Blog 7: The Role of Automation for Transformation Projects
In times of constant change, quickly emerging demands for digitalization and competitive markets, companies are looking for ways to further optimize their processes. Consequently, many organizations have turned to automation technologies, such as RPA tools, to automate mundane and repetitive tasks. The benefits of automation are quite obvious: Automated processes are faster, less prone to error and people can concentrate on more complex, higher value-added activities.
Especially for activities with high volumes the benefits can be huge. Let me illustrate this with an example: A few weeks ago, I talked to a company from the consumer products industry. While a lot of transactions with its suppliers run fully digital via B2B integration, they still receive roughly 4.000 documents per month such as invoices and purchase orders via email. Let us assume you need on average 2 minutes for processing one document, that is: Extracting and verifying the data, collecting approvals, creating it in the ERP system and so on. In total, this sums up to over 130 hours of manual work per month. Applying RPA tooling and AI for document understanding can drastically speed up the processing of these tasks, thereby freeing people from tedious copy & paste or data entry and export activities.
Why looking at automation only is not enough
To streamline their processes, many companies have also started looking into other technologies: Besides RPA, also workflow engines, integration middleware as well as tools for process mining and process analytics have risen. One big downside is that these technologies often are not well integrated and hence customers are struggling with setting up an aligned end-to-end approach.
With our Enterprise Automation offering we want to address this and provide a unified and interlinked approach. As described in the blog article by Angela Harvey, this concept is based on the combination of 3 products:
- SAP Integration Suite: You cannot automate what you can’t connect to. Our suite provides unparalleled connectivity and integration for a variety of scenarios. Be it SAP / Non-SAP, Cloud / on-Premise applications, B2B, B2G, API-led or event-driven scenarios.
- SAP Signavio: Before you optimize, you might need to understand where to start and uncover inefficiencies first. With SAP Signavio you can analyze, model and govern your business processes to drive operational change.
- SAP Build: Drive automation of long-running processes with capabilities for app development, process automation and portal sites. Low-Code/No-Code and visual design tooling also empower citizen developers and business experts to contribute to the development process in an agile fashion.
It is important to note that Enterprise Automation is a flexible and modular concept. Hence, customers can start with whatever product they see fit. From a transformation perspective Enterprise Automation can provide significant benefits when modernizing your SAP ERP, so when moving from the classic SAP Business Suite to SAP S/4HANA. It can be applied at any stage, both before the migration as well as after the migration:
- Before the move: Leverage Signavio’s “plug and gain” approach and LeanIX to analyze and clean up processes in advance and gain immediate benefits from applying automation (e.g. via pre-built content packages). Use the Integration Solution Advisory Methodology of the SAP Integration Suite to design and prepare a future-proof integration strategy.
- After the move: Bring process excellence to the next level by combining process mining, integration and automation and enable a continuous improvement cycle. Enable a governed approach to accelerate and scale the building of process automations based on Low-Code/No-Code techniques.
Another advantage in terms of transformation is the versatility – similar to a Swiss Army Knife. Enterprise Automation allows process optimization across the enterprise and line of businesses: Be it sales, procurement, HR, finance, production or logistics. A comprehensive collection of use cases and end-to-end scenarios has been put together by Manuel Namyslo in his blog article: How to get started with Enterprise Automation.
The role of AI in Enterprise Automation
Let us take a closer look at the role of AI and how it fits into the picture of Enterprise Automation. When transforming business processes and modernizing enterprise applications, AI should be part of the agenda, due to the massive benefits it can provide. Within our Enterprise Automation offering, the AI capabilities are tightly embedded to make the consumption as easy, seamless and relevant as possible.
A few highlights of them include:
- Use Document Information Extraction (DOX) within SAP Build Process Automation to grab data from documents like invoices, payment advices and purchase orders to automate their processing. We also plan to integrate the DOX premium edition to make the processing of arbitrary documents with varying structure and layout even simpler.
- We plan to use AI to provide recommendations for workflows as proposals based on historic data. This will support and speed up the decision making for approvals and workflow items (see roadmap item).
- Visual tools already cater towards ease-of-use and simplify the building of process automations by business experts. There are also plans to make the design process even more intuitive by leveraging Generative AI functions (see corresponding roadmap items). As illustrated in this preview video, users describe what they need or what they want to craft in natural language. This can be an entire process flow, but also single process steps such as a business rule. The system then automatically generates the respective building blocks. Apart from that the AI-based assistant will also help with the discovery of pre-built content by providing suitable proposals from the content catalog.
As you can see AI is a crucial factor in many ways. Not only for the automation of processes, but also to accelerate the design and development process in various aspects. In addition, Enterprise Automation can also help with infusing AI into the process layer, by providing the respective integration capabilities.
To conclude: Enterprise Automation should be considered as a strategic tool set in the light of any transformation initiative for ERP and enterprise application landscapes. Its modular style allows you to start small at any stage of your project: From simple workflow automation and high-level process modelling, up to a fully-fledged vehicle for continuous process excellence. While our offering is optimized for SAP applications and systems, we embrace openness and enable process excellence across heterogeneous IT landscapes.
Where to look next and where to start? I recommend checking out the blog article How to get started with Enterprise Automation to get further inspiration. In addition, Low-Code/No-Code tooling such as SAP Build is well suited for getting Hands-On experience. Therefore, feel free to reach out to your SAP account manager to experience the ease-of-use in a Hands-On workshop. Finally, start by looking into potential use cases and assess them with the help of SAP or partners on how to tackle them with Enterprise Automation.
Previous Blogs:
- Blog 1: The Central Role of Clean Core and AI
- Blog 2: The Role of BTP as Extension and Innovation Platform
- Blog 3: How Clean Core can accelerate your SAP Business Transformation
- Blog 4: Mastering the Data Dance: The Potential of Clean Core and AI
- Blog 5: How hybrid Integration upholds the role of Clean Core
- Blog 6: Clean Core Extensibility
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