Digital process automation is about automating, enhancing, and adapting business processes beyond standard customer needs or market expectations.
To increase agility and enable focus on differentiating and value generating task, employees should be freed from the burden of daily routine bit by bit. SAP Build Process Automation is the one product that helps with automation.
SAP cloud ERP has many built-in standard automations that greatly reduce daily manual work. However, many daily processes are customer-specific and therefore need to be automated on a customer-specific basis.
SAP Build Process Automation is one of the services of SAP Build. It offers powerful tools that allow you to create custom automations visually and without programming knowledge. The ratio of the effort to create these automations compared to the effort saved is enormous, and automations pay off quickly!
By using SAP Build Process Automation in SAP BTP, you can create process extensions on top of SAP and third-party applications that provide you with a real-time, event-driven view of processes, and orchestrate tasks and processes across your landscape regardless of where it runs—SAP, non-SAP, cloud, or on-premise. You can make process changes more quickly and cost-effectively, adapt and act with greater agility, and take advantage of new business opportunities. You can use prebuilt workflows and process automation bots to automate your business processes. SAP Build Process Automation enables everyone to automate workflow processes and tasks without writing code. Users can create forms, manage decision logic, and build, adapt, and organize process flows with drag-and-drop simplicity. They can automate repetitive manual tasks (e.g., copy-and-paste operations, data extraction, data entry, and data creation) using low-code/no-code capabilities or the built-in automation recorder. Built-in AI capabilities enable intelligent document processing such as extracting data from structured or unstructured documents to transfer it to your enterprise systems for processing—without needing data scientist support. SAP Build Process Automation simplifies process and task automation so business users can unleash their process expertise without writing code.
You can also jump-start projects with more than 400 SAP-delivered process content packages, RPA bots, and connectors designed specifically to enhance the capabilities of your SAP applications such as SAP S/4HANA, SAP Ariba, SAP SuccessFactors, and more. Simple and secure access to business applications, processes, and data across SAP and third-party systems ensures that you can use these without losing context and meaning.
Before your organization adopts SAP Build Process Automation, tools such as SAP Signavio can help identify where the bottlenecks and inefficiencies are in your processes. SAP Signavio is business process management software that helps business processes be more flexible, efficient, transparent, and resilient. Let’s consider purchase requests, for example. SAP Signavio could identify if there were some departments or areas that had many outstanding purchase requests or maybe departments where the requests were open for some time before a purchase requisition is triggered in SAP S/4HANA. Once we’ve identified areas for improvement, SAP Build Process Automation is then available with many features to help business user refine, optimize, and even automate rote processes. The process builder and forms builder make it easy to define processes and required inputs. The purchase request can be made through an SAP Ariba shopping cart, an email, or Microsoft Excel. Using the Document Extraction AI functionality, the information needed is automatically loaded into an approvals form. This information could be collected through a self-service form as well.
Once the purchase request is approved, a purchase requisition is made directly in SAP S/4HANA with the required fields updated automatically via an API that business users can invoke with all the complexity hidden. This purchase requisition can be triggered automatically for low-value items. An email notification can easily be sent to the purchaser, with pertinent information from SAP S/4HANA included, such as the requisition number and expected fulfillment date.
This process can also be bidirectional. For example, if the delivery is going to take too long, the purchaser can decline in the email and opt to order an in-stock item for faster delivery. Process Visibility shows all the processes in flight. Team managers can easily see where their team’s requests are in the process. In addition, the task center is essentially a federated view of all the approvals the managers need to make, so they can easily approve items for their team centrally.
Editor’s note: This post has been adapted from a section of the book SAP Business Technology Platform by Smitha Banda, Shibaji Chandra, and Chun Aun Gooi.