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MartinSlavik
Associate
Associate
6,721
There is in each company a group of small, monotonous, time-consuming and administrative tasks which make the user's lives more complicated. Just take a look in your SAP Business One ERP: Purchase/Sales Orders, Purchase Invoices, Deliveries, etc. - these days the business documents are approaching your company via user email inbox as PDFs and pictures or in paper format. Until now the user must have opened them, check and analyze them, and decide what to do with each specific document. Usually there was a need to manually introduce the most of these data into ERP.

But what if I tell you that all this is history if you are using SAP Business One?

Now via the Best Practices for Intelligent Automation for SAP Business One we are providing you new and simple ways to automate these business processes and simplify your SAP Business One user’s life. We are delivering now for you the first wave of SAP Process Automation bot templates which can be used out of box, customize them to your business needs or just use them as inspiration templates for your own business process automations.

The SAP Process Automation is an AI-powered, intuitive, and no-code solution for Workflow Management and Intelligent Robotic Process Automation, aiming to simplify the user’s life, automate the repetitive and time-consuming tasks and let user focus on the more important and valuable activities.

The questions like “is it really worth for SME companies? How to start? Could we do it?” can all be answered with “Yes”. We recommend the approach to check the full process, e.g. order to cash and identify areas and tasks which are candidates for simplification and automation. The aim is not to have one big, complicated bot but rather to have a set of smaller bots which can follow one another.

If the steps are identified, it is possible to use as a starting point the set of the bots we provide as a best practice templates and examples of business scenarios which can be automated.

 

With the first release of Best Practices for Intelligent Automation for SAP Business One, we are providing you in SAP Process Automation Store the first 6 best practices bot templates available out of box and ready to be used within the minutes:

  • Business Document Extraction from E-Mail ​(2X1)

  • Proof of Delivery Note Upload in the Outbound Delivery and the Invoice (2S1)

  • Supplier Invoice Upload for Intelligent Invoice Scanning​ (2R1)

  • Sales Order Creation from a Local Purchase Order ​(2C1)

  • Master Data Enrichment for Business Partner Identification (3C1)

  • Activity Creation for Business Partners (2B1)


 

These may seam relatively small tasks from the overall complex processes, but let’s try to add up the saved manual data processing time with one example: let's assume user spend 1-2 min to identify, download and classify each received invoice and then another 5-7 min to type the invoice field by field into the system. If it is then multiplied by the total number of invoices all relevant users need to process in a week, month and year and then extrapolate it to all the documents you need to process in your company and you will be amazed of the resulting time savings.

Another advantage and positive impact is that not only the job is completed, but thanks to implemented rules and logic, the task is completed more accurate with less manual mistakes as it is done by the bot in the background while you focus on really important tasks like your customers.

What is worth mentioning is also that a part of the provided scenarios are taking advantage of the incorporated Document Information Extraction feature, which is a ML service part of SAP Artificial Intelligence Business Services used for the extraction of relevant data from the unstructured business documents. Document Information Extraction service is included at no extra cost in the license of SAP Process Automation and provides you a set of pretrained ML models like invoices, purchase orders and payment advices, but also gives you access to the template functionality which allows you to extend the use of the service to your own custom business documents. The following bots use the service:

  • Proof of Delivery Note Upload in the Outbound Delivery and the Invoice (2S1)

  • Supplier Invoice Upload for Intelligent Invoice Scanning​ (2R1)

  • Sales Order Creation from a Local Purchase Order ​(2C1)

  • Master Data Enrichment for Business Partner Identification (3C1)



For more information about the Document Information Extraction service visit the following link: Service Guide for Document Information Extraction.

 

How to start?

1. Please refer to our guide available at: Working with Best Practices for Intelligent Automation for SAP Business One

In order to setup the SAP Process Automation please follow the instructions on the above mentioned link in section: How to Set Up the Best Practices for Process Automation for SAP Business One.

 

For the Application Development for SAP Process Automation you can find more information, see Subscribing to SAP Process Automation in the application help for SAP Process Automation on SAP Help Portal (EN only).

 

2. Consider the following OpenSAP courses:

Intelligent Automation for SAP Business ByDesign and SAP Business One

Enter Next-Level Bot Building with SAP Intelligent RPA 2.0

What’s New with Bot Building in SAP Intelligent RPA 2.0

Bot Building with SAP Intelligent RPA 2.0 Track (2022 Edition)

 

3. In order to run the bots there is a need to download a Desktop Agent from Download Center and install it on the machine where you will be running bots and then register the Desktop Tenant as explained in the relevant documentation. For more information, see Install Desktop Agent to Run Automations in the application help for SAP Process Automation on SAP Help Portal (EN only).

In a nutshell: Desktop Agent is an application which resides on your Windows machine and allows to execute bots. The bots are automatically assigned to a specific agent via the SAP Process Automation Development

4. Login to your SAP Process Automation Development environment

 

5. Enter the SAP Process Automation Store to acquire SAP Best Practices bot templates for SAP Business One. Please note that each bot available in the store is equipped with three documents (additional documentation and will be enabled with videos for each bot which will visualize the key technical information for each bot.)



    1. Business case – describing the business purpose of the bot.

    2. Technical specification – describing the setup of the bot and the technical process behind.

    3. Configuration file example – using as a template for defining the rules for the particular bot run.




 

Please note that the bots are available as templates so they require configuration for particular customer and its needs. On top of that they are provided as free of charge and as a starting point based on which the bot can be enhanced for some additional needs or process steps.

 

6. Execute bots.
The bots might be executed in two ways:



    1. Triggered manually from the SAP Process Automation Application Development

    2. Scheduled for automatic execution based on the predefined timetable also in the SAP Process Automation Application Development




 

 

What’s next? 

This is a short summary of our delivery for SAP Business One. It should help you to understand the purpose and aims of the delivery within the SME segment.  In principle it doesn’t matter what is your industry it’s undeniable that with the help of SAP Process Automation can help you streamline and simplify the processes within your company.

I would like to ask you to share your feedback, thoughts or ask questions in a comment section.

 

 

 

 
20 Comments
erickgomez-tech
Participant
0 Kudos

Hi Martin,

Activity Creation for Business Partners Configuration File

PDF: Activity Creation for Business Partners Configuration File have error, I can't open.

May be you can check? If yes, thank you so much.

Best regards,

Erick Gómez

 

MartinSlavik
Associate
Associate
0 Kudos
Hi Eric,

have you tried the technical specification "Technical Specification - Activity Creation for Business Partners (2B1)"? If yes, I've checked it and for me it is open without any error.

Best Regards,

Martin Slavik

SAP SME Product Management
erickgomez-tech
Participant
0 Kudos
Yes Martin, me too!

But, the other one have a problem.


I need the a spread sheet that containing a template to be filled by the user as input data for the bot execution, right?

Best regards,

EG

MartinSlavik
Associate
Associate
Hi Erick,

OK I see, this is the excel file. It works for me as well, I can download it and open it. Please try to download it and open as MS Excel file.

Best Regards,

Martin Slavik

SAP SME Product Management
erickgomez-tech
Participant
0 Kudos

Perfect, I'll try again.

Thank so much Martin, great post, I loved and testing right now.

Best regards,

EG

 

agardiles
Participant
0 Kudos

Hi Martin,

When I try to generate the package, if have a quota availability error.

How can I solve this?

 

Thanks in advance!!

Regards,

Augusto

MartinSlavik
Associate
Associate
0 Kudos
Hi Augusto,

I'm not sure, but it seems you are using the free tier which has some limitations which are described here:

https://help.sap.com/viewer/a331c4ef0a9d48a89c779fd449c022e7/Cloud/en-US/9c5114089f8445eea223a19604f...

There would be most probably needed to delete some artifacts.

 

Best Regards,

Martin Slavik

SAP SME Product Manager
agardiles
Participant
0 Kudos
Ok, I will check that.

Thanks Martin!
0 Kudos
Hi Martin,

Is it possible to customize the bot so the supplier invoice uploaded in SAP is based on an existing Purchase Order? Is this matching achievable/ supported?

Thank you!
MartinSlavik
Associate
Associate
0 Kudos
Hi Andrea,
the basic purpose of the bot is to transfer the Invoice from PDF to SAP Business One. I think there is in this case nothing to be changed for the purpose of the matching. The matching of the imported Invoice with e.g. Purchase order existing in the system is done as part of SAP Business One standard functionality - Electronic Documents Import Wizard,
The wizard performs the matching of the related documents, as proposal and user can adjust it. You can check for example SAP Note 3060961  for more details.

Regarding the adjustments of the bot itself, I would say that the proposed one can be the use of the "templates" within the Document Information Extraction service (see for example SAP Help). If you create your own templates then it might be very helpful to incorporate them into to bot.

Best Regards,

Martin Slavik

SAP SME Product Management
TusharNathvani
Participant
0 Kudos
Hi Martin,

I am trying to use Proof of Delivery Note Upload in the Outbound Delivery and the Invoice (2S1) and Sales Order Creation from a Local Purchase Order ​(2C1) but on both the bot I am facing the issue related to attachments. I give the permission to /mnt/.../attachment folder as well in HANA Server.

Once the process has been finished then I can see that pdf file has been copied into /tmp/sap_b1_b1service0/ServiceLayer/Attachments2 folder but not able to find into actual path of attachment folder (/mnt/attachments/INECOM_DEMO_MFG/Attachments/])

I am receiving the error on attachment web service.

"errorInfo": {
"exception": "irpa_core.error.RequestError",
"exceptionShort": "RequestError",
"exceptionMessage": "Response code 400 (Bad Request)",
"line": 78
}

Regards,

Tushar
erickgomez-tech
Participant
0 Kudos
Hello tushar.nathwani2

I recommend separating the matter into two parts.
I tried 2C1 and at first, I had a problem because I didn't have the attachment folder mounted in SUSE.

It is already working fine, could you indicate if you still have this problem that you describe?

I'll stay tuned

Erick
erickgomez-tech
Participant
0 Kudos
Dear Martin, I want to thank you and the entire team at SAP who made it possible for us to have these best practices for intelligent automation with SAP Business One today.

After much study and practice, today I have 3 of the 7 robots working, allowing me to teach what I have learned to other professionals, in fact, I have already taught several courses on the basic aspects to take advantage of SAP BTP.

Thanks to your blog I was able to learn to use them and now I am very happy with the result, without a doubt, this blog enlightened me, as well as many other articles that have helped me to have the knowledge and experiences that I have today.

Allow me to introduce myself, I am Erick Gómez, a Venezuelan who has lived in Mexico for 10 years, I was an SAP Business One Commercial Executive for a little over 15 years, working for various partners in the region, now I am only a facilitator serving SAP Partners.

I understand the barriers to entry that we have in Latin America, those that delay the adoption times of these technologies, one barrier is the language, another barrier is the technical language and the third barrier is the level of sophistication that we have in all this.

Thanks to your blog I have been able to break down all these barriers, now I want to share it with all my colleagues who require it and, of course, also help the SAP Business One client to take advantage of the advantages offered by the platform.

SAP BTP has been a great motivation to continue learning and now become a Citizen Developer, all this being said, once again thank you very much for sharing the knowledge with all of us, it is our turn now to put it into practice.

I wish you many more successes and greetings to the entire SAP team that works as a team to turn companies into Intelligent Enterprises.

Kind regards,

Erick
TusharNathvani
Participant
0 Kudos
Hi Erick,

 

Thanks for the reply.

Yes, I mounted the attachment folder in SUSE and even I checked permission on mounted folder which is also fine. But still, I am receiving the error.

Regards,

Tushar
TusharNathvani
Participant
0 Kudos
Hi,

I am using Sales Order Creation from a Local Purchase Order ​(2C1) bot and also used the Master Data Enrichment for Business Partner Identification (3C1) but at the time of Process bot not able to identify the customer information. I created same information as a customer on my sap b1 system which is mentioned in Purchase Order PDF file but still its pickup the default customer only which I mentioned in the configuration.

does anybody have idea that any more configuration required for customer identification?

Regards,

Tushar
TusharNathvani
Participant
Issue has been solved.

Thanks,

Tushar
ahurtado
Explorer
0 Kudos
Greetings, I have the same error, could you please tell me how you solved it? thank you
TusharNathvani
Participant
Hi Andres,

 

Actually, when you mount the attachment folder in HANA by default it considers permission as 754 so we changed from 754 to 777. Once we changed from 754 to 777 then issue has been resolved.

Regards,

Tushar
ahurtado
Explorer
0 Kudos
Hi Tushar, I followed your steps but unfortunately it still doesn't work and I get the same error. Maybe there is some step that I have missed? thanks
TusharNathvani
Participant
0 Kudos
Hi Andres,

 

I hope you are not using the same file. If yes, then please change the file name of PDF because if you upload the attachment with the same file name that time also it gives the same error.

 

Also have you checked the logs that are you facing the issue with attachment or something else?

Regards,

Tushar