Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems have long been essential for managing critical business functions—finance, inventory, procurement, human resources, and manufacturing. With rapid advancements in technology, artificial intelligence (AI) is reimagining what’s possible.
ERP systems are much more than repositories of data and business processes. With AI in the picture, ERP evolves into a smart assistant—proactively guiding your team, identifying patterns, flagging issues, and helping you stay two steps ahead of the competition, reducing supply chain issues and optimising customer service.
If you’re still running on a traditional ERP solution, it’s time to explore how AI can take your business to the next level.
What we’ll cover:
- How is AI impacting ERP systems?
- The role of AI in data and business intelligence
- Current use cases for AI in manufacturing
- AI-enhanced user experience in ERP
- Leading AI-enabled ERP solution
- How to get started
How is AI impacting ERP systems?
AI-enabled ERP solutions allow team members to make smarter decisions faster by using AI learnings from real-time and historical data. ERP solutions hold enormous data libraries across customer, supplier, inventory and order management. Using AI learnings will lead to better outcomes across multiple functions of a business—from finance and procurement to manufacturing and supply chain management.
- Automates repetitive tasks: AI and machine learning automate labour-intensive work like sales order creation, invoice matching, order processing, bank reconciliations and compliance checks, freeing your team for strategic, value add work. As an example, businesses with high volumes of sales orders that are manually captured from a customer order might consider Robotic Process Automation to create the order automatically in the ERP system. Once the order is automatically created, the AI bot can review the order and learn from previous orders/decision-making. For example, the AI Bot might run several checks to suggest next steps:
- Customer credit check
- Stock availability check
- Available to promise overview to see when stock will be available to ship to the customer
- Suggested email output to notify the customer of the order scheduled delivery
- Improves data quality and integration: AI continuously scans for anomalies, missing fields, or inconsistencies, validating and correcting data automatically to ensure clean, reliable inputs across all departments. It also integrates data from emails, PDFs, spreadsheets, and third-party systems—eliminating manual data input and reducing errors.
- Provides predictive insights: AI analyses trends from historical and real-time data to forecast demand, plan inventory, and anticipate maintenance needs—helping you prepare proactively. Use natural language to write reports, use AI to make recommendations about data analytics and recommendations for further data insight to business trends.
- Enables conversational interaction: Natural Language Processing (NLP) lets users query the ERP systems in plain language, making reporting and insights instantly accessible.
- Delivers contextual, actionable reporting: Beyond numbers, AI highlights drivers of profitability, emerging risks, and supplier performance to support informed decisions.
AI’s impact on data handling and business intelligence
AI enhances ERP systems by transforming how data is processed, analysed, and acted upon. Rather than simply reporting on past performance, AI uncovers patterns, identifies root causes, and delivers predictive insights that support faster, smarter decisions. It adds depth to business intelligence—connecting the dots between data points to show not just what happened, but why it happened and what’s likely to happen next. This frees up team members’ time for customer interaction and value add processes.
- AI automatically cleans, prepares, and integrates data for you—reducing time spent wrangling spreadsheets.
- Pattern recognition and anomaly detection highlight unexpected shifts in performance.
- Proactive alerts let you know when action is needed, before problems escalate.
With AI-driven BI, companies move from reactive to proactive—shifting from hindsight to foresight.
Current Use Cases for AI in Manufacturing
AI is transforming manufacturing across multiple areas by automating routine tasks, improving decision-making, and boosting productivity. Key use cases include:
- Enterprise Search & Data Access: Natural Language Processing (NLP) enables users to ask plain-language questions like “What are my open sales orders?” and instantly retrieve answers from across ERP systems, documents, and databases. The AI understands context, not just keywords, to return the most relevant results—reducing search time by up to 50 per cent and accelerating decisions.
- Demand and Inventory Planning: Advanced machine learning models analyse historical sales, seasonal trends, supplier data, and external factors like weather or market shifts to generate dynamic demand forecasts. The AI also detects and corrects anomalies in data automatically, resulting in more reliable planning and significantly less manual intervention.
- Inventory Management: AI simplifies inventory setup and data cleansing by extracting, organising, and validating data from sources such as spreadsheets, PDFs, product spec sheets, and diagrams. By automating classification and reducing duplication, it shortens onboarding time by up to 75 per cent and cuts inventory creation effort by 80 per cent.
- Sales and Order Automation: AI uses historical patterns to auto-complete missing fields in sales orders—like pricing, delivery terms, or product codes—ensuring accuracy even with incomplete customer input. Intelligent recommendation engines analyse past buying behaviour and unstructured customer requests to suggest optimal product configurations, reducing quoting costs by 20 per cent and speeding up sales cycles.
- Invoice Processing: AI-powered Optical Character Recognition (OCR) extracts data from invoices—whether scanned, PDF, or digital—and validates it against purchase orders and goods receipts. By automating capture, matching, and approvals, it minimises manual data entry, reduces errors, and accelerates accounts payable workflows.
- Production Engineering & Maintenance: AI analyses equipment logs, past error patterns, and sensor data to help engineers troubleshoot faults faster. It generates automated task lists and recommends solutions based on similar historical issues, improving engineering productivity by 25 per cent, helping maintenance teams plan better, and reducing unplanned downtime by 1 per cent.
- Financial Operations: AI transforms natural language inputs—such as “Upload journal entries for Q4 accruals”—into validated journal entries using embedded business rules. It automates generation, validation, and posting processes, cutting up to 85 per cent of the manual effort involved in period-end closing and improving data accuracy.
- Customer Service & Support: AI extracts critical information—like case details, product names, and issue types—from unstructured communications such as emails and chat messages. It structures this data for faster case handling, suggests next best actions, and drafts responses for agents, increasing service productivity by 50 per cent and reducing repeat issues by 30 per cent.
These examples represent only a fraction of AI’s capabilities within ERP systems for manufacturing—an area that continues to rapidly evolve and unlock new efficiencies.
How AI Makes ERP More User-Friendly?
AI tools create intelligent interfaces, personalised dashboards, and built-in assistance so that ERP solutions offer a more personalised user experience.
Virtual agents
AI-powered ERP systems offer bots that can answer questions, automate repetitive tasks, and assist users without waiting on IT support.
Adaptive interfaces
AI can learn how different users work—offering shortcuts, insights, and data that match their roles and preferences.
Document summarisation & report generation
Need to send a financial update or executive summary? AI can generate a polished report in seconds, tailored to the audience, with an email overview and summary that helps the audience focus on key data.
Embedded co-pilots
AI can sit beside your team, suggesting the next steps, flagging unusual transactions, or even writing draft emails or reports.
Coding
AI will enable coding – creating apps, reports, user specific training and user manuals. With limited technical experience, users will be able to achieve technical tasks that would previously have required IT skillset.
AI in SAP S/4HANA Public Cloud
SAP S/4HANA Public Cloud is leading the evolution of ERP systems with embedded artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities. These smart technologies enable automation across core business functions—streamlining processes like demand forecasting, invoice matching, and detecting anomalies in financial data. By minimising manual tasks and enabling faster, more informed decision-making, SAP S/4HANA Public Cloud empowers manufacturers to operate more efficiently and proactively.
Time to Act on AI ERP Solutions
AI ERP systems are no longer a future vision—it’s here, and it’s rapidly becoming the standard.
Combining the structured power of ERP and the data sets available within ERP with the intelligence of AI enables faster decisions, fewer errors, greater efficiency, and a better user experience.
To stay competitive, businesses should consider:
- Review their current ERP setup to assess compatibility with AI technologies
- Engage with ERP providers that support AI-enabled tools and capabilities
- Equip teams with the skills to interpret AI-driven insights and work alongside intelligent systems
Done right, AI ERP systems don’t just help you run your business. It helps you transform it.
Unlock the Power of AI in ERP with Leverage Technologies
At Leverage Technologies, we help Australian manufacturers harness the full potential of Artificial Intelligence within ERP systems. From intelligent automation to predictive analytics and conversational interfaces, we guide you through real-world applications of AI that drive efficiency, accuracy, and smarter decision-making.
Want to explore how AI can elevate your ERP and transform your operations? Speak to an expert at Leverage Technologies today.
Contact us at 1300 045 046 or email info@leveragetech.com.au
Author – Cooper Mundell | Leverage Technologies