One corporate expense that often goes unnoticed is manual document processing.
Every invoice, purchase order, delivery note, form, or operational record that your team has to review, extract, validate, route, and enter into an ERP takes time. Not strategic time. Not high-value time.
The kind of time that gets absorbed by routine work: opening files, reading fields, copying data, checking information, sending documents to the right place, and repeating the same steps again and again.
When this work scales across hundreds or thousands of documents every month, it becomes a slow leak in your team’s capacity, draining hours that could be used for higher-value work.
That is the pain SAP Document AI helps address. And after more than two decades working as SAP partners, we saw a clear opportunity to help companies turn that pain into a practical, measurable use case for automation. That is why we recently organized a hands-on workshop together with SAP at their Dallas offices.
We brought together 15 companies across telecom, energy and utilities, pharma, automotive, food and beverage, and high tech to work on real document-heavy scenarios. The goal was not to give them a generic product demo. We wanted each participant to leave with a PoC they could show internally, guided by our consultants and connected to their own operational reality.
But before getting into the technical work, we started with the business case.
That is why we used an ROI calculator created by Inclusion Cloud to help participants estimate the potential savings of automating their document workflows with DocAI.
Now, we are sharing that calculator, so your team can do the same: compare the current cost of manual or semi-automated document processing against a potential SAP Document AI workflow, estimate possible savings, and build a clearer case before moving into a PoC.
Try the SAP Document AI ROI Calculator here
Below, we explain what you can do with the calculator and how it can help you build a stronger business case to discuss internally with IT, finance, and business stakeholders.
What the ROI Calculator Helps You Estimate
The calculator looks at three main areas.
First, it estimates SAP Document AI usage based on monthly document volume, average pages per document, and the number of fields extracted from each document. This gives teams a clearer view of the expected DocAI consumption and associated monthly cost.
Then, it helps calculate the current cost of the manual process. Teams can enter the average time spent processing each document, the hourly cost of the people involved, and any additional operational, software, or per-document costs.
Finally, the calculator compares both scenarios to estimate monthly savings, annual savings, payback period, and projected ROI after accounting for the one-time automation cost.
For reference, in one energy-sector scenario discussed during the workshop, the estimated payback period was close to six months. The company was managing a high volume of operational documents across multiple regions, formats, and languages, with much of the process still depending on manual review, data extraction, validation, and SAP entry.
Of course, every case is different. But it shows why document-heavy processes can be a strong place to start.
Let’s Turn Your Document AI Business Case into a PoC
The calculator is only the first step.
We are making it available for free so your team can evaluate whether Document AI aligns with your financial and business needs before investing more time in a PoC.
If the numbers look promising, our team can help you move from estimate to execution. We can work with you to identify the right document workflow, define the business case, and build a practical PoC using your own documents, rules, systems, and operational constraints.
And if DocAI is not the right starting point for your needs, we can also help you explore other GenAI capabilities within SAP BTP and identify where AI could create measurable value inside your SAP environment.
If you have questions about the calculator or want help creating a PoC, get in touch with our team.
