3,500 suppliers a year — 90% onboarded touchlessly.
A procurement team onboarding approximately 3,500 vendors per year needed to turn supplier registration packs into complete, verified SAP vendor records. Each supplier could submit forms and supporting documents containing legal, tax, bank and other master-data information that had to be reviewed before approval.
Artificio automates that path. It reads the registration pack, extracts the required supplier data, validates configured tax and bank information, checks for potential duplicate suppliers, screens configured watchlists, assembles the vendor-master record and routes the result through the required approval process.
Clean registrations can move through the approved straight-through path. Failed or ambiguous checks become explained exceptions showing the field, source evidence and reason for review. Using the supplied case-study metrics, 90% of vendors are onboarded touchlessly, while clean-vendor processing moved from approximately 3 days to 15 minutes.
A vendor is not ready for SAP just because the registration form is complete.
Supplier onboarding combines document collection, master-data creation, verification, compliance screening and approval. A supplier may provide legal name, address, tax information, bank details and supporting evidence across several forms and attachments. Procurement must determine whether the information is complete and consistent before creating the SAP record.
The risk is not limited to missing fields. A duplicate supplier can fragment spend and reporting. Incorrect bank information can create payment risk. A screening hit may require investigation. A mismatch between the form and supporting evidence can require supplier clarification.
The automation objective is therefore not merely to digitize a supplier form. It is to produce a verified, governed vendor-master candidate that is ready for approval and SAP creation.
- ✕Receive registration form and attachments by email.
- ✕Open each document separately.
- ✕Re-key supplier data into working files or SAP.
- ✕Check tax and bank information manually.
- ✕Search for possible existing suppliers.
- ✕Perform required screening.
- ✕Chase missing or inconsistent information.
- ✕Route approval through email.
- ✕Create vendor after all checks are complete.
- ✓Supplier submits one governed registration pack.
- ✓Documents are classified and fields extracted.
- ✓Configured tax and bank checks run automatically.
- ✓Existing SAP suppliers are checked for duplicates.
- ✓Configured watchlists are screened.
- ✓Exceptions show the exact field and reason.
- ✓Clean records move through approval automatically.
- ✓Approved vendor master is created in SAP.
- ✓Evidence and decisions remain traceable.
Three days of cycle time was mostly coordination and verification.
The final SAP creation step was only one part of onboarding. Procurement first had to collect the registration pack, inspect documents, verify details, determine whether the supplier already existed, complete screening, resolve discrepancies and obtain approval.
Clean suppliers and problematic suppliers passed through much of the same manual process. That made the procurement team spend time reviewing records that could have satisfied deterministic checks automatically.
Artificio separates the two populations: clean suppliers that satisfy the configured onboarding policy and exceptions that require procurement, compliance, finance or master-data judgment.
Understand the supplier, verify the evidence, screen the risk, then create the SAP record.
1. Governed supplier registration
The process begins with a structured registration workflow. Required forms and supporting documents can be collected together so procurement can see whether the supplier pack is complete.
2. Digital supplier registration — created with prompts
Artificio can digitize the process before a supplier sends a document. A procurement or master-data team can use natural-language prompts to create an online vendor registration form with the fields, sections and supporting-document requirements needed for its onboarding process.
The supplier receives a secure registration link by email and completes the form online. Structured data such as legal name, addresses, contacts, tax identifiers, payment information and other onboarding attributes can be captured digitally, while required evidence such as tax forms, bank documents, certificates and other supporting files can be uploaded in the same experience.
This gives the business two complementary intake paths: collect structured information digitally wherever possible, and use Artificio document intelligence to understand the documents that still need to be submitted. The result is an end-to-end digital onboarding process rather than document automation alone.
Describe the information you need → Artificio creates the registration form → send the supplier a link by email → supplier enters data and uploads evidence → Artificio validates, screens and routes the request → approved vendor is created in SAP.
3. Document understanding
Artificio reads the submitted documents and extracts the configured vendor-master information. This can include legal/entity information, addresses, tax identifiers, bank details, contacts and other fields required by the customer's onboarding design.
4. Automated validation and screening
Configured checks are performed before approval. These can include document-to-form consistency, tax and bank validation, duplicate detection against existing supplier data, and watchlist screening through the customer's approved data sources and policies.
5. Explained exceptions
A failed check does not simply mark the vendor “invalid.” Artificio can identify the affected field, source evidence and reason the workflow stopped, allowing the reviewer to focus directly on the issue.
6. Approval and SAP onboarding
Once the required checks and approvals are satisfied, the complete vendor-master candidate is submitted through the customer's approved SAP integration path. SAP remains authoritative for the final master-data transaction.
Turn multiple supplier documents into one consistent vendor record.
A supplier registration pack can contain overlapping information. The registration form may contain the legal name and bank account, while tax evidence and bank documentation independently contain some of the same fields. Artificio can use those documents as evidence rather than treating them as unrelated attachments.
| Source | Example information | Workflow use |
|---|---|---|
| Supplier registration form | Legal name, address, contacts, business details | Core vendor-master candidate |
| Tax document | Tax identifier and legal/entity information | Tax validation / consistency check |
| Bank evidence | Account / routing / bank information | Bank-detail validation |
| Supporting certificates | Configured supplier qualifications or evidence | Completeness / policy checks |
| Existing SAP vendor data | Existing supplier identities and master attributes | Duplicate screening |
High-risk fields should be verified before they become payment master data.
Tax and bank information receive explicit controls in the workflow. Artificio can compare the values supplied in forms with supporting documents and invoke configured validation services or enterprise rules where available.
A mismatch, missing identifier, invalid format or failed configured verification becomes an exception rather than being silently accepted. Bank-detail changes or higher-risk conditions can also follow a stronger approval path where the customer's policy requires it.
The objective is to discover inconsistent or unverified payment-related data while the supplier is still in onboarding — before the information becomes an active SAP vendor-master attribute.
Know whether the supplier already exists — and whether a screening result needs investigation.
Artificio checks existing supplier data before a new vendor is created. Matching can use configured identifiers and supplier attributes to surface exact or potential duplicates for review.
The workflow can also screen the supplier against the watchlists configured and approved by the customer. A possible match is not automatically treated as a confirmed match; it can be routed to the responsible reviewer with the screening evidence and supplier context.
| Check | Clean result | Exception result |
|---|---|---|
| Existing supplier / duplicate | No conflicting vendor identified | Potential duplicate routed for review |
| Tax information | Configured checks satisfied | Mismatch / missing / failed validation |
| Bank information | Configured checks satisfied | Mismatch / validation exception |
| Watchlist screening | No review-triggering result | Potential hit routed to authorized reviewer |
| Document completeness | Required evidence present | Missing document / field |
The 10% that needs attention arrives already explained.
At the supplied 90% touchless rate, procurement and related reviewers can concentrate on the smaller population that fails or cannot complete the automated checks. The reviewer sees the source registration evidence, extracted value and specific reason for the exception.
Exceptions can be routed by type: procurement for supplier information, finance/master-data teams for payment or SAP data, and authorized compliance personnel for screening-related review, according to the customer's governance model.
A complete vendor master reaches SAP only after the required checks are satisfied.
Artificio assembles the verified supplier information into the vendor-master structure required by the customer's SAP process. Approval routing can vary by supplier type, company code, purchasing organization, risk condition or other configured rules.
After approval, the vendor is created through the supported integration method for the customer's SAP landscape. The SAP response and resulting vendor/business-partner reference are retained with the onboarding history. If SAP rejects the transaction, the record returns to exception handling rather than being treated as onboarded.
Supplier-facing intake outside SAP. Governed vendor creation inside SAP.
The supplier-facing experience can therefore start digitally: Artificio-generated online form, email invitation, structured data capture and document upload. That same workflow continues through document understanding, verification, screening, approvals and SAP creation — without forcing procurement to stitch together a separate form tool, document inbox and master-data workflow.
The exact SAP creation approach depends on the customer's ECC or S/4HANA landscape, vendor/business-partner model, enabled interfaces, organizational structure and governance. Artificio works through the enterprise's approved integration path.
Touchless onboarding does not mean uncontrolled onboarding.
The straight-through path applies only when the configured evidence, validation, screening and approval conditions are satisfied. Failed checks, potential duplicates, screening hits, ambiguous documents and policy-sensitive suppliers remain human-in-the-loop.
The workflow can retain submitted documents, extracted fields, validation results, screening outcomes, reviewer decisions, approvals, corrections, SAP transaction requests/responses and the resulting master-data reference.
About 3,150 vendors a year can follow the touchless path.
At 3,500 vendors per year and a 90% touchless rate, approximately 3,150 vendors per year can follow the touchless onboarding path, leaving roughly 350 vendors per year for exception handling or additional review based on the supplied metrics.
The cycle-time improvement is equally significant: a clean onboarding process that previously took approximately three days can complete in about 15 minutes. Because “three days” is an elapsed business-cycle measure rather than stated hands-on labor, this case study does not convert that improvement into unsupported labor-hour savings.
The operational shift is clear: procurement spends less time reading and re-keying clean registration packs and more time resolving the supplier records that genuinely fail a validation, duplicate or screening check.
Vendor onboarding is strongest when document AI, validation, screening, workflow and SAP creation operate as one process.
OCR alone can read a registration form. The enterprise problem is deciding whether the supplier information is trustworthy enough to become master data: do the documents agree, are tax and bank details validated under the configured policy, does the supplier already exist, did screening raise an issue, and have the required approvals been completed?
Artificio brings those steps into one governed workflow and sends only approved vendor-master candidates to SAP.
Prompt-built vendor registration form → email link to supplier → digital data + document collection → document understanding → tax & bank validation → duplicate & watchlist screening → exception/approval workflow → approved SAP vendor.