Post Vienna thoughts on SAP Build Process Automation

[Majic]

First and foremost, I’d like to thank to all of you who participated in my sessions during the SMB Innovation Summit in Vienna. Each time after I am giving a speech on the events, I like to also give a short summary with key important points which were discussed. Similar feeling, I have at present after we dived into the subject of SAP Build Process Automation, in context of SME products, literally SAP Business One, SAP Business ByDesign and SAP S/4 HANA Public Cloud.

SAP Build Process Automation is a part of SAP Build, our low-code/no-code approach, known also as citizen development. The SAP Build consist of three products:

• SAP Apps – allowing to create business application with no-code experience, those which later you may deploy as a web or mobile.


• SAP Build Process Automation – allowing to create workflows and automation tasks (previously known as a bot for intelligent Robotic Process Automation).


• SAP Build Work Zone – allowing you to design sites with centralized access to business applications on any device.

Each of the parts has a different purpose, but for each you do not need to be a pro-developer and you may have quick ramp-up delivering new tools for your organization.

Now, in my session you could get some insights around SAP Build Process Automation, let me again split them into three areas of what you get in the package.

• Processes and Workflows – allowing you to build a step-by-step flow for the processes in your organization, enhanced by forms and decision trees and by this automating, e.g., approval processes, communication with customers or/and suppliers or orchestrating document flow within the company.


• Task Automation – these are our famous Robotic Process Automation bots, so to say the tools which takes the role of human being for processing most repetitive tasks, both as a background job communicating via APIs of given application or working on the UI of given application (e.g., WebClient of SAP Business One).


• Document Understanding – the door to our Document Information Extraction, allowing to read the content of the documents in various languages for the purpose of further processing (e.g., invoices provided as graphical images, pdfs, etc.)

On top to that SAP has already provided many examples via the SAP Build Content Catalog, which you may browse by the process relevance, as a product, line of business, industry.

Here are two important things to mention:

• Customers and Partners may build content based on the examples to adjust it to the needs of the end-user.


• Partners may publish content to the community as free of charge or payable content.

In addition to the dedicated content created for our SME customers, keeping in mind that some of the needs of small, medium, and large organization are very similar,  SAP Business One and SAP Business ByDesign users may also get inspiration in S/4 content to create similar automations for their products and processes.

In context of innovation summit and SAP Business One community, I would also put some examples of the workflow ideas:

• Return Request Process, please check on interesting blog post of my colleague covering both business and technical aspects of how we build the workflow and the bot to fulfill the process. You may also download the process from the store and see on your tenant how it works in practice.


• As an idea, what can be done you may recall that in B1i we have provided Request for Quotation, this type of process can also be built with Workflow and Task Automation tools.


• The last which came to my mind during the presentation was an update of currency exchange rates, where the bot instead of human being will visit the page of the bank of your choice, read actual exchange rates and update the ERP system used by the organization.

Having said that and answering one of the questions, the SAP Build Process Automation may be used for communication within SAP ecosystem, however, may also communicate with third party applications or websites.

I hope that the summary will find you well, I am also aware that not everything I may provide in the short blog post, however for some I hope it will be a good starting point for automating processes and tasks with SAP Build Process Automation.

At the end let me share with you some links which might be helpful while kicking of your first project:

• SAP Business One Help


• SAP Business ByDesing Help


• OpenSAP course: Intelligent Automation for SAP Business ByDesign and SAP Business One

Thank you for your time and wish you fun with SAP Process Automation.