Hyperautomation? SAP RPA customers have been doing it for months!

As part of the preparation for the launch of SAP Intelligent RPA 2.0 at TechEd, many experts have been sharing their insights and giving a little preview of the new version in our blog. You can find the entire collection under the tag “SAP Intelligent RPA 2.0”. In these insightful articles they have talked about the new path taken by the solution in the direction of a low-code/no-code approach. What these buzzwords tell us is pretty simple: it is all about allowing business users without coding skills to automate tasks.

I already explained in articles how providing low-code/no-code tooling is the first step to a “new level of flexibility and speed”. That is, empowering business users to create customizable solutions according to their daily business routines. This can lead to an increase in user satisfaction and operational efficiency, and, maybe, that is why Gartner estimates that over 65% of all application development will be done via low-code/no-code by 2024. Exciting, right?

Besides this “democratization of technology”, Gartner has also named “Hyperautomation” as one of the Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2020. At SAP we have always believed that the RPA is even more powerful when combined with other services such as Business Process Management (BPM), Process Insights, Artificial Intelligence, Analytics or Application Extensions, to deliver digital transformation and make businesses work effectively.

Not only us, but our customers know that for a fact as well, they have been “doing hyperautomation” for months, combining RPA with other intelligent capabilities to go further, deeper, quicker. In the next paragraphs you will discover what Hyperautomation meant for some of our customers and what tools are in their intelligent toolkit helping them reach end-to-end automation and next level of efficiency gains.

Villeroy & Boch

The German company, founded 1748, operates in 125 countries around the world. Operating internationally demands a seamless workflow and operational efficiency across several business functions.
At the beginning of their RPA journey, Dr Daniel Neuhäuser, Head of ERP Core Solutions at Villeroy & Boch Group, chose to rapidly automate simple, frequently occurring tasks such as responding to standard e-mail inquiries and making general ledger postings. His team did this in a few weeks using attended SAP Intelligent RPA bots, and a few bots are doing the job. It is a no brainer.

But Daniel Neuhäuser is a forward-thinker, and from the very beginning he had in mind to go further: his goal was to create a fully automated invoice error handling process, by seamlessly combining SAP Intelligent RPA and some of SAP AI Business Services able to handle unstructured data and documents.

Indeed, bringing Document Classification and Document Information Extraction artificial intelligence services into the tool mix, allowed RPA bots to evolve: they can now trigger tasks autonomously and automate more complex tasks such as processing attachments from emails according to their type and predefined confidence thresholds for every type of document. These advanced “Hyperautomation bots” are classifying 6000 documents per year!

All this has been done while tightly integrating with the SAP ERP application and productivity solutions. Adopting these technologies meant freeing the staff to focus on strategic tasks and delivering better customer service: less time spent with routine queries and more time to assist wholesale customers to increase Villeroy & Boch top line!

Villeroy%20Boch%20RPA%20Improvements

Further information: Business Transformation Study; Project Presentation for Innovation Award.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Improving the user experience with less budget and in less time with hyperautomation

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) saw in hyperautomation a chance to accelerate digital transformation. The global, edge-to-cloud and platform-as-a-service company showcases the powerful combination of Intelligent Robotic Process Automation, Service Ticket Intelligence, and Conversational AI in self-healing IT service operations.

As many other companies worldwide, HPE also faced the challenge to do more with less and sought to quickly and efficiently remove costly and ineffective work processes. Combining powerful technologies with SAP’s Business Technology Platform portfolio provided prepackaged and pre-integrated solutions including analytics and machine learning capabilities, which simplified IT processes and elevated customer experience. Additionally, allowing the integration of Conversational AI technology and SAP governance, risk, and compliance solutions, where chatbots took over simple interactions with users, such as authorizations request and password reset, making these actions more convenient.

Supporting automation with a comprehensive, prepackaged AI platform enabled by the SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation, SAP Conversational AI, and Service Ticket Intelligence services, made possible to achieve a proof of concept in just 55 days and deploy the full portfolio of IT use cases for the business operations self-healing service in as little as four weeks.

Further information: Business Transformation Study; Blog post.

Murphy Oil

Hyperautomating into the next generation digital oil field

Murphy is an independent company working with exploration and production of oil and natural gas in the United States and Canada while globally conducting exploration activities. Performing such operations can easily involve non-productive time caused by mechanical failures, weather, and logistical problems, which add substantial overhead to operations.

Advanced digital initiatives on SAP Cloud Platform allowed the oil corporation to optimize well operations reducing the non-productive time. Moreover, touchless mobile applications based on SAP Intelligent RPA, SAP Data Intelligence Machine Learning & AI services, SAP Conversational AI and SAP Cloud Platform Integration Suite, resulted in onshore field operators working with improved effectiveness and safety. With Machine Learning, Pattern Recognition and Intelligent RPA features Murphy was able to achieve 12% cycle time reduction processing over 24 million events from 800 wells to provide comprehensive view, identify data anomaly and suggest correction tasks.

Hyperautomating the operations, that is, furthering the use of disruptive technologies combined, demanded 10-12 weeks for implementation and resulted in faster and accurate decision making, reduction of costs, improved forecasting and communication across functions and ensured Murphy Oil consistency and repeatability in the completion process.

Further information: Innovation Awards, Blog post

Conclusion

These customers showcase perfectly how hyperautomation has been the reality for some time now for enterprises in different industries. SAP Intelligent RPA 2.0 will bring innovations fostering it even more with a cloud-based design studio and the low-code/no-code approach for improved bot building experience, as well as shortened implementation and deployment time with pre-built content and bundled offerings with SAP’s core product portfolio.

Stay tuned for more customer examples following very soon. Do not miss the upcoming blog posts in this series, there is much more to come. For more information on SAP Intelligent RPA 2.0, take advantage of the inspiring lineup of 20+ sessions we prepared for you at SAP TechEd 2020!