Product Information
SAP Intelligent RPA 2.0 – Early customer feedback
My name is Peter Engel, I am the Solution Owner of SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation. This is the fifth blog post in a sequence of articles to give you a deeper look behind the scenes of our development on the next level of our product.
In Sebastian Schrötel’s previous blog post we have seen that RPA is just at the beginning of a broader evolution, followed by my first blog post on how SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation solution elevates to a cloud based low code automation tool in Bringing SAP Intelligent RPA to the next level.
Harsha Bhat gave us some very interesting insights on how customers can adopt these innovations and find a gliding path to success by automating and optimizing business processes using SAP Intelligent RPA.
Also we are constantly adding more and more content on our bot store for SAP S/4 HANA, ECC, etc.. In this blog post SAP ECC Bot Store Content for Intelligent RPA Praveen gives you an overview of our latest development there.
Andreas Gerber gives you a first sneak peek on the new features.
In this blog post, I will give you some first insights directly from our customers on the Next Level of innovations for SAP Intelligent RPA. We showed our customers our latest developments and let them test the product during a BETA phase. Examples for the new features are:
- Simpler interaction with a focus on the Business User while interacting with Excel, Outlook, Screen, Loops, conditions etc.
- Simpler to test with an advanced Automation and Screen tester saving more time in bot development and maintenance phases
- A cloud toolset where all interactions are in a browser. No need to install a desktop tool for the design part, which lowers your total cost of ownership (TCO) at no efforts for updating / maintaining the software installations
- Easier to maintain project for developers:
- Coding with SDK is easier
- Less async pattern
- Less code to merge
- Improved SDK structure
Here some of their statements on the new product version:
Balbir Singh Dhillon, Associate Director Intelligent Solutions, Zuellig Pharma:
“Great job on the Beta version, today we saw and experienced many steps that have become much easier during the robot creation process. Just the emails alone saves a lot of time and places that functionality in the hands of the Citizen user and no longer dependent on experienced developers.
The look and feel, and the user experience was really great and I can only see the product getting richer with additional features like the recorder.”
Daniel Neuhäuser, Head of ERP Core Solutions, Villeroy & Boch:
“Intuitive user experience with the new Cloud Studio, great to see features like automated data type generation in Excel and find all the functions from the Desktop Studio now as activities for easy use with drag & drop.”
Others:
“Good to see that their is no installation of a fat client for developers anymore.”
“Impressive UI features with intuitive design will enable also the citizen developer to build complex bots.”
“The combination of custom development and drag & drop functionalities works very well.”
“The new introduced dependency management lowers our maintenance costs.”
“Implementation time for bots with Outlook, Excel and SAP integration will dramatically reduced due to the new activities.”
To highlight what this statements are about I would like to show you a comparison for some features between the new Cloud Studio and the Desktop Studio.
Outlook SDK
Desktop Studio
Also in the desktop studio we have an Outlook SDK to automate actions on mails without screen capturing, but most of the functions are only available via coding. Therefor the automation of outlook requires good Java Script knowledge.
This picture shows you the code for searching e-mails and save the attachments:
Cloud Studio
Now let us check how it works in the new Cloud Studio. No coding at all and the structure is easy to understand for everybody:
Data Type Generation
Desktop Studio
In the desktop studio you have to define the data types and structures manually. E.g. from an Excel file with five columns you have to create the structure manually in the properties or to declare it in the Java Script code:
This not a big thing for five columns but you can easily imagine that for larger Excel sheets it is a lot of work.
Cloud Studio
In the new Cloud Studio you have a single activity to do this automatically called Excel Cloud Link which analyse the excel and automatically generates the data structure and during using this activity in an automation filled the data from the excel into this structure:
Screen Recording
The last comparison is done easily because we have no screen recording with the Desktop Studio. To have a first impression how the screen recording is working view this video:
Conclusion
The first feedbacks from our customers are very promisingly. So stay curious and look out for our announcements on TechEd on the general availability of the Cloud Studio.
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