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In a previous blog post, I presented the benefits of Enterprise Automation through the success stories from two very different customers, Blue Diamond Growers and Homemade. This gave you a first glimpse of how Enterprise Automation can quickly increase business efficiency in any organization.
Demo of advanced Enterprise Automation at SAP Sapphire 2024
At SAP Sapphire 2024, SAP CTO Juergen Mueller showcased a demo of Enterprise Automation, in the context of extending SAP S/4HANA Cloud in compliance with SAP’s Clean Core strategy:
Click the image to watch the Enterprise Automation demo
First, new SAP Signavio Benchmarking Analytics presents a comprehensive dashboard of the business processes, called Process Performance Overview, which shows that the Lead to Cash process does not perform as well as it could. In particular, the analysis shows that many sales orders involve a manual step because delivery block is not removed after a customer pays an overdue bill.
Second, by using the upcoming new Build Extension Wizard embedded in SAP S/4HANA Cloud, one creates a new extension project: a Business Event, occurring when a Journal Entry is created, triggers an automation created with SAP Build Process Automation which automatically removes the delivery block after the overdue bill is finally paid by the customer.
That’s it!
The Future of Enterprise Automation is AI-driven
You’ve read that our customer Homemade is using an SAP Business AI service named Document Information Extraction to read documents and automatically enter the data captured from those documents into their systems. This is a very common use case for applying AI to business processes that many of our customers are already using. And we know that we can go much further in process automation by using Generative AI. That's why we've been working hard for several months to add GenAI capabilities to the 3 pillars that make up our Enterprise Automation suite:
- SAP Signavio which provide visibility into business processes, potential bottlenecks, root-cause analysis, and suggestions for improvement.
- SAP Build Process Automation which automates workflow processes and tasks with drag-and-drop simplicity using pre-built workflows, bot automations and connectors for SAP and non-SAP systems.
- SAP Integration Suite which helps to seamlessly integrate diverse capabilities available in complex IT landscapeswith proven pre-built integrations, APIs, connectors, and best practices.
I’m happy to share today an overview of this new capabilities powered by Generative AI.
For a comprehensive deep dive, I engage you to read Evgeniy Gorbunov’s blog post “Enterprise Automation: Deep Dive on new Generative AI capabilities”. 💡
Generative AI in SAP Signavio
To efficiently leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) technologies for business processes, our colleagues from SAP Signavio introduced last year the concept of Large Process Models (LPM). The idea is to go far beyond the traditional LLMs by finetuning them and augmenting them to focus on their application in the area of business processes.
Read more in the blog post written by Dr. Andreas Gerber, VP Head of Engineering SAP Signavio Process AI: “Large Process Models: Process Management in the Age of Generative AI”.
Upcoming capabilities in SAP Signavio powered by GenAI leveraging Large Process Models will be:
- Process Recommender: our AI-assisted process recommender will provide process and domain owners with the ability to obtain preconfigured process models that are a best match to their needs, based on a database of 5,000 best practices. With this capability, you will narrow down thousands of options to those process models that best suit the needs of your organization.
- Performance Indicators Recommender: this capability will provide process owners and process analysts instant recommendations on the process performance indicators to be monitored. Users can move from problem identification to a measurement approach with no effort by leveraging a repository of thousands KPIs and PPIs
- Process Analyzer: this capability empowers users with any skillset to ask questions in natural language and receive immediate insights that can inform business decisions.
Generative AI in SAP Build Process Automation, with Executable Process AI
Our aim for Process Automation is to go further, and we now want to provide Executable Process AI and more. Indeed, there are challenges when automating processes:
- No active assistance to business experts while starting automation of critical processes
- Slow pace of incrementing large process automation
- Difficulty to comprehend already modelled artifacts when lacking adequate documentation
To tackle these challenges, we decided that SAP Build Process Automation should include
- Conversational AI capabilities within the studio
- Auto-generation of automations and process segments based on embedded intelligence within the studio
Our solution, SAP Build Process Automation, will soon bring embedded generative AI capabilities to generate processes, automations, and decisions, including:
- Interactive Process Generation and Modifications: you will be able to describe your process in natural language, to interact and iterate to finalize desired process flow and finally generate the process with automations, forms, and decisions (business policies) that fits your requirement.
- Summarization of Complex Artifacts: this capability will create a short comprehensive description of complex historical or newly generated complex artifacts, for instance the summary of a complex decision table.
In a few words, SAP Build Process Automation will bring tremendous benefits to our customers, by
- offering a conversational experience for citizen developers
- accelerating time to value for authoring automations and processes
- standardizing SAP application access for automations through a semantic access layer fostering reuse and fail-safe connectivity
These evolutions are planned to be available in 2024, and you can discover all the improvements planned in Process Automation by browsing SAP Build Process Automation public roadmap.
Generative AI in SAP Integration Suite
Integration is the foundation of an intelligent enterprise: only by connecting customers, products, employees and brand experiences with business operations, continuously and in real time, can organizations exploit the full potential of their system landscape and make the right decision at the right time.
With SAP Integration Suite, you can integrate solutions inside and outside your data center. You can accelerate connectivity with prebuilt integration flows, connectors to hundreds of systems, thousands of APIs, and other capabilities that simplify integrations with SAP and third-party applications. There are a few AI-based capabilities in SAP Integration Suite already, such as a conversational assistant in SAP Business Accelerator Hub (beta), flow step recommendations, and recommendations for interfaces and mappings.
Now we are working to further integrate AI for 2 purposes:
- Generation of Integration: this new capability can create new integration flows, based on the specific integration scenarios, different connecting applications, and business partners. It will be leveraging Unified Customer Landscape – UCL - to discover the customer landscape and offer seamless integrations between those systems and provide pre-configured connectors and scheduler.
- Anomaly Detection: we will leverage AI for anomaly detection, identifying unusual or abnormal behaviors by continuously monitoring the API traffic. This AI-based mechanism will immediately notify API owners upon detection of anomalies in API Call Volume, API Error count, API Response time, while providing insights to aid investigate the cause & analyze impact and recommend remedial actions.
So, as you can see, Enterprise Automation suite with SAP Signavio, SAP Build Process Automation and SAP Integration Suite will be more powerful than ever. Up to you now to harness this power to improve the efficiency of your business!
One more thing? Joule Extensibility in SAP Build!
In addition to Enterprise Automation, there is another amazing perspective involving SAP Build that I’m very proud to share with you: indeed, SAP Build will be the go-to low code extension layer for Joule, enabling customers to extend Joule by creating custom skills using advanced GenAI capabilities.
Here is the announcement of Joule Extensibility with a demo shown by Juergen Mueller in his Innovation keynote:
Click the image to view the Joule extensibility demo
The benefits of Joule Extensibility through SAP Build for our customers and partners will be to
- Provide support to business users in ad-hoc scenarios
- Enhance collaboration and innovation across the SAP ecosystem
- Reduce redundancy and leverage collective expertise to enhance business processes
- Streamline the integration process, saving time and resources
- To let customers stay ahead of the curve with access to the latest AI capabilities
Stay tuned to see how Joule and SAP Business AI can help you leverage artificial intelligence to improve your business efficiency!
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