Your teams working from home? Robotic Process Automation to the rescue!

The recent weeks have seen an unprecedented experiment in the business world – the largest relocation of office work in history. While initial efforts had to be around equipment, connectivity and collaboration, organizations now must double down on productivity, process and business continuity. While knowledge workers are adapting more easily, task workers lack the structure, procedures and guidance they’re used in their office environment. On top of having to balance the needs of the job and the family at home, they’re on their own managing difficult tasks without the direct help and expertise of co-workers and supervisors.

Managers running operations in finance, procurement, HR, logistics, supply chain, marketing etc. now must adapt their work processes quickly to be productively operated by a remote workforce. Now is the time to quickly digitalize the operations handbook, centralize task management, and beef up electronic document management. But this all takes time – how can we ramp up electronic support for task workers quickly? How can we incrementally offer them more and more procedural help without going through lengthy training?

This is where software robots are of incredible value. They can be quickly trained by operations personnel to handle tedious repetitive tasks, provide contextual guidance in real time, help human workers in following step-by-step business processes they might be unfamiliar with, and help guarantee compliance with company policies. And now we can take them even further – from reactive, on-demand servants to pro-active co-workers and problem solvers. The good news is that the technology for software robots is available and mature – Robotic Process Automation (RPA).

In case you are not familiar with RPA – let me introduce it.

In large enterprises, workers spend a lot of time interacting with the different applications of the IT landscape: in order to carry out their mission, they frequently have to copy and paste data from one application to another, or even to manually re-enter information.

Robotic Process Automation is all about implementing “software robots” to automate these tedious, non-value-added tasks as much as possible. From what we have seen for years in many companies operating in various sectors, from banking and finance to telecommunication providers and utilities, repetitive tasks can represent no less than 10% to 30% of the daily worktime of their average employee.

• In Finance, an RPA bot can automatically enter into an ERP invoices received by email.

• In Sales, an RPA bot can automatically enter quotations made by account executives in the CRM to update the sales pipeline.

• In HR, an RPA bot can automatically create offer letters for new employees.

• In Shared Services, an RPA bot can automatically create service request in the ERP from supplier inquiries.

To explore more use cases, just visit our Use Case Discovery tool.

To unlock immediate business value pre-built SAP Intelligent RPA bots allow users to rapidly improve / automate core business processes without touching underlying systems already in place. Our customer Daewoong Pharmaceutical for example has saved thousands of person-hours in repetitive order management tasks. The full list of readymade bots can be found in our Intelligent RPA Store.

Starting immediately with SAP Intelligent RPA is super easy:

• Take advantage of our free trial
• If you are a customer with a SAP Cloud Platform Enterprise Agreement in place, SAP Intelligent RPA is already included.
• Get your license “touch-less” via the SAP Store
• To have a broader view on SAP Intelligent RPA and its business outcomes, please read our White Paper.