Supercharge efficiency with Enterprise Automation: SAP Build and SAP Integration Suite

[Manuel_Namyslo]

The ability to intelligently automate business processes is top of mind for many stakeholders involved in process management across organizations. According to a recent IDC study, annual spending on Intelligent Process Automation (IPA) technologies is projected to reach $102 billion by 2028. Of this, $19.9 billion will be allocated to AI-powered automation tools, with an impressive annual growth rate of 43.4%.

While there will be certainly no shortage in resources to spend for automation software, the real challenge remains in the details: How can organizations implement a holistic approach for process excellence, which allows them to manage processes, identify bottlenecks, deliver scalable automations and integrate their process extension within a holistic process landscape. In my previous blogpost I have already outlined in detail how SAP’s framework on Enterprise Automation delivers an solution to the problem statement mentioned above.

And this blogpost series will offer you a more detailed guidance on the interconnectivity of each service included in Enterprise Automation which are:

• SAP Build Process Automation
• SAP Integration Suite
• and of course SAP Signavio.

Let’s explore the value you can unlock for your processes by combining SAP Build Process Automation with SAP Integration Suite in this one.

What is Enterprise Automation?

As outlined in my previous blogpost Enterprise Automation with SAP: Enterprise automation with SAP software provides an integrated set of tools for process mining, automation, integration, monitoring, and optimization of your processes and workflows. It helps you quickly and intuitively gain insights into your business processes and identify the right automation tool for the right outcome. While each solution can be leveraged independently, Enterprise Automation offer native integration between SAP Build, SAP integration Suite and SAP Signavio – supplemented with best practices, guidance and pre-build content which can be implemented directly.

• SAP Signavio provides visibility into business processes and potential bottlenecks, root-cause analysis, and suggestions for improvement based on 200,000 industry benchmarks and best practices. This detailed understanding of inefficiencies across your organization enables you to optimize and automate processes.
• SAP Integration Suite is an integration platform as a service with thousands of prebuilt integrations, APIs, events and connectors to SAP and third-party software applications. The suite reduces complexity across on-premise and multi-cloud environments, helping you optimize comprehensive business processes.
• SAP Build to create automations and applications usingthe low-code and no-code design tools. Including pre-built automations and connectors for SAP software and third-party systems, the solutions let your business experts rapidly address process inefficiencies

Here you can also see a visualization of the main components and its respective capabilities:

Leverage the combined power of SAP Build Process Automation and SAP Integration Suite

1st scenario: Integrate to innovate

The first scenario we are going to cover in this blogpost is about building required process extensions and integrating the to your systems of records. SAP Build Process Automation allows you to create entirely new business processes and automation from scratch. However, during development, you may need advanced integration capabilities and various types of connectors to link your processes with different systems, whether cloud-based or on-premise, and whether using SAP or third-party platforms.

Integration Suite, you can natively trigger an iFlow created in SAP Integration Suite at any point within your process definition. This is particularly useful when handling tasks like data transformation, entity mapping, field validation, or accessing over 250 connectors such as iDoc, SOAP, SMTP, Kafka, and more. Moreover, customers that start their process excellence journey with Integration Suite can complement their integration styles with additional automation capabilities like approval workflows, business rules or RPA bots that have been provisioned with SAP Build Process Automation.

Let’s jump into an example. In the screenshot below you can see a process definition within Build Process Automation to automate the creation of Purchase Requisitions within your organization:

Once all the parameters and required approvals are fulfilled, we want to create a PR document within our system of record. In the first Action of the screenshot below you can see that we are natively calling an OData service to directly push this new PR within our SAP S/4HANA on-premise system. But in the second Action, we trigger an additional Integration Flow (iFlow) that has been established within the SAP Integration Suite:

 

This is done rather quickly thanks to the ability to natively trigger an iFlow within the Action design-time of SAP Build Process Automation, which is also documented in our Help-Portal:

This allows you to include in iFlow within your process definition whenever it is necessary. Because in the iFlow design-time of the Integration Suite you can establish any scenario that is relevant, make use of data validation and entity mapping, and use more than 250 different connectors to integrate to any backend application. The connectivity options and adapters are also documented within the Help-Portal. In this screenshot you can see how the iFlow replicates the PR document in our MM-module of SAP ECC by using a SOAP adapter:

 And here you can see an example how entity mapping looks like: We are mapping the corresponding data fields of the OData service to the SOAP service to make sure that no data gets lost or misinterpreted.

2nd scenario: Event-driven architectures

Another common use case for combining SAP Build and SAP Integration Suite is in the area of event-driven architectures. Thanks to the Event Mesh service available in SAP Integration Suite, you can listen to and subscribe to critical business events, whether they are happening within your SAP or non-SAP environment. This also includes the new Advanced Event Mesh service, which offers more capabilities, broader deployment options, and the ability to handle larger payloads compared to the regular Event Mesh service.

SAP Build provides native connectivity to both Event Mesh and Advanced Event Mesh, enabling you to proactively trigger process instances without human intervention, based on business events as they occur.

For instance, you can use Advanced Event Mesh to listen for and subscribe to the creation of business partners within your S/4HANA system, as well as in third-party systems. Whenever a new business partner is created, SAP Build triggers a process instance to validate the data, sending approval notifications to business users to assign addresses and payment information for the new business partner, ensuring high data quality.

By integrating event-driven architectures with SAP Build, you can significantly increase the processing speed of your business workflows, reduce human intervention, and enhance operational excellence for your IT department.

Here you can see a screenshot of the Advanced Event Mesh cockpit within SAP Integration Suite:

You can listen and subscribe to multiple events by creating queues in your SAP or non-SAP system within multiple regions and hyperscalers. For example it can be an event that indicates that a new business partner has been created within your ERP landscpape:

Once this subscription has been established you can proactively trigger a workflow or automation task within SAP Build Process Automation. To stay within the example, you can trigger new approval workflows once a new business partner has been established. As a result, every time a new business partner has been entered, an additional approver makes sure that the payment details and to address of the organization has been assigned correctly. By doing so you increase the degree of data accuracy and compliance of your business processes while minimizing the degree of human intervention:

Thanks to the native connectivity of SAP Build and our Event Mesh services you can easily select any event to trigger a process instance in SAP Build Process Automation. Further details on how to establish the connectivity can be found on the blogpost of my colleague Win, which can be found here or within the public documentation in the Help-Portal.

3rd scenario: Simplifying connectivity to improve developer efficiency

The final scenario for combining SAP Build and SAP Integration Suite involves our new consolidated API for SAP-managed data: Graph.

Graph uses modern open standards like OData v4 and GraphQL, serving as a key capability within API Management in SAP Integration Suite. With Graph, developers can access your business data as a single, semantically connected data graph that spans the entire suite of SAP products and beyond. It is designed for SAP’s ecosystem of partner and customer developers, offering a powerful API that significantly reduces the cost and complexity of creating and deploying reusable extensions and other client applications.

As enterprise landscapes continue to expand in both scale and complexity, each new system, SaaS, or microservice introduces new protocols, data models, connectivity requirements, and security conventions. Real-world challenges often span multiple lines of business, services, and APIs, making it difficult even for experienced developers to grasp all the underlying technologies and interfaces. Creating new business-extending client applications requires a growing range of expertise and skills. The rise of low-code tools, now widely adopted by nonprofessional developers, further widens this gap.

Graph simplifies this complexity by allowing you to combine and expose data from multiple systems and data sources. You can then easily consume this API within SAP Build. At any point in your SAP Build Process Automation workflow, you can leverage an Action to retrieve, post, patch, put, or delete data within your SAP landscape.

This connectivity model allows you to interact with systems based on a unified enterprise data model, simplifying data access and avoiding unnecessary ETL processes and data replications for specific use cases.

Here you can also find a simplified architecture, that describes this scenario:

Additionally, SAP Integration Suite allows you to leverage proven integration features such as API Management, which helps monitor and evaluate your connections. You can also apply critical policies to these connections to ensure compliance and secure operations.

Further details can be found on the blogpost of my colleagues Palak Garg and Evgeniy Gorbunov.

Conclusion

I hope this blog post has helped you identify the key synergies between SAP Build and SAP Integration Suite and how they can enable seamless automation across your enterprise. Please remember that the use cases provided are just examples and can be tailored and refined to meet your specific needs.

Here you can also find a simplified architecture, that describes the entire scenario in a more generic way:

 For further guidance, I’ve included links to additional blog posts and resources on the Help Portal that will assist you in implementing these use cases. If you're interested in exploring more scenarios related to Enterprise Automation, feel free to check out the following links:

• Official Enterprise Automation with SAP page
• How to get started with Enterprise Automation Guide
• Whitepaper: Transition to SAP S/4HANA with Enterprise Automation
• Enterprise Automation with SAP Product Tour
• Enterprise Automation with SAP webinar

Stay tuned!