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Evaluating SAP RPT-1 for Enterprise Business Process Prediction: In-Context Learning vs. Traditional Machine Learning on Structured SAP Data

Machine Learning 2026-02-24 v1 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Tabular foundation models aim to make machine learning accessible for enterprise data without task-specific training. This paper presents the first independent evaluation of SAP's Retrieval Pretrained Transformer (RPT-1) from a practitioner perspective. RPT-1 is a compact 64.6 MB model pretrained on 1.34 TB of structured data across 3.1 million tables. We benchmark it against tuned gradient-boosted decision trees (XGBoost, LightGBM, CatBoost) on three SAP business scenarios: demand forecasting across SD/MM/PP modules, predictive data integrity in BC/MM/QM, and financial risk classification in FI/CO/AR. Across five-fold cross-validation on datasets ranging from 2,500 to 3,200 rows, RPT-1 reaches 91-96% of tuned GBDT accuracy without any training examples. The classification gap is modest at 3.6-4.1 percentage points on AUC-ROC, though regression tasks show wider gaps of 8.9-11.1 percentage points on R-squared. An interesting finding is a crossover at roughly 75-100 context rows where RPT-1 actually outperforms XGBoost under limited data. Based on these results, we propose a practical hybrid workflow: use RPT-1 for rapid screening, then train GBDT selectively where prediction accuracy justifies the effort. All experiments are reproducible through publicly available Hugging Face Spaces.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2602.19237,
  title  = {Evaluating SAP RPT-1 for Enterprise Business Process Prediction: In-Context Learning vs. Traditional Machine Learning on Structured SAP Data},
  author = {Amit Lal},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.19237},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

12 pages, 5 figures, 32 references. Reproducible experiments available at Hugging Face Spaces

R2 v1 2026-07-01T10:46:23.188Z