Patch Manager automation

please provide more detail on what you are trying to achieve.

I have a bunch of groups that are separated by vendor. Each group has 10-20 child groups that represent a product type (dell r710 running win2k8r2, HP laptop running win 10, etc)

Each month the vendors test the patches on their products then releases a qualified patch list stating which child group should get which KB.

I am looking for a way to simplify the process of entering approvals for each vendor group and their child groups.

I receive the patch lists from the vendors in excel format. I would like to convert the content of those lists to json or xml and then "feed" them to the SWPM/WSUS to approve the patches rather than manually enter each kb for each group.

Hopefully that clarifies the issue I am faced with.

So patch manager piggybacks strongly on what is already going on in WSUS.  I don't believe there would be anything different for the process you describe than if you were writing your scripting based on just a pure WSUS environment.  I can't say I know anyone who has done an example of what you describe but regardless of the scheme you use to approve or deny updates in WSUS, patch manager should just reflect those changes when it polls the WSUS server.

If you are planning to build out this automation to include custom packages that you created in patch manager it could get a little more complicated.  I wouldn't be surprised if it was possible to automate the approvals and such, but I don't think PM has any kind of api where you could easily script out building and publishing the contents of the packages.