Automating processes is nothing new. When machines took over the repetitive manual tasks of workers in the 18th century, the Industrial Revolution was in full swing. A vast number of tasks in factories were automated, resulting in a significant reduction in the number of workers needed. With RPA, it’s possible to automate repetitive digital tasks. Will this development spark another revolution?
SAP believes that over the next three years, half of all business processes supported by SAP ERP software will be automated using RPA.
SAP & RPA
With its acquisition of the French company Contextor in 2018, SAP is capitalizing on the RPA trend. The product is part of the Intelligent Enterprise framework. Combined with support from SAP Conversational AI and machine learning capabilities, SAP presents this as the holy grail of digital automation. In this way, customers and users are supported by a chatbot when using RPA. Machine learning automatically handles exceptions to the process.
RPA in Practice
What exactly is the RPA solution that SAP offers? First, we need to distinguish between two types of RPA: attended and unattended RPA.
The attended variant can be described as a digital assistant. SAP also refers to this form as “Robotic Desktop Automation.” With this approach, users are supported on their desktops by bots that can perform certain predefined tasks. The user always retains control while the tasks are being performed. Consider a scenario in which a user views data in a specific third-party application and then initiates the automated process. The application is parsed, and after verification, the data is entered into an SAP transaction and saved.
The unattended version can be thought of as a digital worker. In this case, the tasks are performed completely autonomously by a bot running on a server. Therefore, no user or desktop is required. Users are then only needed to monitor the process and handle any exceptions that may arise.
Desktop Studio
To design automated attended and unattended processes, you can use Desktop Studio. This is a desktop application that allows you to define the actions of a process and create a workflow for it. In addition, you can use scripting to add additional logic and give the processes a certain level of intelligence. Using Desktop Studio, the entire process can be debugged and ultimately saved as a package. This package serves as the input for the Cloud Factory.
Cloud Factory
The Cloud Factory is a service on the SAP Cloud Platform. Here, you can upload the package you created in Desktop Studio. All RPA processes you’ve created are organized through the Cloud Factory. You can monitor all processes using various dashboards. Monitoring can also be performed from these dashboards. You can also manage tasks such as scheduling unattended processes here.
By configuring various “Environments” in the Cloud Factory, the automated processes can function correctly. System-specific data and user credentials for the various applications within the automated process are stored here. This also makes it possible to configure an OTAP pipeline. The Cloud Factory also registers the Desktop Agents that use these Environments.
Desktop Agent
Using the Desktop Agent, attended processes can be executed on the user’s computer . The Desktop Agent performs all actions, such as clicking, navigating, and manipulating data. Additional content can also be presented via injected user interface elements. This allows you, for example, to trigger automated processes, as well as display additional information at specific points and moments within the process. The desktop Agent must be installed on the user’s desktop.
Conclusion
With RPA, SAP hopes not only to reduce costs by automating digital processes. SAP also aims to improve data quality by reducing data entry errors. In addition, the user experience is enhanced because users perform fewer repetitive tasks, allowing them to focus more on tasks that add greater value.
Because SAP provides a complete set of tools that allow you to create automated processes and easily integrate them with SAP processes in the SAP GUI, Fiori apps, and other SAP Cloud Platform services, SAP has the opportunity to capture a large share of the RPA market. This is especially true if SAP delivers on its promise of “End-to-End Automation” by combining these capabilities with SAP Conversational AI and Machine Learning.
