12 innovative Low-Code/No-Code app and automation solutions developed by Partners in Asia Pacific and Japan.
The demand for more speed and flexibility in cloud software development has surged, shifting toward hyper-agile architectures. This is where, the emergence of low-code/no-code (LC/NC) technologies are gaining significant advantage. IDC research reveals low-code is helping businesses build applications faster. As per IDC, 51% of the primary users of low-code development platforms are full-time, professional developers. If you are a developer, you'll need to adapt to significant changes. If you are a business-user, new opportunities are already there that will allow you to be more efficient and innovative than before.
At SAP, we encouraged our ecosystem of Partners to come forward and innovate with Low-Code Application Development and Automation solutions. The #Hack2Build initiative was a perfect format to get both SAP and Partners collaborate and innovate. The initiative was led by SAP Co-Innovation Lab in cooperation with SAP Process Automation product management and SAP Appgyver product units, along with experts from Partner Solution adoption units to help partners to build solutions which will automate business processes faster. This engagement provided the partners with a rich experience, to explore use of low-code and no-code developer productivity tools with a unified development experience and allowed the partners to seamlessly Integrate and automate processes across Line of business functions or automate business processes catering to an industry need with SAP Process Automation. SAP Process Automation is a citizen developer solution to adapt, improve, and innovate business processes, which provides an intuitive no-code development experience.
It was interesting to see a variety of SAP Process Automation centric solutions emerging from 12 Partners across Asia Pacific and Japan, each of these solutions showed the potential to address a customer need to automate business processes.
We had a hectic week, where partners, in the true spirit of hackathon, spent many hours to brainstorm, architect, plan, and use the Low-code and no-code tools to automate workflows and processes with drag-and-drop simplicity. SAP experts and architects were providing the necessary coaching and guidance to fulfil the partners’ ambition to bring their ideas to a working prototype. The demo jam was a culmination of the partners efforts to learn, build and show their innovations using SAP Process Automation.
The Winning solutions from the two days of virtual demo-jam held by SAP in October are highlighted:
Demo Jam Day 1 – 19th October
Winner: bneXt, Philippines
Automated time logging and billing system
bneXt showcased timeX, an automated time logging and billing system. Service oriented industries like consultancy firms, construction companies, BPO organisations who need to record employees work and activity hours, face delayed processing of billing to their clients, due to the manual processes involved. Although, there are multiple third-party solutions which could address this challenge, bneXt sees it as an opportunity when it comes to connecting with SAP's ecosystem.
The demo highlighted how timeX automates the manual processes in a consultancy firm, right from consultant logging of activities to client billing and invoicing. timeX uses SAP AppGyver to create the interface consultants use to log their activity and SAP Process Automation to create client billings.
timeX by benXt
Runner-up: Bosch, Vietnam
Commerce order replication monitoring and reprocessing
In situations where Customer online orders from Commerce cloud solutions is replicated to SAP ERP or SAP S/4HANA systems, there are failed orders which needs to be manually processed by the business users. This results in manual effort and time spent to monitor and retry failed order replication from SAP Commerce to SAP S/4HANA.
Bosch developed Commerce order replication monitoring and reprocessing solution. Bosch solution demo leveraged SAP Process Automation with its embedded RPA capabilities to help business users to simplify the replication and monitoring process flows. The solution automates task using RPA unattended bots. The results are exported, and the system sends notification to the Order manager. Replication history is visualized in dashboard developed in SAP Analytics Cloud.
Bosch: Commerce order replication monitoring and reprocessing
Demo Jam Day 1 – 20th October
Winner: EY, India
Insurance Underwriting Automation
All insurance policies go through the underwriting process to onboard new customers.Though this is a mandatory process, issuing new policies can take a lot longer than expected, which can lead to insurance companies losing valuable clients. In addition, various aspects of this process involve repetitive tasks, leading to human error.The Insurance Underwriting Automation solution developed by EY allows companies to replace these repetitive tasks with the help of SAP Process Automation using the workflow management capabilities.
Process automation project gets created when user submits the insurance application documents. Risk assessment of the insurance customer is automated with RPA and using workflow management, the report and premium calculation is shared with the stakeholders.
Insurance Underwriting Automation by EY
Runner-up: Hitachi Vantara, India
3-Way Match for Incoming Invoices
Supplier invoice verification is a labour-intensive and error prone activity, which causes delays in payment processing. Most organisations perform 3-way match for their inbound invoices, where incoming Invoice from the supplier is matched with purchase order quantity and goods receipt quantity before creating an inbound invoice in SAP.
The workflow management and RPA capabilities of SAP Process Automation was used to handle supplier invoice collection and performing 3-way-match for the invoices. The RPA bots pick all fresh/pending invoices on periodic basis from a designated document folder and performs the 3-way match. Workflow management determines the invoice approval process with business rules and invoice creation in SAP S/4HANA thereby providing end-to-end process visibility.
Hitachi Vantara: 3-Way Match for Incoming Invoices
The Jury team
The Panel of Judges were overwhelmed with the quality of the Partner innovations on SAP Process Automation, many of them combining SAP Appgyver, Workflow management and RPA capabilities. Many thanks to our panel of judges for spending their valuable time and evaluating the 12 partner innovation prototypes. The insights and expert advice shared, was well received by the partners, which would be beneficial to enhance their solution architecture for the full-solution build phase.
Ashok Nagichetty Munirathinam - Head Centre of Excellence –Business Technology Platform APJ
Thomas Volmering - Chief Product Manager, SAP Process Automation
Gianluigi Bagnoli - Global Head of BTP Partners Enablement, PES
Deepak Mukhija – RVP and Head of Partner Solution Adoption, APJ & GC
Rudolf Held - Global Head of SAP Co-Innovation Lab Network
Next Steps
SAP Co-Innovation Lab offers support to all the participating partners to build the full scope of the solutions. The Partners are encouraged to enhance their prototypes taking into account the recommendations provided by the panel of judges and SAP experts who were part of this #Hack2Build initiative. The completed solutions built on SAP Process Automation will then be positioned with the chosen commercial model(s) for customer adoption of such Partner innovations.
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