IT Services Management with SAP Intelligent RPA and SAP Conversational AI (part I) (Challenge Submission)

In my previous blog, I explained how to interface SAP Conversational AI and SAP Focused Insights for SAP Solution Manager to build powerful digital assistants transforming customer and employee experiences for your IT services.

In this serie of tutorials, we will explore the different possibilities to interface SAP Intelligent RPA, SAP Conversational AI and Focused Insights for SAP Solution Manager.

Context

Chat-bots and Automation bots are a natural fit: Chatbots provides the natural language interface while automation bots execute attended or unattended workflows.

In this picture, Focused Insights for SAP Solution Manager is acting as a unified analytics engine with generic APIs to consume, expose and publish metrics for the bots to push communication to customers.

SAP departments have now the opportunities to build and deliver new capabilities for IT services and SAP Application Management.

SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation (SAP Intelligent RPA)

SAP Intelligent RPA automates repetitive manual processes by creating, scheduling, managing, and monitoring bots.

In IT function specifically, SAP Intelligent RPA can improve service desk operations, optimise systems monitoring, detect security attack, perform backups, request authorisations, trigger testing, deliver virtual machines, …

SAP Intelligent RPA relies on 3 components:

• Desktop Agents executing process automation for attended bot (digital assistant) and unattended bot (digital worker).
• SAP Cloud Platform orchestrating & monitoring process automation by managing agent hierarchies, environment, configuring and distributing packages.
• Desktop Studio offering an integrated development to define, build and test process automation.

SAP Intelligent RPA manages the following artefacts:

• Applications implementing the automation logic. Applications are built with the SAP Intelligent RPA desktop studio and imported in the SAP Cloud Platform factory.
• Environments containing hierarchies of agents (Machines or logged-in user accounts).
• Deployments mapping Applications to Environments. It maps the workflows content to the execution environments.
• Trigger defining the execution schedule via jobs.

SAP Intelligent RPA interfaces

SAP Intelligent RPA manages four types of APIs:

• API Notifier: A REST call executed when a job execution status reaches a specified state (START, SUCCESS, FAILURE, CANCEL).
• API Trigger: Start the execution of a scenario or a process in a specified deployment from an external application via a HTTP POST call.
• CAI Notifier: Send a message or update a SAP Conversational AI conversation when a job execution status reaches a specified state (START, SUCCESS, FAILURE, CANCEL).
• WEB Services CALL: A Web Service call triggered from an SAP Intelligent RPA process or scenario.

Based on those APIs, we can support the following architectural model:

• SAP Intelligent RPA provides the automation layer but also captures data.
• SAP Conversational AI is able to trigger processes based on contextual data while providing access of dynamic insights derived from the end-user conversation.

1) API Trigger

1.1) Create the API Trigger

To start an execution of a scenario or a process in a specified deployment from an external application via a HTTP POST call, we need to declare an entry point by adding a new API trigger entry to the target deployment.

The API trigger provides an URL and a token for external calls.

1.2) Invocation of the API Trigger

The SAP Intelligent RPA trigger is accessed from the SAP Conversational AI skill is defined in a Webhook:

The header should contain the SAP Intelligent RPA trigger token to identify the correct trigger.

Reference the SAP Conversational AI conversation

The correlation ID of the bot conversion is added to the body of the post message.

2) CAI Notifier

2.1) Create the CAI notifier

The CAI notifier is created by adding a new entry to an existing trigger API.

The main attributes of the CAI notifier are the conversion ID to map the chatbot instance and the type of reaction: a message send or a memory conversation update.

In addition, the notifier can be accessed on different states of the scenario: Start, Success, Failure.

3) BOT execution

During the execution of the Chat-bot, when the WEBhook is triggered, the execution of the SAP Intelligent RPA scenario will return a message displayed in the conversion flow:

3.1) Trigger SAP Intelligent RPA scenario

3.2) Update SAP Conversational AI chatbot with SAP Intelligent RPA scenario execution status

Source of information

Trial blog: https://blogs.sap.com/2019/12/26/sap-intelligent-rpa-trial-get-ready-to-build-bots…/

Open SAP Training: https://open.sap.com/courses/rpa2

software Download: https://tools.hana.ondemand.com/#cloud

SAP HELP: https://help.sap.com/viewer/c836fab4182e45548b6c6c6d0d0a9146/Cloud/en-US/f2e3d2d3e84d42eabe14913f7ee9269c.html