Slack-to-ERP purchase approval workflow automation

A pharma ingredients supplier, 400 purchase requests monthly, routed approvals via email with lost threads and no SLA visibility. SAP PO creation lagged 3–5 days. Finance could not answer which requests were stuck with which approver; audit prep meant reconstructing chains from forwarded Outlook threads.

Simplileap mapped the as-is flow with procurement and IT: request intake form, category owners, dual approval above ₹8L, and manual SAP entry after final sign-off. Bottlenecks were notification fatigue, ambiguous card subjects, and no escalation when approvers were on travel.

Automation design: Slack workflow builder + custom bot posting interactive cards; threshold rules by amount and category; SAP BAPI integration via middleware; escalation after 24h idle; audit log in PostgreSQL. Each approval action wrote immutable events, actor, timestamp, decision, PO reference, exportable for internal audit.

Middleware handled idempotent SAP posts so double-clicks on mobile Slack did not duplicate POs. Failed BAPI responses routed to a finance exception channel with payload snippets, not silent failure. Staging used recorded VCR-style mocks when SAP test system instability blocked end-to-end runs, unblocking CI while infra team refreshed sandboxes.

Problems: SAP test system unstable, recorded VCR-style mocks for CI; approvers on WhatsApp not Slack, dual notification channel for tier-1 only; currency FX edge cases on import POs, manual review queue. Change management included a two-week parallel run where email remained authoritative until error rates dropped below agreed threshold.

Security review covered least-privilege SAP service accounts, secrets rotation, and PII minimization in Slack card text. Procurement leads could filter audit logs by category and date range without database access, operational self-serve reduced IT ticket load.

Outcome: median approval-to-PO time 3.8 days → 11 hours; audit findings on missing approver trail resolved. Supplier anonymized, pharma ingredients distributor, India operations.