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!

References

SAP BTP Solution

How to run python script on SAP BTP