Taking advantage of free trade agreements can entail considerable administrative efforts. This is especially true for entering data from Long-Term Supplier Declarations into SAP GTS – a time and cost intensive labor of little love. Fortunately, AI can easily process LTSDs and any other document type and integrate them directly into SAP GTS.
Businesses may want to take advantage of preferential duty rates available through free trade agreements. Doing so can help to become and remain cost-competitive. However, that means it must be proven that the products sent are eligible for preferential duty. As manufacturers rarely make everything from scratch, they rely on suppliers for parts and materials. So, they need to verify that their suppliers conform to preferential origin requirements. This can be done by a Long-Term Supplier Declaration (LTSD), which suppliers provide.
These LTSDs are typically handled through SAP GTS E4H. In this article, we focus on the sub-process of LTSD request and response.
After the LTSD request is sent out and a response is received, the information needs to be entered to SAP GTS E4H using the Fiori App “Manage Long-Term Supplier Declarations – Inbound”.
As there is no widely accepted industry standard for LTSD requests and responses, there are many different types and forms. They can be e.g. PDFs or Excel spreadsheets and interactive forms are also used. The documents can even be printed out, scanned or faxed.
Manually collecting these LTSDs and entering them into SAP GTS is tedious and inefficient. Extracting the data using methods like OCR often fails due to the complexities mentioned.
In short, it’s a mess.
Solving the Problem with AI
To address this and other document integration challenges, we have developed cbs AID for LTSD (Advanced Integration of Documents). The solution is certified by SAP as built with SAP Business AI, leveraging SAP Business Technology Platform’s generative AI Hub in SAP AI Core. cbs utilizes these tools to build scalable and secure AI applications.
So how does cbs AID work?
» Document Reading
Once the documents are uploaded using the interface (or API), the first step is pre-processing. The solution automatically corrects rotation. Improperly scanned documents are also improved and brought in shape.
» Document Understanding
Using a large language model (LLM), cbs AID then segments the document, identifying key areas of interest. The solution has an intelligent understanding of what an LTSD is and how to read it. cbs AID analyzes the tables and maps complex relationships between columns and even data outside of the tables. This allows cbs AID to accurately extract the preferential origin for the supplied materials.
And then, acting as a supervisor, another large language model, verifies the extracted data ensuring consistency with the expected output result.
» Integration into SAP GTS
After the data is extracted from the incoming documents, our application performs various checks with the GTS system, for example, whether the supplier or material is known.
If needed, the solution can also accommodate human checks and intervention depending on the parameters determined by the customers.
Afterwards, the LTSD is automatically posted into SAP GTS.
Benefits
The advantages of cbs AID are clear: it empowers businesses to process and map content with high accuracy of more than 99% while drastically reducing manual efforts. Through advanced extraction algorithms, elimination of expensive model retraining and low operational costs the RoI is typically reached in less than a year.
Our solution is not limited to the field of foreign trade, of course. It can be extended to any other document types like payment advice, customer orders, product data, delivery notes and safety datasheets.
We integrate any complex, human-readable document into SAP.
Contact us to learn more!
