Automate Document Printing and status check after using Document Generation feature in SuccessFactors Employee Central

Introduction –  Many times SAP SuccessFactor functional and operational people get requirement wherein they need to generate employee related document in SAP SuccessFactor and print those documents so that they can be signed by signatory authority physically and then hand overed to employee directly or via courier. SAP SuccessFactor allows document generation and either document download to local computer or send email with generated documents as attachments to the person who generated it.

We will consider e-mail criterion in this example. Once document is downloaded or emailed, printing documents to save as archive is still process in many organizations. As you can imagine if we are generating 100s documents, collecting them from email and printing them manually would be a headache and tiring. Here iRPA and Python comes to rescue.

Workflow – We will use outlook activities as dependency in our project. The iRPA Bot will scan through inbox of outlook with predefined subject lines. The subject should contain some static phrases. The bot Also it will only scan only for unread emails. Once the emails are identified, the bot will iterate through the emails in the context and save all the attachments specifically pdfs on local drive. Once PDF is saved, IRPA will execute a python script to print the documents one by one and note its status. Python file will send status email once everything is processed.

Mode of Execution:

Here we can use below modes of execution provided by IRPA framework.

1. Attended Mode – User can run the bot once file generation activity is complete
2. Scheduled Mode – IRPA bot can be scheduled in cloud factory, this will scan user’s outlook at periodic interval and then print those files to default printer. User can collect all the printed files at EOD.

Comments:

The ability to call python script from IRPA opens up wide range of ability to do ML-AI related tasks along with regular defined rule based RPA tasks. This make bot more intelligent and one can automated more than just rule based automation and have cognitive ability as well. This article was intended to showcase integration with python and its application.

More Information on IRPA can be found at SAP iRPA Cloud Studio Guide and for Python one can refer to https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/

I’d like to thank Chintan M. Shah for the help and guidance he provided.

Cheers and Thanks!