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SDenecken
Employee
Employee
Enterprise IT is in the thick of digital transformation efforts, with Forrester indicating that 90% of organizations cite it as a top priority. SAP has released its first Intelligent Robotic Process Automation (IRPA) solution, to capitalize on the market opportunity.



While SAP’s IRPA solution can be used as a general purpose tool to automate many of the repetitive tasks across SAP and non-SAP systems, similar to the leading market vendors in RPA; one of main differentiations of SAP’s offering is our ability to deliver automation content as part of the business processes in S/4HANA applications. These automation skills address two problems that customers face during a typical RPA implementation

  • Stability – Many third-party tools rely on screen/UI scrapping to automate user tasks, UI recording based bots tend to break when screen changes during system upgrades. As customers move more of their core systems to the cloud, bot maintenance becomes an on-going issue.


 

  • Scalability – While customers can build their own workflows from scratch using any of the tools, most of the effort is spent in process discovery, bot design and development. Our content accelerates customer’s RPA implementation by having basic automation skills already developed and maintained via SAP, i.e. one never needs to worry about how to put a sales order or post a general journal entry manually in S4; thus, further increasing the ROI with RPA.


In short, our content strategy delivers cloud stable bot skills in S/4HANA that accelerates customer’s RPA practice.

Our IRPA Content comes in the form of

  • Project files: workflows developed using iRPA tools in Studio, these scripts are developed by content build team that ensure compatibility of target systems of S/4HANA OP or CLOUD. Customers or partners can further extend, modify our bot scripts based on their business needs.


 

  • Bot runners (agents): executables running the bots. They can be scheduled to run unattended or attended to carry out the tasks based on our standards. To ensure the stability of the bot skills, we design them with API/CDs Views, instead of the easier approach via UI.




In S/4HANA, we have already an established Best Practice content delivery channel for customers to fast track their SAP deployments in various lines of business and industry areas. The same is applicable for IRPA content where customers can be guided on using the pre-built bot skills to deploy an RPA strategy. Given IRPA skills can be developed outside of core application release cycle, BP provides a flexible way to get the content to customers faster.

Starting June, we have already released pre-defined bot skills for Finance, Procurement and Data Management areas via Best Practice. The bot content are basic building blocks for assembling sophisticated digital workers.  For instance, customers can download the package for general journal entry upload and run it as it is, or further extends the bots to cover their needs using the iRPA design Studio.

By automating many of the necessary-but-rote business processes that occupy our customers’ time, we can enable customers to realize more value from our software through faster process execution, reduced human error, and better use of human capital on strategic initiatives. There are opportunities to automate repetitive tasks across all of SAP’s offerings. We will continue to release pre-defined bot content for customers on a regularly cycle, stay tuned for more to come.

 

For more information on SAP S/4HANA Cloud, check out the following links:

Follow us via @Sap and #S4HANA, or myself via @SDenecken

 

 
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