How to automate email processing for SAP Business ByDesign
Short answer
Watch shared mailboxes through Microsoft Graph or IMAP, classify and extract data from emails and attachments, match to ByDesign master data through web services, and create draft documents for human review. Outbound email from ByDesign can be improved separately with form templates and workflow.
ByDesign customers often run lean order desks and AP teams. Customers email purchase orders as PDFs, Excel sheets or plain text; suppliers email order acknowledgements and invoices; prospects send RFQs to a general sales address. Someone reads each message, looks up the business partner and material, and keys the document. It is accurate when the person is fresh and slow or wrong when they are not.
Email automation here means reading what arrives, deciding what it is, pulling out the structured data, and creating a draft in ByDesign that a person reviews. The aim is to remove the typing, not the judgement.
Because ByDesign is SaaS, the only route in is the supported web services or custom services. That actually simplifies the design: the automation lives outside ByDesign and posts through one arrangement.
What teams use it for
Customer purchase orders to sales order drafts
Extract customer PO number, ship-to, items, quantities and requested dates; match ship-to and materials; create a draft sales order for the desk to confirm.
RFQ intake to sales quotation
Identify RFQ emails, capture part numbers and quantities, and open a draft quotation with the original email attached.
Supplier acknowledgements to PO updates
Parse confirmations with dates and quantities and attach them to the matching purchase order, flagging differences.
Supplier invoices from a shared AP inbox
Route PDF invoices to extraction, match to PO and goods receipt, and create a supplier invoice draft or an exception task.
Customer service requests
Classify emails into returns, delivery inquiries and complaints, and create service requests with the right category.
Outbound status emails
Generate shipment and delay notices from ByDesign data with consistent wording, queued for approval or sent directly for low-risk cases.
SAP Business ByDesign integration surface
- SOAP web services via Communication Scenarios for sales orders, quotations, purchase orders, supplier invoices, service requests and business partner data; exact service names depend on release and enabled scenarios.
- Custom web services in the Cloud Application Studio to create drafts with only the fields your automation needs, or to attach files to documents.
- Business partner and material lookups via query-style services or report feeds, used for matching sender, ship-to and part numbers.
- Native ByDesign outbound email, form templates and output management, configured by key users for document delivery, separate from inbound handling.
- The Web Service Message Monitoring view for diagnosing rejected inbound calls from your automation.
How it works
- 1
Connect to the mailboxes
Use Microsoft Graph with application permissions limited to specific shared mailboxes, or IMAP for other providers. Process by message ID and mark or move handled messages.
- 2
Classify the message
Decide PO, RFQ, invoice, acknowledgement, service request or other. Start with rules plus a small language model; unknowns go to a human queue.
- 3
Extract the data
Read the body and attachments. Spreadsheets are easy; PDFs may need OCR. Output a normalised structure with a confidence per field.
- 4
Match to ByDesign master data
Resolve the business partner by sender domain, customer references and addresses; match part numbers using customer part number tables and fuzzy matching, never guesses on low confidence.
- 5
Create a draft
Post to the relevant service in a draft or in-preparation state, and attach the source email. Do not auto-release.
- 6
Review queue
Show the email next to the extracted fields, highlight low-confidence values and let the clerk fix and approve in one view.
- 7
Learn from corrections
Store corrected matches such as customer part numbers and ship-to aliases so the next email matches without review.
Example flows
Customer PO by email
Trigger: An email with a PDF PO arrives in orders@ the shared mailbox.
- The classifier tags it as a customer purchase order.
- Extraction returns customer PO number, ship-to and three line items with a 0.62 confidence on one part number.
- The matcher resolves two parts automatically and suggests two candidates for the third.
- The clerk picks the right candidate, and the system creates a draft sales order with the PDF attached.
Result: The clerk confirms a draft in a minute instead of keying it for ten, and the alias is saved for next time.
Delay notice to the customer
Trigger: A purchase order delivery date moves beyond the sales order promise date.
- A scheduled comparison finds affected sales orders.
- A draft email is generated with new dates and a short reason from the PO comment.
- The account owner approves and the message goes out from the sales address.
Result: Customers hear about slips before they ask, and the discussion is logged on the account.
Keeping data on-prem
ByDesign is hosted by SAP, but the email processing does not have to be. Run the pipeline in your own network or private cloud, reading mailboxes via Graph or IMAP and posting to ByDesign over an allow-listed outbound connection. For extraction and classification, open-weight models on your own GPUs avoid sending customer orders, price lists and drawings to a third-party API. Keep the review queue inside your network and expose only the ByDesign posting calls externally.
Security checklist
- Grant mailbox access only to named shared mailboxes with least-privilege app permissions.
- Treat every attachment as hostile: scan for malware and never execute macros or active content.
- Defend against prompt injection in email bodies by keeping the model's output structured and never letting it choose which service to call.
- Write only drafts through a restricted arrangement, and release after human review.
- Retain the original email with the document for audit, subject to your retention policy.
Ways to get it done
Rules plus a low-code tool
Effort: 1 to 3 weeks, fragile as formats change.
Works for a few fixed formats from a handful of customers.
Packaged intelligent document processing
Effort: 2 to 6 weeks plus licence.
Good for invoices; check that it can post to ByDesign services and handle your approval flow.
Custom pipeline with a private model (Netray or another partner)
Effort: 4 to 8 weeks for the first document types.
Best for varied formats, mixed languages and strict data control.
Pitfalls
- !Auto-creating confirmed orders from low-confidence extraction produces expensive errors; stay with drafts until accuracy is proven per customer.
- !Duplicates are common: customers resend the same PO. Check customer PO number and date against existing orders before creating.
- !Reply-chain emails hide the real request in quoted text; strip signatures and quoted history before classifying.
- !Customer part numbers and units of measure drive most mismatches. Maintain the mapping, not just OCR quality.
- !Mailbox rate limits and throttling can stall processing; batch and back off.
Frequently asked questions
Can ByDesign read incoming emails by itself?
ByDesign can store and send emails in several processes, but turning inbound PO or invoice emails into documents typically needs an external pipeline. That pipeline reads the mailbox and calls ByDesign web services to create drafts. Check what your release offers for inbound handling before building.
Is it safe to auto-post supplier invoices?
Only with strict controls. Many teams auto-create drafts and auto-match invoices that agree with the PO and goods receipt within tolerance, and route the rest for review. Full straight-through posting needs clean master data and a clear audit policy.
What accuracy should I expect?
It depends on document quality and variety. Clean digital PDFs and spreadsheets usually extract well; scans, handwritten notes and unusual layouts need more review. Measure per sender and expand automation where results hold up over a few weeks.
Do I need an LLM or will rules do?
Rules are enough for fixed formats from a few senders. A language model helps with varied layouts, free-text emails and multiple languages. Use a model for extraction and keep deterministic code for matching and posting.
Can this send emails as well?
Yes. Drafts can be generated from ByDesign data and sent after approval, or sent automatically for low-risk notices. Many companies keep ByDesign output management for formal documents and use the pipeline for conversational updates.
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