Motivation
In the fast-paced digital era, businesses seek efficiency in every operation. Yet, the process of creating service orders for faulty equipment remains labor intensive, requiring manual data entry and analysis.
Our solution leverages the power of SAP Build Process Automation as a SAP BTP extension, a web service hosted on SAP BTP Kyma runtime, and generative AI powered by SAP AI Core, to transform this tedious process into a seamless, automated workflow. This blog outlines the approach.
The Original Business Process
Traditionally, the creation of service orders is a manual and time-intensive process.
The cons? Lots of tedious toggling between email and S/4HANA system service order creation page, involving several steps that are not only prone to human error but also lead to delays and potential customer dissatisfaction.
This is how it originally looks like:
Image 1: Outline of the original service order creation workflow
- Receive customer email requesting a service order for faulty equipment.
- Manually extract key information from the email, such as equipment details, purchase date, and analyze attached images for consistency with the equipment description.
- Download, rename, and document descriptions of attached images for organization.
- Develop a comprehensive problem description based on the email and images, manually entering this along with all extracted information into the S/4HANA system.
- Manually upload images to the service order form.
- Create the service order.
- Confirm service order creation with the customer via email.
Solution
We aim to automate the manual aspects of this process, creating a system that automatically processes customer emails, including attachments, to generate service orders in S/4HANA without manual input.
This solution relies on two main components:
- SAP Build Process Automation, an extension of SAP BTP, for workflow automation.
- Generative AI, powered by SAP AI Core and delivered through a web service on SAP Kyma runtime, to interpret and process data.
Image 2: SAP Build Process Automation as an SAP BTP extension
SAP Build Process Automation, an SAP BTP extension, streamlines business process automation and decision-making with minimal coding. It features intuitive drag-and-drop interfaces for easy process design and quick integration within the SAP ecosystem, thereby boosting operational efficiency and facilitating digital transformation.
The automation workflow, created with SAP Build Process Automation, monitors the inbox for service order requests, extracting content and attachments from emails. This information is processed by our web service on SAP Kyma runtime, where the “magic” happens.
Generative AI is an exceptional component in solutions like ours. Within our web service, we utilized the open-source vision model Llava 1.6 to interpret attached images and GPT-4 for analyzing email content, all powered by the SAP AI Core.
We then use the results to populate the S/4HANA system via POST requests, ensuring that the entire service order form is filled accurately and thoroughly. Multiple image attachments are also supported, with the attached images being uploaded and renamed automatically.
Last but not least, to end off the automation workflow, we can send an automated email reply to the customer with an update on their server order number and status.
Results
From just a single customer email,
we unlock all these capabilities shown below, hands-free and without any human intervention!😉
Image 7: Results generated by LLaVA 1.6 and gpt-4-32k
Image 8: Uploaded attachments of renamed images
Image 9: Automated email response sent to the customer
Conclusion
The most remarkable aspect of this solution is its complete automation, which can lead to the significant advantages below:
- Faster creation of service orders (~2 min per email)
- Increased accuracy of service orders
- Higher scalability where hundreds of requests can be handled simultaneously
- Better customer satisfaction due to rapid response and accuracy
Beyond service order creation, the potential applications of AI and SAP products can extend to various other business processes, including warranty claim automation, invoice posting automation, and many others.
This video summarises the automatic service order creation process using SAP Build Process Automation and Generative AI:
If you’re interested in the technical details of this solution, you can visit this blog. Also, if you're interested in exploring solutions like this or wish to learn more, feel free to reach out to me.
References
SAP Build Process Automation
SAP AI Core
SAP AI Core service guide
Generative AI @ SAP
Service Order documentation
Generative AI hub sdk
- SAP Managed Tags:
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