Strategic Goal

To eliminate manual data entry at the quoting front end and automate the full journey from customer document ingestion to SAP CPQ quote population, at scale, across regions, and without sacrificing accuracy.

Challenges

The company’s quoting process suffered from structural inefficiencies that grew more costly as request volumes increased:

  • Unstructured inbound requests: Customers submitted product requests through a mix of channels, including email bodies, Excel attachments, and other unstructured formats, with no standardized intake process.
  • Time-consuming manual entry: Sales representatives had to manually extract product IDs, descriptions, and quantities and input them into SAP CPQ line by line. For requests containing 1,000+ items, a single quote could consume an entire working day.
  • Inconsistent material number formats: Operating across multiple regions and industries, the company encountered varying product identifier conventions dependingon the customer segment. Sales teams had no systematic way to match these formats to the correct entries in the product master, leading to frequent mismatches.
  • No exception handling workflow: When a product could not be found in the master data, there was no structured process to resolve it, leaving sales teams without a clear path forward.

Solution

CLARITY deployed an intelligent document processing solution as the front end to the company’s SAP CPQ environment, automating the entire journey from document ingestion to quote population with built-in validation and exception handling.

  • Intelligent document ingestion: Users upload customer request files, whether Excel spreadsheets or email content, directly into the solution interface. The platform automatically extracts product IDs, descriptions, quantities, quote IDs, and business partner information, identifying customer segments at the header level to drive downstream matching logic.
  • Automated product recognition and validation: The solution performs real-time validation of every product ID against master data replicated from the Omnichannel system and S/4HANA via SAP CPI. Customer-segment-aware matching logic accommodates varying material number formats across business units. Unrecognized products are flagged immediately, with the three closest alternative suggestions surfaced based on description similarity.
  • User review and confirmation: Before any data is pushed forward, sales representatives review a clear summary of matched items, flagged exceptions, and suggested alternatives, retaining full control over every line.
  • Seamless SAP CPQ quote population: Once confirmed, the solution pushes validated products and quantities directly into SAP CPQ via API, supporting both new quote creation and population of existing quotes, including full header field mapping such as ship-to, bill-to, and commercial terms.
  • Continuous master data synchronization: Product master data and business partner records are replicated daily from the Omnichannel system and S/4HANA via SAP CPI, ensuring matching logic stays current.

Results

The solution delivered significant, measurable impact across the company’s quoting operations:

  • Dramatically faster quote preparation: Quote preparation time was reduced by 80–90%, turning a full-day task into a matter of minutes, even for requests with 1,000+ line items.
  • Manual data entry eliminated: Sales staff no longer manually map product IDs, descriptions, or quantities, freeing them to focus on customer engagement and deal-making.
  • Improved data accuracy: Invalid or unmatched products are caught before entering SAP CPQ, reducing downstream rejections and rework across the order lifecycle.
  • Reclaimed sales capacity: Each sales representative handling high-volume quotes recovers an estimated 5–10 hours per week. For a team of 10 representatives processing five large quotes each weekly, this equates to approximately 200 labor hours recovered per week, the equivalent of five full-time employees redirected from data entry to revenue-generating activity.
  • Accelerated revenue cycle: Faster quote turnaround shortens the overall sales cycle. Across hundreds of quotes per month, even a one-to-two day reduction per quote compounds into meaningful revenue acceleration.
  • Scalable operations: The company can absorb growing quote volumes without proportional headcount increases, supporting business growth without added operational cost.