logic, and a controlled path for exceptions.

The second lesson is that mandatory reference-document controls should be part of the automation design, not handled after posting. In this case, quotation resolution determines whether the order is eligible for touchless creation. The workflow either creates the SAP sales order with the correct quotation reference or deliberately stops and obtains approval.

The third lesson is to measure automation at the transaction level. A high field-extraction score is useful, but the business result is whether a valid, policy-compliant SAP sales order can be created without manual order entry.