VIM Beyond Invoices
Nobody reads the order confirmation. Until the goods arrive late.
Check price, quantity and delivery date of every confirmation against the purchase order, write the confirmed date back into the PO and send only genuine deviations to purchasing — from five projects with the VIM Beyond solution package for order confirmations.
20+ projects10+ years in SAP VIMnearly 6 years at OpenText
Where it hurts
The confirmation arrives. And then?
Hardly any purchasing department checks every order confirmation line by line. Not out of negligence — but because the effort bears no relation to the perceived benefit. Until the four things happen that it was meant to prevent:
The check is manual work
Holding price, quantity and date of every line against the purchase order ties up real capacity in purchasing once you receive a few hundred confirmations a month — capacity nobody ever books as a project.
Deviations surface too late
A date three weeks behind the requested one is noticed by planning when the goods are missing. Price deviations show up in invoice verification — by then the PO is long released and the goods are on site. And while the query is being resolved, the early payment discount expires.
The purchase order never hears about it
Without maintained confirmation control, material planning keeps working with the requested date. MRP then plans on figures no supplier has ever confirmed.
“Week 34” instead of a date
Suppliers confirm in calendar weeks, in ranges and in free text. Any extraction that does not convert this into an SAP date creates rework instead of saving it.
What we build
01
A solution package, not a custom build
OpenText ships a ready-made solution package for order confirmations inside the VIM Beyond framework. We configure it instead of starting a process from scratch — and extend it where your purchasing process departs from the standard.
02
Extraction, your choice
Header and line data from PDF, mail attachment and paper: PO number, item, material, quantity, price, date. Recognition runs through Intelligent Capture (IC4S), Core Capture (CC4S), a third-party engine you already operate, or AI extraction with AIxVIM — the solution package behind it stays the same.
03
Price, quantity and date against tolerances
Every line against the purchase order, with your tolerances per price, quantity and date. The tolerance decides, not chance: you define per deviation type at what point a difference counts as one at all.
04
Delivery and payment terms
Not only the figures on the line: delivery and payment terms can be checked against the purchase order too. A supplier quietly moving from 14 to 30 days net surfaces at the document rather than at the payment run — with a separate approval step if you want one.
05
Straight through where nothing deviates
If everything sits inside tolerance, the confirmation is processed fully automatically — without anyone opening it. Only a document with a genuine deviation goes to a reviewer. That is the actual lever: the work does not drop by a percentage, it drops to the exceptions.
06
Dates SAP can work with
Calendar weeks, ranges and free-text dates are converted into a confirmation date and written into the purchase order through confirmation control. From that point on, planning works with the confirmed date rather than the requested one.
07
Agent determination on your criteria
Who receives the work item is configured dynamically: by purchasing group, company code, plant, material group, amount threshold — and combinations of those. Deviations reach the responsible buyer instead of a shared mailbox. We have built a parallel approval workflow and a custom Fiori app for price, quantity and date discrepancies.
08
Archived against the purchase order
Through SAP ArchiveLink the confirmation hangs on the purchase order — exactly where people look for it later: in the PO history, in invoice verification, in every query with the supplier. No network drive, no second system.
09
Template and rollout
One template further plants and countries can adopt, instead of a separate solution per site. Most recently built in the chemical industry for the global launch of the order confirmation package.
Evidence, not claims
Five projects. One solution package.
Order confirmations in the VIM Beyond framework are not a concept paper for us: we have implemented, extended, upgraded and handed them into operation in packaging, healthcare, food and chemicals.
- Global template for the order confirmation package (chemicals)
- Parallel approval workflow inside the Beyond process
- Custom Fiori app for price, quantity and date discrepancies
- Algorithm for calendar week and date conversion
- Material number extraction verified by a custom business rule
- Transition from BCC to IC4S including UAT support
How we work
01
Look at the documents
We look at real order confirmations from your suppliers, not sample documents: layouts, languages, date formats, edge cases. That is what the extraction strategy is built on — and what makes a statement about automation potential credible.
02
Rules and tolerances
Together with purchasing and planning we define what counts as a deviation, who sees it, and what may pass without a question. That decision determines the degree of automation — not the software.
03
Implement and hand over
Customizing, development, our own testing, a supported go-live and training for key users and IT. Afterwards third-level support, so the solution holds when the next supplier layout arrives.
Customer voices
What clients say about working with us
Johannes supported us during our migration from SAP R/3 to SAP S/4 HANA, including the upgrade of OpenText Vendor Invoice Management for SAP Solutions (VIM) which we are using to process sales orders. We were facing several uncertainties in the process, as well as issues with SAP Single Sign-On in the validation client.
Thanks to his clear guidance and deep technical expertise, we were able to complete the upgrade successfully and identify the root cause of the SSO issue. Johannes even uncovered a deeply rooted bug in the OpenText Intelligent Capture for SAP Solutions (IC4S) component related to restoring machine learning data, which we were able to get corrected. His ability to explain complex topics clearly and his professional, solution-oriented approach made a big difference for us.
I would absolutely recommend working with him.
Johannes Auer impresses across the board with his overall package as a project manager. His ability to address issues early and proactively, combined with an excellent professional background, builds trust from the very beginning. Particularly noteworthy is his clear, technically sound, and at the same time pleasantly human communication with all stakeholders, which significantly contributes to the project’s success. Even in challenging situations, he remains calm and keeps a clear overview. His structured way of working and his ability to explain even complex matters in a clear and precise manner round off his profile and make working with him not only successful but also highly enjoyable.1
What I particularly value in working with Johannes Auer is his quick grasp of complex topics and his extensive expertise – not only in the SAP VIM environment but also across the broader SAP landscape.
He finds pragmatic solutions, critically questions existing processes, and proactively provides helpful documentation. He delivers changes and adjustments reliably after conducting his own tests – significantly reducing the risk of errors only being discovered by the business users.1
Next step
Let's talk about your VIM project.
No obligation — 30 minutes, directly with the managing director.
Frequently asked questions about order confirmations in SAP VIM
Do we need SAP VIM for invoices first?
No. VIM Beyond Invoices is a framework in its own right and can be implemented without invoice processing. If you already run VIM, however, you save the installation, the archive connection and the capture infrastructure — and your business users already know the interface.
What does a checked confirmation give accounts payable?
It clears the path for fast invoice processing. If price, quantity and date already match at the confirmation, the later invoice runs through without a price or quantity block instead of sitting in a query between purchasing and accounting. That decides how many invoices you pay within the early payment discount period — and that discount is real money, lost by the week once an invoice stalls. Clearing the deviation at the confirmation leaves the invoice the full term.
What happens to a deviation?
It becomes a work item with the document image, the PO reference and the concrete difference. Agent determination decides who receives it — usually the responsible buyer, plus an approval step for price deviations above a threshold. Only after that decision is the confirmed value written into the purchase order.
Does this work when suppliers confirm calendar weeks?
Yes, and it is the normal case — one of the reasons plain standard OCR fails here. We have implemented conversion logic for calendar weeks, ranges and free-text dates in several projects, including the question of whether “week 34” means Monday, Friday or the end of the week. You make that call, not the software.
What straight-through rate will we reach?
That depends on two things: the quality and consistency of your supplier layouts, and how tightly you set your tolerances. A defensible figure only exists after a document review with your real confirmations. Anyone quoting a rate before that is guessing.
We receive confirmations via EDI. Do we still need this?
Where suppliers confirm cleanly via EDI, EDI is the better route and needs no VIM Beyond. The value lies in the long tail: the suppliers who email a PDF to a shared address. In most organisations that is the majority — and precisely the part that is checked manually today, or not at all.
Confirmation control already exists in standard SAP.
It does — the problem is not the field but how values get into it. Standard SAP expects somebody to enter the confirmed date and quantity. The solution package closes exactly that gap by reading both from the document, checking them and writing them back.
More document types in the VIM Beyond framework
Sales orders
Capture customer purchase orders from mail and PDF, check them against customer, material and pricing master data and create the sales order in SAP — without re-keying in the sales office.
To sales orders →
Other inbound documents
Customs documents, proof-of-arrival confirmations, mill and test certificates — and any document type without a standard package, as a custom scenario in the framework.
To the other inbound documents →
Processing order confirmations automatically in SAP
Automated processing of order confirmations is the most frequently requested use case for OpenText VIM Beyond Invoices — and the one with the most mature solution package. The sections below summarise what it is about and where the pitfalls sit.
What is an order confirmation in the SAP process?
The order confirmation is the supplier’s reply to a purchase order: it confirms — or corrects — price, quantity and delivery date per line. In standard SAP these values belong in the confirmation control of the PO item, so that material planning and goods receipt work with the confirmed rather than the requested date. The bottleneck is capture: as long as the confirmation sits in a mailbox as a PDF, nothing exists in SAP.
How VIM Beyond Invoices automates the check
The solution package captures the document via capture or AI extraction, assigns it to the purchase order and compares each line with the PO data. Lines inside your tolerances are confirmed without intervention; deviations create a workflow item for the responsible buyer. The document itself is archived against the purchase order through SAP ArchiveLink.
Approving price, quantity and date deviations
Not every deviation carries the same weight. Two pieces on a bulk order is noise; an eight per cent price increase is a decision. We therefore define tolerances and approval levels separately per deviation type — and built a dedicated Fiori application for a chemical group in which price, quantity and date deviations are decided in a single step.
Calendar weeks, ranges and other date formats
The practical acid test of any confirmation automation is dates. Suppliers confirm “week 34”, “end of August”, “34/26” or a two-week range. Extraction that returns these merely as text only moves the work elsewhere. We therefore implement explicit conversion logic — with a deliberate decision on which day a calendar week maps to.
Early payment discount: why the confirmation decides the invoice runtime
Price deviations that go unnoticed on the confirmation reappear later as a price block in invoice verification — by then in accounts payable, with the goods in stock and no room to negotiate. That is where the damage happens: a blocked invoice waits for a query between purchasing and accounting, and while it waits, the discount period runs out. A checked confirmation turns that around — the invoice meets a purchase order whose prices, quantities and dates are already confirmed, and can run through unblocked. The benefit is calculable: it is the discount on the invoices that miss the deadline today. Checking order confirmations therefore relieves your invoice intake in SAP VIM directly. More on the framework and the other document types on the VIM Beyond Invoices overview; references in the project list.
- 1This testimonial was originally written in German and has been translated into English for international readers.