This partner insight was authored by Fabian Rückels, Director of International Growth at Doxis. 

An invoice arrives in an email inbox. AI reads it, pulls the header data and line items, and matches it against the purchase order and goods receipt. The invoice posts in SAP. From inbox to posting, no one has touched it. At most enterprises, an invoice’s life looks nothing like this: it waits on manually keyed data and hand-picked approvers who don’t always sign off in time, bouncing between procurement, purchasing, and supervisors.

The distance between those two realities is smaller than most SAP customers think — and closing it doesn’t require leaving SAP. The gaps in the standard can be filled from within SAP itself.

Doxis, ​“The document intelligence company,” was formed in 2025 after SER Group acquired three companies and launched only in January 2026, with roots in traditional enterprise content management (ECM). After more than 12 years in the SAP ecosystem, I came to the new brand through one of the purchased enterprises, a very SAP-focused company with a background in both SAP and non-SAP archiving.

Our SAP portfolio spans SAP archiving and document management, document management for SAP SuccessFactors, SAP-embedded solutions for Procure-to-Pay and Order-to-Cash, and multiple SAP-integrated solutions for workflow management.

External Software Solutions

As SAP became a leading ERP vendor, it quickly realized that it couldn’t accommodate every company’s process and gave software companies the opportunity to develop solutions within an SAP system. Doxis is one of the hundreds of companies that have developed SAP-based software over the last 30 years. If an enterprise is big enough, it will have an SAP department and develop its own solutions; for smaller enterprises without that expertise, IT companies like Doxis fill in the gaps that the SAP standard configuration cannot accommodate.

We always try to focus on the SAP approach, developing SAP-embedded solutions that sit within an SAP system. There’s another approach — developing your own cloud solution that connects through an API to SAP — but most companies we’ve worked with that really focus on SAP want their users to operate within the SAP user interface.

Invoice Automation

Where supplier invoices get stuck in an SAP system depends on the enterprise’s scale and location. Generally, companies lack automation in the verification workflow, and many still run it on legacy systems.

A workflow without enough automation becomes the biggest bottleneck, especially once an invoice exceeds a value limit and supervisors join the approval chain. Over the last five years, Europe has focused on e‑invoicing, which in theory allows companies to receive fully correct invoice data and automate the process.

Most companies implement three-way matching with Doxis, comparing supplier invoices with purchase orders and goods receipts. If the match succeeds, most automatically post the invoice. This is called a ​“zero-touch invoice.” If there is a price or quantity deviation, or a goods receipt is missing, workflows route automatically to procurement and purchasing. These can be accessed via SAP Launchpad or SAP GUI. Because we operate via a web interface, users don’t need to be SAP users, removing another bottleneck. Without a purchase order, accounts payable usually starts with some verification, then sets automated workflows in motion.

AI-driven no-touch posting with three-way matching doesn’t just deliver a nice user interface; it’s a big win in time. Users feel at home in their existing SAP user interface, and the automations save them an enormous amount of time.

IT colleagues at large U.S. enterprises don’t expect e‑invoicing to be a topic in the next five years due to the federalist system. In the U.S., invoices arrive in various formats: email, portals, XML files, or PDFs. Many companies still capture that data with legacy OCR software, most of it template-based. Someone has to build a template for each supplier’s invoice layout, and every time a supplier changes its format or a new supplier comes on board, someone has to build or repair another one. Creating and maintaining those templates is heavy manual work in its own right.

SAP’s standard configuration doesn’t close this gap on its own, and it adds another: There is no central dashboard for accounts payable to see all invoices across departments. Doxis closes both by using AI to extract the invoice data from emails inside a fully automatic technical black box, with no templates to create or maintain, because the model reads each invoice as it arrives, whatever the layout. The data and documents are then sent to a central SAP dashboard where accounts payable can see all invoices.

Control matters as much as speed. Extracting data from an invoice can run inside a black box; posting decisions cannot. For invoices without a purchase order, a machine learning algorithm built on SAP’s Predictive Analytics Library suggests the right account, cost center, and workflow user from historical data. We set rules to act on suggestions only if the model is at least 80% confident. Clients need this mix of rule-based automation and AI, especially when auditors ask about the process. No one wants to say, ​“An AI model gives us the information; how and why, we don’t know.”

All In on SAP

Big enterprises spend a lot implementing SAP, then more on other tools, creating a fragmented, siloed data landscape. Our mantra is, ​“If you implement SAP, use SAP as your central system. Let all departments that work with SAP collaborate in and through SAP.”

One user interface, no silos, and data in one central place. Our SAP-embedded solutions store all documents and data as part of the SAP business object. Invoices, order confirmations, sales orders, and delivery notes live within purchase orders and invoices where the SAP standard expects them. The audit trail exists in the SAP standard, so instead of building a parallel one, we add documents and data to it and fill gaps only where the standard falls short.

S/4HANA Migration

The right timing for adopting solutions like ours depends on the migration method. Many companies do a quick brownfield migration: a purely technical move to S/4HANA that doesn’t change existing processes, with optimization as a second step, which can itself be a good entry point. For companies taking a greenfield or bluefield approach and starting over, the transformation is a once-in-a-lifetime chance to examine processes, the supplier landscape, and current add-ons. An S/4HANA upgrade touches the whole organization, so it makes sense to include optimization in the project.

Where should an organization begin? Usually where the pain is greatest. Accounts payable, archiving, and SuccessFactors may be the three biggest entry points before scaling to the rest of Procure-to-Pay and Order-to-Cash. Whatever the starting point, I recommend that clients be very clear on how much they want to automate, how much AI to use, and how much control to keep with rule-based automations. Have an SAP strategy and maintain real SAP expertise in your organization.

The Road Ahead

Agentic AI fits into this picture unevenly. The ECM side of our practice, our web solution, contains much of it: chatbots, AI-powered search, and more. The SAP world moves more slowly. SAP is pushing tools like Joule, its chatbot, but few customers use it yet. I estimate 80% of SAP customers still work in the traditional SAP GUI. Companies remain hesitant, which is why the right mix of rule-based automations and agentic AI matters. There is still a long way to go, and the pace is set by SAP as much as by vendors like us.

Doxis is a new brand, but it is not a loose collection of parts: Four companies have become one, combining Procure-to-Pay and Order-to-Cash automation, an SAP-certified archive, and document management for SAP SuccessFactors in a single portfolio. Markets from the U.S. to the U.K., Spain, and France have shown me how unique that combination is in the SAP world. And because U.S. enterprises typically buy through their SAP account executives and the SAP Store, we have brought all of our solutions there: a natural first stop for any enterprise ready to close the gaps that the SAP standard leaves open.

Fabian Rückels is Director of International Growth at Doxis.