AWS for SAP
Transforming ERP Business Process Operations with Agentic AI
This is a guest post by Amanda Jensen, AABG Global Innovation Lead at Accenture and Mike Earley, AABG Lead GenAI Architect at Accenture in partnership with AWS
Executive Summary & Takeaways
A leading enterprise partnered with Accenture to transform their Direct Ship billing by deploying an agentic AI solution on AWS that replaces manual exception handling with real-time, AI-driven insights and guidance. The result was a rapid, business-led transformation that reduced operational friction, accelerated issue resolution, and improved revenue realization within five weeks of deployment. Takeaways include:
- When aligned to business outcomes and powered by scalable cloud infrastructure, AI can deliver measurable impact in months—demonstrating a practical path to enterprise reinvention.
- Agentic AI shifts operations from reactive exception management to proactive, insight-driven decision-making, enabling faster resolution of high-value items.
- Centralized knowledge and conversational interfaces boost productivity and scale expertise, reducing reliance on manual processes and freeing up experienced staff.
Introduction
For enterprises that handle a high volume of transactions, manual exception handling in enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems creates bottlenecks that delay critical business processes and ultimately impact customer satisfaction and revenue recognition. Managing these complex business process operations at scale presents significant operational challenges. Traditional approaches to ERP exception management cannot keep pace with ever increasing business demands, and organizations need an AI driven approach to achieve operational excellence where AI agents can autonomously reason, make decisions, and act. This post shows how Accenture built an Agentic AI solution using AWS services that transforms ERP business process exception management.
Challenges with ERP operations
Direct Ship operations present unique complexities for large enterprises. Even within a mature ERP landscape, the volume of orders, the depth of process configuration, and the number of exception scenarios make it difficult for operations teams to efficiently identify, triage, and resolve billing issues.
Challenges compound when workflows extend beyond the ERP into incident management, logistics, and compliance systems where interface failures, data mismatches, and handoff gaps are common. Process knowledge tends to concentrate with experienced team members, and standard operating procedures (SOPs) often span multiple documents creating onboarding challenges and slow resolution times.
International orders add further complexity with customs documentation, country-specific tax and duty rules, value-added tax (VAT) compliance, currency handling, and export controls. The result is invoicing delays, revenue gaps, and compliance risk.
Agentic AI solution
To address these challenges, Accenture developed an Agentic AI solution using AWS services like Amazon Bedrock and Bedrock Agentcore that shifts ERP exception management from manual, effort intensive operations to autonomous, agent driven resolution. The solution consists of two primary components that work together to transform the operator experience: a Digital Assistant and an integration capability with enterprise systems. The Digital Assistant serves as a conversational AI interface that centralizes SOPs, job aids, and institutional knowledge into a single, accessible system, allowing team members to ask natural language questions and receive contextual guidance for resolving complex scenarios. This is an AI powered assistant with deep knowledge of Direct Ship processes that can recommend resolutions and provide real time access to SAP data, eliminating the need to navigate multiple systems. The agent processes context, maintains conversation history, and provides actionable insights. The solution integrates with existing enterprise systems including SAP S/4HANA and Okta for authentication, so that the AI agent has access to real time operational data while maintaining enterprise security standards.
Solution Architecture
The solution combines six AWS services, each selected for a specific role in delivering AI capabilities with enterprise security and scalability:
The following describes how these services work together in practice: (1) A team member asks the Digital Assistant a natural language question about a billing exception. (2) The Strands Agents SDK evaluates the request, determines which tools to invoke, and orchestrates the resolution workflow. (3) AWS Lambda securely connects to SAP S/4HANA to retrieve real time order, billing, and shipment data. (4) Amazon RDS provides rapid access to pre loaded exception reports, enabling the agent to cross reference patterns and identify root causes. (5) Amazon Bedrock AgentCore maintains conversational context across multi turn interactions so the agent remembers prior questions. (6) The agent synthesizes all data sources and returns a prioritized recommendation with specific resolution steps.
- Amazon Bedrock: Provides access to high performing foundation models from leading AI companies through a single API. In this solution, Bedrock powers the Digital Assistant’s ability to understand complex billing scenarios, interpret SOPs, and generate contextual recommendations.
- Strands Agents SDK: Integrates the agent seamlessly with LLMs, tools and native AWS services allowing it to evaluate inputs, determine next steps, and select tools autonomously using the reasoning capabilities of foundation models. This eliminates the need for hard coded decision trees and allows the agent to handle novel exception types.
- Amazon Bedrock AgentCore: Manages short term working memory context without complex memory infrastructure. This enables natural multi turn conversations where the agent remembers what was discussed earlier in the session. Additional AgentCore capabilities such as gateway, runtime, and observability allow this solution to scale to hundreds of AI agents in the future.
- AWS Lambda: Acts as a serverless gateway to securely access enterprise systems including SAP S/4HANA. Lambda’s event driven architecture means there are no idle costs while still responding to agent queries with low latency.
- Amazon RDS: Stores pre processed SAP S/4HANA report data, supporting rapid queries to identify exceptions and provide status updates. This separation keeps SAP system load low while giving the agent sub second access to operational data.
- AWS Step Functions: Orchestrates report data loading workflows from a data source, ensuring data is fresh and available for agent queries. Built in retry logic and visual workflow monitoring provide reliability without custom orchestration code.
Benefits and Business Outcomes
Accenture, in partnership with AWS, delivered a working solution in five weeks, demonstrating proven expertise in technology and SAP business processes. This solution minimized repetitive administrative tasks and reduced manual effort in exception management, with the agent providing instant access to SAP data and removing the need to navigate and switch between multiple systems. Recommended actions enabled operations teams to address billing exceptions proactively rather than reactively, so that high-value orders receive immediate attention and reducing revenue delays. New team members gain immediate access to institutional knowledge through conversational interactions, with the Digital Assistant reducing dependency on experienced staff for routine questions and empowering senior team members to focus on complex scenarios. SOPs and troubleshooting guides remain current and accessible through the centralized knowledge base, to help maintain consistent process execution across the organization.
Enterprises can transform their business process operations through an Agentic AI solution built by Accenture using AWS services. The solution demonstrates that AI driven process transformation can deliver measurable business value in weeks, not years, when organizations combine clear goals with cloud native AI capabilities and partners with proven ERP domain expertise. As organizations continue to simplify and automate their ERP operations, Agentic AI represents an effective approach to equip operational teams and drive business outcomes. Looking ahead, the same architectural pattern can extend to procurement, inventory management, and other SAP modules. Connect with the AWS SAP Specialist Team or Accenture AWS Business Group to schedule an Agentic AI Workshop for SAP, to explore how to modernize your ERP management and to improve your business outcomes. You can also Jump-start development with ready-to-use code samples for all Bedrock AgentCore services in AWS GitHub repository.
Accenture AWS Partner Spotlight
Accenture is an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner and MSP that provides end-to-end solutions to migrate to and manage operations on AWS. By working with the Accenture AWS Business Group (AABG), a strategic collaboration by Accenture and AWS, you can accelerate the pace of innovation to deliver differentiated products and services.