Personal Insights
Accelerating Innovation with SAP Process Automation and AI business Solutions
In the digital transformation journey, artificial intelligence (AI) and automation has evolved from an emerging technology to taking the must-have stage in an enterprise of all sizes in the past few years. It has been a consistent trend across industries, and line of business (LoB) and adoption will continue to accelerate.
Today, AI and automation are at the heart of SAP’s strategy to help customers become intelligent, sustainable enterprises. These capabilities enable automated, accelerated, and sustainable business processes, thus building tomorrow’s intelligent enterprises.
Introduction
Intelligent enterprises today apply advanced technologies and best practices within integrated business processes. This makes them resilient, thriving, and sustainable. Whether directly embedded in SAP enterprise applications or consumed as services through the SAP Business Technology Platform, advanced automation technologies enable your employees to focus on those tasks needing human expertise, reduce manual errors and increase customer satisfaction.
What to expect in this blog?
This blog is a part of AI & Automation SAP Community Tutorial Challenge 2022 and will ensure that you understand what it takes to adapt, improve, and innovate your business processes with automation (SAP Process Automation) & AI (SAP AI Business Services). I will introduce the technology and then start with a simple example of a business process with a use case. As we progress through the blog, we will see how with SAP BTP, we can automate the business workflow and enhance the process itself while making it simpler and more efficient.
While I follow one use case example, you will also get to know the different capabilities of SAP product, SAP Process Automation, and, of course, you will enjoy the learning that teaches you how to use the features in your own SAP environment.
This step-by-step approach will enable you to kickstart the SAP Process Automation journey to drive process automation with an intuitive, no-code developer experience that brings together workflow and robotic process automation (RPA).
Get ready to say goodbye to waiting for slow development timelines and doing repetitive, manual workflows!
Let’s first understand what is SAP Process Automation and Data Attribute Recommendation, one of the SAP AI Business Services
SAP Process Automation
SAP Process Automation combines capabilities from SAP Workflow Management and SAP Intelligent RPA with a powerful, yet intuitive no-code development experience. SAP Process Automation enables business users and technologists to become citizen developers. With powerful yet intuitive low-code and no-code capabilities, the solution supports you in driving automation by tapping into the expertise of citizen developers.
Below are the few of the features offered by SAP Process Automation:
Create interactive forms
Create form-based workflows using drag-and-drop functionality and connected data sources
Digitize processes
Build or adapt end-to-end processes with an intuitive, connected graphical interface to maximize efficiency across your organization
Build and run automations
Automate repetitive tasks within existing process flows using robotic process automation
Manage decisions
Develop and manage the decision logic in tabular, spreadsheet-like decision tables
Achieve end-to-end process visibility
Support real-time, event-driven transparency into comprehensive processes and process instances with process-visibility dashboards
Data Attribute Recommendation (SAP AI Business Service)
Data Attribute Recommendation is a SAP AI business service which uses free text, numbers and categories as input to classify information such as products, variants, stores and users into different classes and also to predict the missing numerical attributes in the data .
You can use Data Attribute Recommendation, for example, to classify incoming product information and predict the price of commodities based on their description.
- Manage Training Data
- Manage Machine Learning Model
- Classify Data Records
- Predict Data Records
Let’s look at one of the use cases built with SAP process automation and data attribute recommendation AI service to help customers optimize their business, with capabilities to streamline finance and workforce management.
Use Case
Enrich your service incident data with AI-based data attribute recommendations
SAP Data Attribute Recommendation use machine learning for recommended actions based on workflow data correlation and attributes important for the decision.
In this blog post will create a Data Attribute Recommendation Model to identify incoming Incidents and classify them to their relevant service groups for resolutions.
Setting up Prerequisites Environment to use SAP Process Automation.
Ensure you have an account (free tier) in SAP Business Technology Platform, as described here.
Set up account for Data Attribute Recommendation
Step 1: Setting up the BTP Account
Step 2: Creating service account and service key
Step 3: Placing key and data object recommendation python script in a same file location
Step 4: Loading Key
Step 5: Importing Data
Step 6: Creating schema for data injection
Step 7: Creating dataset ID for data injection
Step 8: Validation of schema and dataset
Step 9: Training Model
Model Template used in identifying Single Label is Auto ML Template. Other Templates to choose from are Hierarchical Template and Generic Template
Step 12:Waiting for Model to complete
Step 13:Inspecting model for accuracy
Step 14: Run the script in the BTP
One can refer this blog spot for detailed steps how can someone run the python script (recommendation model) created above.
Demo
Here is the short video of the attribute recommendation in action:
Conclusion
Development of AI and automation use cases on the SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) is fun. One can start the same from the free tier offered by SAP. It has been a great learning experience for me to create and build the recommendation model using SAP AI service capabilities.
In case you have queries please comment here and i will try to respond as soon as possible.
Happy Learning!
Great use case and very detailed explanations Sudhakar Jha, thanks! 🙏🏻
Thanks Pierre, Glad to know you liked it.