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Hardeep_Tulsi
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert
 

Highlights of the SAP Intelligent RPA Best Practices Content with SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2108 Release (August 2021)


This blog provides an overview of the #S4HANA #Cloud 2108 with the latest and greatest innovations highlights to drive and accelerate digital transformation with improved operations, increased service quality and automate to gain speed and efficiency. These innovations are released as part of our SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2108 shipment for Intelligent Robotic Process Automation using “SAP Intelligent Robot Process Automation Bot Store ".

In this blog, we will expand on the Innovations that accelerate digital transformation by automating repetitive tasks in business processes.

247 Bots in on our Public Store including new SAP Intelligent RPA 2.0 content capabilities that are tightly integrated with SAP solutions for finance, logistics and professional services reshaping the underlying business processes and reporting functionality.

SAP Intelligent RPA helps organizations optimize their productivity, transform paper-based processes into digital assets and provide intelligent automation of structured workflows, decisions and tasks and thus embedding process intelligence, providing business users with real-time insights to achieve business process excellence.

Latest release updates provide the following important components that are newly added to SAP’s Intelligent Robotic Process Automation to drive efficiency for autonomous intelligence.

Cloud Components Improvements

  • DOX integration in cloud studio automations is an SAP service to extract data from documents using OCR & machine learning.  Business user can upload documents to the service and get machine learning predictions for the extracted header fields and line items.



  • Customer can build custom bots reusing DOX templates directly via Intelligent RPA Cloud Studio and easily extract data from  business documents.  You can create templates based on sample document files and on schemas and extract data in your automation flow using activity Extract data with template or Extract data without template.



  • Declare multi-dimensional collections in your applications to capture multi-dimensional tables. You can now automate actions on these collections in your automations using existing activities such as Get Elements, Clicks and more.



  • Public APIs in cloud factory can be used by  leveraging API keys to better manage large scale deployments and executions from an external application. Public APIs will enable you to list existing environments, SAP Intelligent RPA Bot discovery including lists of jobs triggered from specific API triggers and execution status and feature support to trigger a new job as well.


SDK Improvements

  • File uploader activity in automations based on UI5 screens where new activity added to browse file from file system and other excel activities improvements such as “Get range information” which returns data regarding a range of cells, “Is merged” and “Get merged range information” that returns data regarding a merged range of cells.



  • New activities in existing SDKs.





    • Word SDK to automate actions to manage bookmarks.

    • PDF SDK which open with online OCR as an alternative activity to open PDF to extract text from all types of documents including scanned documents.

    • Outlook SDK that retrieve the names of attached files using “Get Attachment Name” activity.

    • Encapsulated SAP GUI actions withhold session and release session activities to prevent bot failure due to scripting issues.




With SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2108, we provide new innovations with Intelligent Robotic Process Automation using cloud studio to build new content that leverage our new scripting engine with support for the latest functionalities.


 

Top three business driven innovations to automate your business processes using SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation capabilities with #S4HANA #Cloud.

  1. Digital Automation for Manufacturing : Maintain Planned Independent Requirements (4FL)

  2. Digital Automation for Professional Services :Automated List of Terminated Employees (w/ SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central) (4P4)

  3. Digital Automation for Finance :Automated Upload of Manual Entries via API (4CA)


Let’s take deeper look at the first business driven innovation for manufacturing using SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation content with SAP S/4HANA Cloud edition.

Digital Automation for Manufacturing - Maintain Planned Independent Requirements  (4FL)

  • Manufacturing Industries using SAP S/4HANA Cloud, essentials edition plan in response to changing business needs and market factors influencing the product.  Dynamic market and business needs brings a challenge in managing and mass maintaining the Planned Independent Requirements (PIR) of creation and revision of production quantities on a period and quantity basis. Planned Independent Requirements (PIR) becomes essential component to support planning for additional product demand as a preliminary step to generate the Make to Stock (MTS) scenario.


 

  • Production planners needs an efficient process while creating the Planned Independent Requirements (PIR) and to validate the corresponding Planned Independent Requirements (PIR) data as well in the system which is very time consuming.  Automation helps optimize time-centric and routine processes of Planned Independent Requirements (PIR) for a set of materials, freeing up end user to refocus on high-value tasks with Improved operational efficiency.


 

  • Digital assistant bot  provide input form to production planners to enter the production data and timeframes (production quantities and periodic data) and process the data based on input form to generate the Planned Independent Requirements (PIR) in the SAP S/4HANA system for single and multiple materials. Production planners can as well schedule the SAP Intelligent RPA background job to execute the automated process. SAP Intelligent RPA Bot will automatically validate the input data and sends notifications to the end users.  SAP Intelligent RPA ensures accuracy in documentation and delivers error-free reports based on the given input.


Communication Scenario “Production Planning Integration“ (SAP_COM_0104)” has to be set up in S/4HANA system for the API "Planned Independent Requirements" which is used to Change Planned Independent Requirements (PIR)  and Maintain Planned Independent Requirements (PIR).

See for more detail documentation here and SAP help documentation URL

Let’s take deeper look at the second business driven innovation for professional services processes using SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation cloud studio content with SAP S/4HANA Cloud.

Digital Automation for Professional Services : Automated List of Terminated Employees- (W/ SuccessFactors Employee Central) (4P4)

Professional Services Companies undergo reorganization due to business expansion, business acquisitions, or other business factors. When employees or contractors leave the company, it is necessary to update the open projects for which they are staffed to, as well as purchase requisitions and purchase orders created for services provided. Identifying the employees whose contract will be terminated in time to take the appropriate actions can be a cumbersome task for the project manager.

Digital worker built by SAP Intelligent RPA fetches a list of terminating employees within the time range defined from SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central and provide the insights to the open items and set them for appropriate actions.

Based on the list of employees identified by the digital worker, following information is generated in report.

  • List of commercial projects where the employee is assigned as project managers.

  • List of purchase orders where the employee is involved or created the purchase order, as it may no longer be necessary to procure such items.

  • List of purchase requisition due to employee termination, which are assigned to the person undergoing termination.


SAP Intelligent RPA digital worker solution provides increased efficiency and reduce time spent by project managers. on individual items of terminated employees .

Let’s take deeper look at the third business driven innovation for Finance.

Digital Automation for Finance :Automated Upload of Manual Entries via API (4CA)

SAP Intelligent RPA simply finance journal entries by performing automatic upload of any manual journal entries using an API from any template mapped by the customer. thereby  reducing manual effort with repeated system operation.

SAP Intelligent RPA bot (4CA) latest version provides a new template file called ‘Master Template’. The new template can provide more capability and flexibility for creating journal entries. Business users can create journal entries in a batch using spreadsheets as data sources and customize their own template for the bot using the master template.

Communication Scenario “Finance - Posting Integration” (SAP_COM_0002) has to be set up in S/4HANA system for the API "Journal Entry – Post (Synchronous)". See for more detail documentation here and SAP help documentation URL

In order to identify labor intensive activities and understand the process bottlenecks, with their root causes, business impacts and find recommendations on digital transformation of business processes, customers can explore SAP Business Process Intelligence that enables organizations to continuously understand, innovate and transform all their business processes by connecting processes, people, systems and data.  Business Process Intelligence  can help you discover opportunities for process improvements and automation (Link) based on data and benchmarks.

Stay tuned for more updates in the next quarters!

For More Information on SAP S/4HANA Cloud, Check Out the following links:

  • SAP S/4HANA Cloud release info here

  • 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

  • jan.gilg’s SAP News Center article here

  • Latest SAP S/4HANA Cloud Release Blogs here and previous release highlights here

  • Product videos on our SAP S/4HANA Cloud and SAP S/4HANA YouTube playlist

  • SAP S/4HANA PSCC Digital Enablement Wheel here

  • Early Release Webinar Series here

  • Inside SAP S/4HANA Podcast here

  • openSAP Microlearnings for SAP S/4HANA here

  • Best practices for SAP S/4HANA Cloud here

  • SAP S/4HANA Cloud Community: here

  • Feature Scope Description here

  • What’s New here

  • Help Portal Product Page here

  • Implementation Portal here


Follow us via @Sap and #S4HANA, or myself via@har1234 (Hardeep Tulsi)