Videos
Video demo: SAP 4-way match automation in action
Why SAP 4-way match has resisted 20 years of automation — and how Kognitos's English-as-code runtime finally cracks it without brittle bots.
About this webinar
A 52-minute deep-dive webinar on automating the 4-way match in SAP — the procure-to-pay verification step that has resisted 20+ years of automation attempts at most large enterprises.
The 4-way match, defined
For every supplier payment, AP needs to verify that four documents agree:
- Purchase order — what we ordered and the price we agreed to.
- Goods receipt — what physically arrived and was accepted.
- Supplier invoice — what the supplier is billing us.
- Certificate of analysis (COA) — confirmation that the received goods meet the contracted quality specs (critical in pharma, food & beverage, and regulated manufacturing).
Why prior automation attempts failed
- Brittle SAP bots: traditional RPA on SAP UIs breaks on every screen change and rejects long-tail variations.
- Supplier document drift: every supplier's invoice and COA layout is different — template-based IDP needs constant retraining.
- Quality data buried in PDFs: COA values often live in scanned lab reports, not in any system of record.
- Black-box generative AI: regulated environments can't accept an unexplained “match/don't match” decision from an opaque model.
Kognitos's approach for the 4-way match
- Neurosymbolic architecture: an LLM-driven extraction layer reads the variable supplier documents (PO, invoice, COA), and a deterministic English-as-code runtime enforces the comparison logic — auditable, repeatable, and editable in plain English by AP staff.
- Exception handling in English: when a document doesn't match (price drift, quantity mismatch, COA quality variance), Kognitos surfaces the discrepancy in plain English for an AP user to resolve — and the resolution becomes a learning for future runs.
- Live SAP integration: the demo walks the end-to-end match including reaching into SAP for PO and goods-receipt data and reconciling against the supplier invoice and COA.
What's announced at the end of the session
- Kognitos Community Edition: available to everyone at cognitos.com/community with prebuilt agents and a chat-to-process builder (Autoite).
- Follow-on webinar with QBotica: a partner session for organisations looking to combine Kognitos with broader automation programs.
Questions answered in this video
What is a 4-way match in SAP, and which four documents are compared?
It's the procure-to-pay verification step that compares the purchase order, the goods receipt (what arrived), the supplier invoice, and the certificate of analysis (COA — the quality confirmation). All four must agree before payment is released. The COA piece in particular is critical for pharma, food & beverage, and regulated manufacturing.
Why has the 4-way match resisted automation for 20+ years?
Traditional RPA breaks on SAP UI changes and supplier document variability. Template-based IDP needs constant retraining because every supplier invoice and COA layout is different. And the quality data on a COA usually lives in a scanned PDF lab report, not in any structured system — that's the hardest piece to read reliably.
Why won't a plain generative AI tool solve the 4-way match in a regulated industry?
Because a black-box generative model can occasionally hallucinate, and there's no audit trail explaining why the system said “match” or “don't match.” That's not acceptable in pharma, food & beverage, or any regulated manufacturer. Kognitos's neurosymbolic approach pairs LLM extraction with a deterministic English-as-code runtime so every decision is transparent.
What does the Kognitos Community Edition include?
Open to everyone at cognitos.com/community: prebuilt agent environments to explore, and Autoite — a chat-to-process builder you can use to describe a process in plain English and have Kognitos generate the corresponding automation from scratch.