BPA - Process Automation for Project Team Assignments

[Hanumath]

Hi Experts,

I am looking for custom process automation to build and this is for SAP Business ByDesign. The need is this as follows

1. Trigger a Bot (Planning to have this scheduled for a particular time in the day to trigger and execute)

2. Query the Projects (SOAP Web services) in ByDesign for a specific list of projects to consider for automation

3. Connect to a Sharepoint site and locate an Excel that has a list of employees to be assigned to the project

4. Loop in the project from the query service response (step 1) and assign the team found in the Excel to those project headers

5. Set a flag (extension field) on the header that the team is assigned for the users to review and release the project

Can the above process be achieved via BPA for ByDesign?

I need the BoT to trigger automatically on a daily or periodic basis (time frame yet to be decided) and once the BoT is triggered the above process steps to be automated by the BoT.

how can I achieve the above process automation?

Attended Bot or Unattended Bot?

API-based Bot or UI Navigation Bot?

Is SOAP supported or ODATA supported in BPA?

Our goal is to achieve this in the backend without having any interruptions to the end users or anyone from the team. We are stuck on the flow and implementing this, need expert advice and steps to fulfill our need.

Any content or materials, video references, or blogs that help me to develop this process automation is helpful for us.

Please help and appreciate your support and guidance here.

Thank you,

Hanu

[Jakub_Roguski]

Hi Hanumath,

I'm not able to answer all your questions, but what I know for sure, based on my hands-on experience, is the following:

1. You can start the process by timer - it is standard SBPA feature. First you have to define your process as having API trigger, then in the Control Tower make instance of your process trigger with scheduled trigger (Control Tower -> Environments -> Triggers -> Add Trigger -> select your already defined API trigger -> select "scheduled" -> set date/time of process triggering

2. You can access your data source by oData from the process. First you have to create a BTP destination to your oData service and then create new "Action", selecting "OData Destinations" as the API source.

3. For accessing and manipulating the Excel file in your scheduled process you should use unattended bot. Unfortunately I have no hands on experience with bot working with Excel files, so can't help with this topic.

[Jakub_Roguski]

One more thing: Excel file is the worst option for storing data. I strongly recommend to use a kind of database, like HANA Cloud, with oData interface. Then you can access your data with any kind of application, even built in SAP Build Apps, writing no single line of code. Using a database via oData you can eliminate necessity of bot at all, doing everything either in the SBPA process or Build Apps applications.

[Hanumath]

Hi Jakub,

How to design and develop our custom DB with the ODATA interface? Do you have experience in doing this? Can you please help me with the steps?

Thank you,

Hanu

[Jakub_Roguski]

Hi Hanu,

It is quite simple:

1. Get running instance of the SAP HANA Cloud

2. Get SAP Business Application Studio

3. In the SAP Business Application Studio start a Full Stack Cloud Application project in a workspace with SAP HANA Calculation View Editor and SAP HANA Tools added to the workspace

4. Connect your development environment to your Cloud Foundry runtime environment

5. Connect your development environment to your SAP HANA Cloud instance

6. Define entities of your database in the CDS file in the db folder of your project

7. Define your service in the CDS file in the srv folder of your project

8. build and deploy CDS

9. Build and deploy the service

It may look a lot of steps and complicated task, but in fact it is simple step by step task anybody can do. I can guide you through the entire process, but first you need to secure access to:

- SAP HANA Cloud - capacity depends on your planned data volume

- SAP Business Application Studio - as many licenses as many OData interface developers you plan to employ - probably just one, for you 🙂

- SAP BTP Cloud Foundry Runtime - size depends on volume of data to be processed by the OData interface, but I would suggest 2GB.

We can go forward when you have access to all three above services.

Best regards

Jakub

[Sankara1]

Hello Hanumanth,

Thank you for reaching out to us. Our expert, Jakob, has addressed most of your queries. Are you still encountering any unresolved issues? Additionally, I recommend following our help portal for SAP Build Process Automation  - https://help.sap.com/docs/build-process-automation?locale=en-US  for any further questions.