For us, working in the Application Development, Automation and Integration area of SAP Business Technology Platform, Enterprise Automation does not come out of the blue, it is part of a strong vision SAP has had years ago: In spring 2018 we started working on a RPA product at SAP, and SAP Intelligent RPA was launched at SAP Sapphire 2019. Then, we added a low-code experience made available Fall 2020 in SAP Intelligent RPA 2.0. We also integrated BPM capabilities from SAP Workflow to launch SAP Process Automation at TechEd 2021. And last year at TechEd we launched our SAP Build portfolio of low-code tools for creating apps, automating processes, and building business sites.
This Process Automation journey is a key part of SAP’s history, which started a half-century ago, when 5 engineers considered that business processes would be better run with computers and software than with pens and paper. Over 50 years later, SAP’s vision remains the same. We want to make the world run better and improve people’s lives, and there are still many improvements we can make. Enterprise Automation is the latest, but certainly not the last!
Why?
Because in an intelligent sustainable enterprise, business processes are quite complex and pretty intricate:
Our aim is to deliver capabilities that seamlessly connect customers, partners, suppliers, and employees across each end-to-end process, through intelligent experiences, agile processes, and bespoke targeted solutions. Our customers expect SAP to help them derive a competitive advantage and improve stakeholder satisfaction with optimal performance.
In order to truly achieve greater efficiency, our customers need to better understand how their business processes are executed today, where they’re still inefficient, and to find out how they can be improved.
This is where SAP Signavio comes to play, providing powerful, integrated platform that helps you quickly realign your organization and bring changes to life at an accelerated rate.
Once this is understood, our customers then have to implement efficiency gains through seamless integration of diverse capabilities available in complex IT landscapes.
This is where SAP Build Process Automation and SAP Integration Suite play a key role.
And all of this is seamlessly leverages AI to automatically help and suggest what’s relevant to do, with a vast library of pre-built content – available through the SAP Business Accelerator Hub and also natively in SAP Build – to simplify automating SAP and non-SAP components of your IT landscape.
Let’s dive into these topics from a technical perspective, to understand what capabilities it brings and how Enterprise Automation will help SAP customers.
SAP Signavio to better understand your processes
At the end of last year, Gero Decker and I raised a lot of attention when explaining at an event in Berlin how to get actionable insights on your processes from SAP Signavio and rapidly improve them with SAP Build Process Automation. I summarized in a blog post the integration path we were working on, with some capabilities being introduced in beta in early 2023.
We delivered, and what was announced earlier is now a business reality: SAP Signavio and SAP Build Process Automation provide tight integration between process insights and process improvement. With this, SAP has now the most comprehensive set of capabilities needed for business transformation and automation.
In order to accelerate a business transformation from process insights to process automation, 135 tailored process improvement recommendations from SAP Signavio Process Intelligence can directly be leveraged in SAP Build Process Automation. Furthermore, SAP Signavio OPAL now contains recommendations from SAP Build Process Automation as best practices. SAP Signavio Process Intelligence can now discover and trigger automated actions to trigger Build process automations as and when a specific pattern is detected on the business system.
SAP Integration Suite to better integrate SAP and non-SAP capabilities
SAP Integration Suite is an integration platform as a service (IPaaS). With this single solution, you can connect applications from SAP and third parties, whether they run on premise or across clouds. You can use a combination of integration modes to address specific use cases and run your integrations on major public clouds for greater flexibility.
Robust functionality in SAP Integration Suite means you can confidently integrate and manage your mission-critical processes across SAP and third-party applications in complex and distributed landscapes. Enterprise-grade capabilities include 99.95% uptime, multizone availability, failover prevention, and elastic scaling for high performance and throughput.
Innovating with modular functionalities becomes easier as SAP Integration Suite offers capabilities for composability, real-time event management, and API management. You can also use a centralized hub to access over 3,600 APIs from SAP and its partners that help you innovate faster.
SAP business applications provide a rich semantical layer of business objects, data and services that are exposed via domain models (through SAP Graph) and APIs via the SAP Business Accelerator Hub (formerly SAP API Business Hub). Workflow Extensibility (ABAP) enables us to discover and extend embedded application workflows with end-to end process automations (e.g., via a subprocess) – 3rd party and more integration-centric automation needs are powered by comprehensive integration flows and connectors of the SAP Integration Suite.
The idea behind Enterprise Automation is to move forward by combining Hyperautomation with Process Composability
Hyperautomation refers to the combination of advanced technologies to automate and optimize business processes end-to-end. It is essentially an extension of traditional automation - like workflow or robotic process automation - which aims to automate individual tasks or activities, whereas hyperautomation targets entire business processes.
Process Composability is the ability to create new processes by combining existing process components in a flexible and modular way. Process components (e.g., Application UIs, workflow templates from SAP Buying 360 and SAP SuccessFactors Guided Experiences) are orchestrated to create end-to-end automated workflows.
SAP Build at the heart of Enterprise Automation
SAP Build now allows organizations to automate more complex and end-to-end business processes than traditional automation, and it does so by breaking down processes into smaller subprocesses and automating them individually. Organizations can then reassemble them into larger, more complex processes that are easier to manage and scale.
While SAP Build Apps enables customers to compose applications and application extensions, SAP Build Process Automation covers business process extensions, cross-LoB workflows and task automations for SAP and non-SAP business applications. Build Work Zone offers personalized digital experiences for task management (SAP Task Center) and unified access to business applications.
While SAP task automations are focused on SAP application (e.g., extraction and understanding of data from documents to create orders or invoices, screen recording of transactions for attended or unattended automation of mundane tasks), we offer these capabilities deeply embedded in the process composition environment (Process Builder) to automate SAP workloads and deliver hundreds of pre-built content bots, workflows, and processes for SAP S/4HANA, SAP SuccessFactors, and more.
As a testament to SAP's openness and commitment to supporting our customer's diverse landscapes and building a robust ecosystem of partners providing complementary offerings on top of SAP's Apps and Platform (aka BTP) capabilities, SAP also intends to integrate with task automation for 3rd party solutions or personal / departmental productivity flows. These 3rd party automations will be orchestrated in compliant business process automations, avoiding islands of automations and unintegrated process silos.
With Enterprise Automation, SAP offers a unique and comprehensive AI-powered solution to discover process inefficiencies, integrate applications and automate processes across heterogenous enterprise environments:
- Improve continuously with SAP Signavio
- Automate completely with SAP Build
- Integrate everything with SAP Integration Suite
For more in-depth information on how our Enterprise Automation offering will evolve further, browse the combined roadmaps for SAP Signavio + SAP Build Process Automation + SAP Integration Suite: indeed, as for all SAP solutions, Enterprise Automation components roadmap is publicly available for our valued customers and partners, so they can confidently build upon it.
How to get started with Enterprise Automation?
SAP Build is part of RISE with SAP and GROW with SAP, so our customers can start using the new enterprise automation capabilities to automate their mission critical ERP processes at no extra cost. Customers can also leverage new discovery workshops, SAP Build to Win, to explore the new enterprise automation capabilities.
Start your Enterprise Automation journey right now!
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