Aproda Product Agent

Today, product data originates from a wide range of sources: supplier catalogs, spreadsheets, data sheets, PDFs, and emails, often with varying levels of quality, structure and completeness. At the same time, expectations for data accuracy, consistency and availability across all business processes continue to increase. As a result, manual product data management quickly becomes a bottleneck: time-consuming, error-prone and difficult to scale.

This is exactly where the Product Agent comes in. It combines advanced AI capabilities with direct ERP integration to transform unstructured information into accurate, structured and ready-to-use product data in Business Central - quickly, reliably and at scale.

The Product Agent is an intelligent AI service specifically designed to automate the processing, creation and maintenance of product and item master data. It combines document and text understanding - for example, supplier catalogs, PDFs, Excel files and emails - with business logic and seamless integration into Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.

Technically speaking, the agent handles the non-value-adding aspects of product data management:

• It extracts product-related information from various sources, including catalogs, price lists, data sheets and email attachments.
• It identifies relevant information such as item descriptions, manufacturers, suppliers, item numbers, variants, units of measure, dimensions, technical specifications, prices, packaging units and classifications.
• It compares the extracted data with existing master data in Business Central and performs plausibility checks, such as identifying duplicates, formatting issues, missing fields, inconsistent units or conflicting descriptions.
• Based on this analysis, it automatically creates new product records or updates existing master data in Business Central, including detailed audit logs.
• If ambiguities are detected, the agent flags them as exceptions, provides recommendations or forwards them to employees for review as part of a human-in-the-loop process.

💡In short: The Product Agent significantly reduces the manual effort required for product data management, improves data quality and accelerates processes from product creation to market launch.

The Aproda Product Agent significantly reduces the workload in day-to-day operations while improving the quality of your product and item master data. Companies benefit not only operationally, but also strategically.

• Less manual effort: Recurring tasks such as capturing, transferring, validating and updating product data are automated. This significantly reduces the workload in purchasing, product management and back-office operations.
• Higher data quality: The agent identifies inconsistencies, missing information and potential duplicates at an early stage. This results in more consistent, complete and reliable master data - providing a solid foundation for efficient ERP processes.
• Faster time-to-market: New products can be created more quickly, while existing data can be updated faster and more efficiently. This shortens time-to-market and improves responsiveness to suppliers, market changes and customer requirements.
• Greater transparency and traceability: All processing steps are logged automatically and transparently. This makes it easy to track which data was imported, enriched, modified or submitted for review.
• Scalability without increasing headcount: As product portfolios, variants and supplier networks grow, the effort required for master data maintenance typically increases as well. The Product Agent enables companies to scale efficiently without proportionally increasing administrative resources.
• A stronger foundation for downstream processes: High-quality product data has a direct impact on business performance. Purchasing, sales, warehousing, reporting, e-commerce and customer service all benefit from consistent, accurate and up-to-date product information.

An SME receives new product information from a supplier in the form of an Excel spreadsheet and supporting technical data sheets in PDF format. The data includes new products, changes to packaging units and updated pricing information. Until now, this information had to be reviewed, cleaned and manually entered into Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central - a process that typically takes 7 to 12 minutes per item, depending on complexity.

With the Aproda Product Agent, the process becomes significantly more efficient:

• The agent automatically extracts information from Excel files and PDFs.
• It identifies relevant data such as item numbers, descriptions, attributes, units of measure and pricing information.
• It compares the new information with existing records in Business Central.
• It determines which products need to be created and which existing records require updates.
• Any unclear or conflicting information is flagged and routed to an employee for review.
• Once approved, the data is transferred to the ERP system in a structured format.
   

The result: Less manual data entry, fewer errors, faster product catalog updates and a significantly stronger data foundation for downstream processes. Depending on data quality and complexity, processing time can be reduced from 7–12 minutes per item to less than 2 minutes.

The Aproda Product Agent solves a common business challenge: Product data is often stored in PDF data sheets, supplier Excel files or other unstructured documents. Manually transferring technical attributes into Business Central is time-consuming, error-prone and difficult to scale.

The agent automatically extracts relevant attributes - such as dimensions, performance data, materials, standards and variants - structures the information and populates product master data in Dynamics 365 Business Central. This includes filling fields, creating attributes and variants, linking documents and supporting validation and approval workflows.

What Can the Agent Do?

• Read data sheets (PDFs) and supplier files (Excel)
• Identify and normalize technical attributes (units of measure, terminology and classifications)
• Map data to Business Central fields, attributes and variant structures
• Create or update product master records and attach supporting documents
• Support validation, approval workflows and audit logging through a human-in-the-loop approach

Benefits

• Up to 50–80% less manual effort in product master data maintenance
• Higher data quality through improved consistency, completeness and standardized units
• Faster time-to-market for new products
• A stronger foundation for online shop filters, search functionality and product recommendations

Scope of Delivery

• Definition of the product attribute model (which fields are mandatory?)
• Analysis of supplier files and data sheets, including extraction logic
• Mapping to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (Item Card, Attributes, Variants)
• Testing with real-world documents and customization of extraction and validation logic