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Solution · Supply chainOne approved record feeds SAP, the PIM, the web shop and the marketplaces
Product and price master data published to every channel
New products and price changes are requested once, checked by rules, approved in Teams and published by robots to every sales channel, then reconciled every night.
Executive summary
Stop retyping every new product and price change into the ERP, the PIM, the web shop and each marketplace.
We design a flow in which a product or price change is entered once, approved once and published everywhere.
A new SKU is sellable on every channel the day it is approved, not three to five working days after it reaches SAP.
SAP S/4HANA (material master, price conditions); PIM; web shop
Business problem
Master data
A distributor's product record is born several times: a new SKU is created in SAP with units, tax classification and purchase price, then described again in the PIM, listed again in the web shop and uploaded again to each marketplace. Price changes travel the same route, and the PDF price list is rebuilt at month end from whatever SAP holds that day.
Each copy belongs to a different team, and nobody owns the agreement between them. The gaps are found by customers whose invoice differs from the offer, by marketplaces that reject a listing for a missing attribute, and by the warehouse when a pallet arrives in the wrong unit of measure. Every new marketplace adds a copy and every promotion week multiplies the changes. Margin leaks through the gap between the agreed price and the invoiced price, and finance learns about it from the credit notes.
How it works today
The flow below is typical for distributors with several sales channels.
- PersonA category manager emails new SKUs or a price change as an Excel attachment; supplier price lists arrive as PDF or CSV
- PersonThe master data specialist creates the material in SAP (MM01) and the price conditions (VK11); a colleague checks
- WaitingE‑commerce waits for the SAP number, then re-keys attributes and prices into the PIM and the shop, days later
- PersonMarketplace listings are updated in each seller portal, product by product or via CSV uploads fixed until the portal accepts them
- PersonAt month end the price-list PDF is rebuilt in Excel from an SAP export
- Risk of errorBetween the first and the last channel, prices and attributes disagree; the difference surfaces as a complaint, a credit note or a rejected listing
- PersonWhen there is time, someone exports all five channels and compares them in Excel
Why the current process costs more than it appears
Time that disappears before anyone measures it.
- Keying is the visible part. Behind each update sit portal error messages, questions back to the category manager and a second pair of eyes in SAP that no time sheet records.
- Every mismatch that reaches a customer costs more than the update did: a credit note, a call from the key-account manager, a corrected invoice, a discount nobody approved.
- A product in SAP but not yet on the marketplaces cannot be sold there; days of waiting per launch, over hundreds of SKUs a year, are revenue nobody attributes to master data.
- Consumer price rules, such as showing the lowest price of the previous 30 days with every reduction, need a price history per channel that this process cannot produce.
Cost of inaction
Another marketplace means a sixth copy of every product, and the arithmetic above repeats every year. The costs outside the model keep arriving: the credit note for the price that was right in SAP and wrong on the invoice, the launch that missed a marketplace by a week.
The other cost is control: a company that cannot say which price is live on which channel, and who approved it, cannot answer a customer, an auditor or a consumer protection authority with confidence.
A plausible organisation with realistic proportions. The figures are there to be recalculated on your data; they are not a client result.
A consumer electronics distributor: three warehouses, 900 employees, 18,000 SKUs, SAP S/4HANA, a PIM, a web shop, two marketplace accounts, Microsoft 365 E3; four people in master data, three in e‑commerce.
2,400 product and price updates a month across five channels (SAP, PIM, web shop, two marketplaces) plus a monthly price-list PDF; 30% new SKUs, 55% price changes and promotions, 15% corrections.
Excel requests keyed into SAP, re-keyed by e‑commerce into the PIM, the shop and the seller portals; price list rebuilt by hand at month end.
Twelve minutes of hands-on time per update summed over the channels; three to five working days before a new SKU is sellable everywhere.
One golden-record request in Power Apps or Excel, rule-based validation, approval in Microsoft Teams, robots that update every channel, a generated price-list PDF and a nightly reconciliation against the approved record.
In the modelled case, hands-on time per update falls from twelve minutes to the two or three spent on request and approval, a new SKU is sellable everywhere on the day of approval, and mismatches surface overnight. A model, not a measurement.
Proposed solution
We design a flow in which a product or price change is entered once, approved once and published everywhere, on the UiPath Platform and your Microsoft 365 tenant. The entry point is a Power Apps form on a SharePoint list, with an Excel template upload for supplier price rounds. A robot checks every request before anyone sees it: EAN check digit, units, tax class, hierarchy, margin floor, validity dates, duplicates and the attributes each marketplace demands. Failed requests go back with the rule named; passed ones reach the pricing controller, and for new products the category head, as a Teams approval with the margin effect attached.
Publishing runs from an Orchestrator queue, one item per SKU and channel. SAP is maintained through standard BAPIs for the material master and the price conditions, so the robot behaves like an interface rather than a user at a screen. The PIM, the web shop and the first marketplace are updated through their APIs with connectors built in Connector Builder; the second marketplace has no usable price API and is updated through its seller portal by UI automation. Confirmations are written back to the request, and the price-list PDF is generated from a Word template, filed on SharePoint and announced in Teams.
Channels also get edited directly, so a nightly reconciliation reads every channel back, compares it with the approved record and posts the mismatches to Teams for a decision. Where a client prefers people for the residual exceptions, Mientha's master-data BPO team takes that queue alongside the robots. No AI is needed; the rules are known.
Power Apps canvas app on a SharePoint list; Microsoft Teams Approvals app via Power Automate; UiPath Orchestrator queues, triggers and audit; UiPath Integration Service (SAP BAPI, Microsoft OneDrive & SharePoint, Microsoft Teams connectors); UiPath Word activities; UiPath SAP and browser UI automation
Request form and Excel template, rule tables, approval routing, publishing workflows per channel, price-list generator, nightly reconciliation and mismatch report, runbook
REST connectors for the PIM, the web shop and the first marketplace (Connector Builder); UI automation of the second marketplace's seller portal; SAP BAPI maintenance
How the automated process works
- PersonThe category manager fills in one golden-record request in Power Apps or uploads the Excel template for a supplier price round
- AutomationA robot picks the request up from the SharePoint list, runs the rules and returns failed lines with the failing rule
- PersonThe pricing controller, and for new SKUs the category head, approve in the Teams Approvals app
- SystemRobots create or change the material and the price conditions in SAP S/4HANA through BAPIs and return the SAP number
- AutomationRobots publish to the PIM, the shop and the first marketplace through APIs, and to the second marketplace through its seller portal; confirmations are logged per SKU
- AutomationOn request or monthly, the price-list PDF is generated, filed on SharePoint and announced in Teams
- AutomationEvery night a reconciliation job reads all five channels, compares them with the approved record and posts the mismatches in Teams
- PersonThe master data specialist decides per mismatch: republish, accept the channel value or open a correction request
Human-in-the-loop model
Automation handles
- Validation of every request: EAN, units, tax class, hierarchy, margin floor, validity, duplicates, channel attributes
- Materials and price conditions in SAP; listings and prices in the PIM, the shop and the marketplaces
- The price-list PDF, the status per SKU and channel, and the nightly comparison of all channels with the approved record
People decide
- Prices and new products, approved in Teams within delegated limits
- Which value is right when a channel was edited directly
- Changes to the rule tables: margin floors, tax mapping and mandatory attributes stay with pricing and e‑commerce
Before and after
Systems and integrations
The stack is deliberately short: one engine, one execution layer, one place where a person decides.
Inputs
- Power Apps request form
- Excel bulk template on SharePoint
- supplier price files from category management
Automation layer
- UiPath Orchestrator
- UiPath Robots
- UiPath Integration Service
- Power Automate approval flow
Target systems
- SAP S/4HANA (material master, price conditions)
- PIM
- web shop
- two marketplace seller portals
- SharePoint (price lists, mismatch reports)
Human touchpoints: Teams Approvals; mismatch summary in a Teams channel; request status in Power Apps
Technologies used
request form with pick-lists, mandatory fields per channel and Excel upload
Aapproval of validated requests; mismatch summaries and price-list links
Aqueues per SKU and channel, rules, publishing, retries, credentials, audit; nightly reconciliation
ASAP maintenance, list and Excel triggers, REST connectors for PIM, shop and marketplace, Teams posts
Athe seller portal without an API; SAP transactions without a BAPI
Aprice-list PDF from a Word template
Asystem of record for materials, units, tax classification and price conditions
AIllustrative economic model
Numbers you can check against your own data.
Credit notes and lost marketplace days are left out of the model, and what remains is an illustration rather than a client measurement. Twelve minutes is the hands-on time per update summed over the five channels, including the second check in SAP and the marketplace CSV corrections; €25 is a fully loaded hourly cost for master data and e‑commerce roles in Central Europe. We show capacity released, not headcount removed.
Run the numbers on your data
An illustrative estimate from your own inputs. It models released capacity; it is not a promise of savings.
Business benefits
- A new SKU is sellable on every channel the day it is approved, not three to five working days after it reaches SAP
- Invoices, the shop, the marketplaces and the price list show the same price, because it comes from one approved record
- Credit notes caused by price and unit mismatches are blocked by the rules before publishing
- A supplier price round of several hundred lines is one upload and one approval, not days of keying by two teams
- Peaks before Black Friday and at launches are absorbed by robots overnight, not by overtime
The management view
- The state of every product on every channel is visible in one list: requested, validated, approved, live where, pending where
- Approval is a recorded step in the flow, not an email that may go unread; delegated limits apply every time
- Every price on every channel traces back to a request, an approver and a timestamp: the price history consumer rules require
Board-level KPIs
Security and governance
Trust in automation is built on the audit trail, not on a promise.
- Robots use a dedicated SAP user limited to material and condition maintenance; marketplace and PIM credentials sit in the Orchestrator credential store backed by Azure Key Vault, never in a workflow
- Four eyes are enforced by the flow: whoever requests a price cannot approve it, and approval limits by margin effect apply automatically
- Every published value carries its request, approver, timestamp and channel confirmation: one audit trail and one price history per channel
- Robots and queues run either on your UiPath Automation Cloud tenant in the EU region or on an Automation Suite you host yourself; the requests, approvals and reports stay in your Microsoft 365 tenant either way
Why now
The EU Omnibus directive requires the lowest price of the previous 30 days to be shown with every consumer price reduction; a process that cannot prove when a price changed on which channel is a compliance gap
Each new marketplace adds another copy of the catalogue, so the manual process, modelled at €12,000 of capacity a month, grows with every channel
The building blocks are standard now: a SAP BAPI connector, Connector Builder for REST APIs, SharePoint and Excel triggers and the Approvals app in Teams, so most of the work is rules and mapping
Relevant executive roles
Master data stops being the reason a product cannot be sold or shipped; the team works on exceptions and new channels
Offers, invoices, the shop and the price list show the same number, and a price round reaches the market in a day
Margin leakage through unapproved price differences and the credit notes that follow are blocked at the source
Standard interfaces to SAP and the channel APIs replace CSV uploads and personal macros
Common questions and objections
Prices, tax classes and units usually live in SAP, and marketplaces still need their own upload. The flow feeds the PIM from one approved request and checks nightly that all of them agree.
It will need maintenance, and we plan for it: the portal steps sit in one isolated workflow, watched daily by the reconciliation and covered by our application management service.
Yes, and it is often the best first step: simpler rules, high volume, a margin effect visible in the first price round. New SKUs and attributes follow once the channel mapping is proven.
When this is not the right solution
- Two channels and no more than a few hundred updates a month, where a good Excel template and a disciplined approval in Teams are enough
- The product hierarchy or the tax mapping is being redesigned, so the rules the robot would apply are not stable yet
- The PIM already syndicates to every channel and is integrated with SAP; then the gap is only the request and approval step
A question for the next management meeting
If we picked one of our products at random today, would the ERP, the web shop, the marketplaces and the price list return the same price, and who would know if they did not?
Implementation approach
A scope without ambiguity, before anything is signed.
We deliver
- One month of your updates, followed from request to published price: channels, rejection reasons and the rules people apply from memory
- The Power Apps form and Excel template, the rule tables and the approval routing in Teams
- Publishing robots per channel, the price-list generator and the nightly reconciliation
- Pilot with one category, then rollout with hypercare and a runbook; optionally our master-data BPO team for residual exceptions
We need from you
- Three months of product and price changes with the corresponding entries in each channel
- A process owner in master data, a pricing controller and an e‑commerce owner for the channel attributes
- API documentation and credentials for the PIM, the shop and the marketplaces, and a technical SAP user
Stages
Discovery
Changes analysed per channel; rules and volumes agreed with the owners
Design
Golden-record fields, rule tables, approval thresholds, channel mapping, security model
Build
Form, rules, robots and connectors per channel, price-list template, reconciliation, Teams touchpoints
Validation
Parallel run on real changes; acceptance by master data and e‑commerce
Go-live and optimisation
Category by category with hypercare; then rule tuning and new channels
Departmental. Effort depends on the number of channels and their APIs, the variety of attribute sets and tax mappings, and how many rules exist only in people's heads.
One price change, five channels, and the same numbers typed three times.
Send us one month of product and price changes and the list of channels. We return a written assessment of which channels can be fed by API, which need a robot at the screen, and which rules should block a request before approval.
Trace one price change end to endThe neighbouring process usually has the same problem
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View solutionIndustries we deliver this in most oftenManufacturing & industryRetail & e‑commerce