Enterprise process automation often requires complex process automation across different organizations and IT environments. This often means that automation solutions need to be more flexible, efficient, and intelligent.
82% of SAP Community users said that rapid deployment, flexibility, and scalability are the top criteria when choosing their automation solution. SAP Intelligent RPA 2.0 is a major release of our product geared towards this goal. The newly created cloud development platform further simplifies process design and enables low-code/no-code development.
In addition, for SAP S/4HANA customers, SAP Intelligent RPA provides pre-defined automation templates out of the common SAP S/4HANA automation scenarios. More than 200 free and ready-made bot templates are provided in our SAP bot store. The pre-defined bot templates and SAP Intelligent RPA 2.0 enable quick delivering of trusted robotic automation for SAP S/4HANA customers. But not only IT staff can benefit from automation; business users can also be empowered and contribute to it, paving the way for enterprise digital transformation.
While complex processes often require a combination of AI technologies, traditional RPA bots only apply to well-defined, rule-based business processes. By equipping RPA bots with the ability to “sense” and “think”, the combination with AI technologies enables the automation of processes that couldn’t be automated before: for example, processes with unstructured data input or processes relying on human judgement.
In the following, I will describe two RPA use cases in SAP S/4HANA being used in conjunction with machine learning and other intelligent technologies.
During daily business, a sales representative needs to extract purchase order information from customer emails and then manually create sales orders in the SAP S/4HANA system. The entire business process is time-consuming, laborious, and prone to data errors. With the RPA bot, order information provided in an excel template can be easily extracted and sales orders automatically created via API. Empowered by a machine learning data extraction service, the bot can also extract data from unformatted orders, such as pdf or image files, and then create a sales order in the SAP Fiori app.
Another example is the use case for supplier invoice processing. In this case, OCR + machine learning act as the "eye" and "brain" of the RPA bot. OCR is used primarily to recognize and extract the pdf invoice, while machine learning learns from historical data to recommend the supplement missing field such as company code or cost center information. With the formatted and completed invoice data, the RPA bot uploads the invoice into SAP S/4HANA. With the combination of OCR + machine learning + RPA technologies, the entire end-to-end supplier invoice processing from invoice extraction to invoice posting is fully automated. The customers who adopted this case were able to reduce their monthly manual effort from two days to less than an hour.
Here RPA functions as the core, leveraging evolving AI technologies and delivering them in an agile model, from simple to complex – from process automation to intelligent automation – this is the hyper automation journey that enterprise leaders should embrace.
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For more information on SAP S/4HANA Cloud, check out the following links:
- The power of best-in-class and Next Practices business content for a modern ERP blog post
- SAP S/4HANA Cloud: The Intelligent ERP blog post
- SAP S/4HANA Cloud: New Product Releases here
- Latest SAP S/4HANA Cloud Release blog posts here
- SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation Content here
- SAP S/4HANA Cloud release info: http://www.sap.com/s4-cloudrelease
- SAP S/4HANA PSCC Digital Enablement Wheel here
- Inside SAP S/4HANA Podcast here
- SAP S/4HANA Cloud Community here
- SAP Activate Community here
- Best practices for SAP S/4HANA Cloud here
- Help Portal Product Page here
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