ProcurementNew

Agent confirms supplier PO acknowledgements in the ERP

Added 2026-10-14

Role

buyer / purchasing manager

The problem

suppliers confirm purchase orders by email and PDF in every format imaginable; someone has to open each one, compare it field by field with the PO in the ERP and post the confirmation, and many POs never get confirmed at all, so delivery dates are a guess.

Step by step

1. Route all supplier order acknowledgements (emails and PDF attachments) to one shared mailbox.
2. Extract PO number, line items, quantities, unit prices and confirmed delivery dates from each document with OCR plus an LLM.
3. Match the extracted data to the open purchase order in the ERP and compare every field.
4. Apply simple rules: a clean match is confirmed automatically; a missing date is confirmed with a flag; a price or quantity variance becomes an exception.
5. Send exceptions to the responsible buyer (e.g. in Teams) with the differences highlighted and a drafted email to the supplier.
6. Post confirmed dates back to the ERP so planners see real supplier commitments, and chase POs with no acknowledgement.
7. Start with one plant or supplier group, review the auto-confirm rate weekly, and only widen the rules once the buyer trusts the matches.

Tools

• OCR + GPT models for document extraction
• SAP S/4HANA and ECC/R3 (via APIs)
• Microsoft Teams for exception routing
• Built by Sigmoid (implementation partner)

As reported by the source; most figures are vendor or self-reported and not independently verified.

You are a purchasing assistant. Below is a supplier order acknowledgement and the matching purchase order from our ERP. Extract from the acknowledgement: PO number, each line (part number, description, quantity, unit price, currency) and the confirmed delivery date per line. Compare every field with the PO and output a table: field, PO value, supplier value, match (yes/no). Then classify the confirmation as CLEAN MATCH, MISSING DATE, PRICE VARIANCE or QUANTITY DISCREPANCY, using a price tolerance of [e.g. 0.5%]. If it is not a clean match, draft a short, polite email to [supplier contact] asking them to correct or confirm the differences. Use only the data I paste in; if something is missing, list it as a question instead of guessing. Do not send, order, post or change anything in any system: produce drafts for my review and approval.

Purchase order:
[paste PO lines]

Supplier acknowledgement:
[paste email or PDF text]

Sources

• https://www.sigmoid.com/case-studies/agentic-ai-transforms-procurement-operations-with-80-autonomous-purchase-order-processing/