Videos
Extracting Information from SAP Sales Order with Kognitos
From an emailed PO to a fully created SAP sales order — in 36 lines of plain English, with a closing notification to the sender.
What's in this video
A 6.5-minute walkthrough of a Kognitos process that turns an emailed purchase order into a live sales order in SAP. The whole process is 36 lines of plain English, plus a couple of subprocedures.
What the process does
- Email trigger: the run kicks off when a PO is dragged into a new email and sent to the Kognitos-provided address. The PO in the demo is for Global Text Solutions Incorporated dated 2024-11-15.
- SAP authentication: a subprocedure logs into SAP — kept separate so it can be reused by other processes.
- Customer name extraction: Kognitos uses a Textract+GPT extraction blend to pull the customer name accurately without training.
- Line-item extraction: the single-line table is parsed for material name and quantity.
- Reference lookups: subprocedures translate the customer name into a customer number and the material name into a material number using SAP reference tables.
- Create the sales order: a single English statement creates the SAP sales order with the customer number, material number, and quantity.
- Notify the sender: the original emailer gets the new SAP sales order number back by email — closing the loop.
Tools and patterns shown
- Process flow view: a visual summary of the “big rocks” — authenticate → extract → look up → create — useful for explaining the automation to stakeholders.
- Subprocedures: the SAP login and the reference lookups are isolated and reusable.
- Email metadata in runs: every run shows the email body, sender, and attachment metadata alongside the extracted facts.
Questions answered in this video
What does this Kognitos process do end to end?
It receives an emailed purchase order, authenticates to SAP, extracts the customer name and the material/quantity from the PO, looks up the customer and material numbers in SAP reference tables, creates a SAP sales order with those IDs, and emails the original sender back with the new sales order number.
How long is the underlying Kognitos process?
36 lines of plain English in the main process, plus a couple of subprocedures (SAP authentication and the reference lookups). The whole flow runs from an inbound email and finishes by emailing the sender back with the SAP sales order number.
How does Kognitos extract the customer name and line items?
Through a Textract+GPT blend purpose-built for high-accuracy extraction without training data. The same step also pulls the single-row line-item table for material name and quantity.
Can I kick this off from something other than email?
Yes. Email is convenient for the demo, but Kognitos processes can also be triggered by an API call or on a schedule — the rest of the process stays identical.