Create and Configure Automation: Part 5

[Murali_Shanmu]

In this blog post, I will be extending the process to include an Approval Form for the Department Manager to review and action the request for special projects. On successful approval, an RPA bot would be used to send email confirmation to the employee.

Getting started with SAP Process Automation

Part 1 – Subscribing to SAP Process Automation and understanding the components Part 2 – Creating your first Business Process Project and configuring Trigger Forms Part 3 - Adding Process Controls & Approval Form Part 4 - Creating Data Types & Decisions Part 5- Create and Configure Automation Part 6- Deploy Business Process Project Part 7- Configure Process Visibility Dashboard & Integration with Fiori Launchpad

 

Create and configure Approval Form

Similar to the previous steps, use the “+” icon to create a new approval form.

In the Create Form popup, provide a name and description for the new approval form.

Similar to the Manager Approval Form, I have designed this form exactly the same the way. I have added Department Manager Approval comments as well as Manager Name as a mandatory field and kept the rest as read-only.

Save the changes and navigate back to the process builder screen. Select “Department Manager Approval" and provide the below details in the “Inputs” tab.

• Set the subject value which will show up in the My Inbox for the approver.


• For the “Users”, I have selected the output from the Determine Approvers decision.

In the “Inputs” tab, bind the field to the corresponding attributes from the Process Content under “Special Projects Start Form”.

With this model, all special project requests less than 300 hours will auto-approve and be channeled to the respective department managers. Any project request which has greater than 300 hours, will go through multi-level approval.

To finish off this automation, scenario, let me show you how to use RPA to do eliminate any repetitive tasks. For illustration purposes, I am going to use RPA to send a confirmation email. Please check the product roadmap in the future as such activities like sending emails would be further simplified with in-built skills.

Create and configure RPA Automation

We can easily embed RPA automation within SAP Process Automation to handle repetitive tasks especially when dealing with unstructured data. In this section, I am going to show how you can use RPA to send a confirmation email.

The “Department Manager Approval” would have two outputs – Approve and Reject. Connect the Reject output to an end event. Use the “+” icon from the Approve output and create a new Automation.

Select the RPA Agent version. I have already installed an RPA Agent on my laptop and configured my SAP Process Automation URL in the Tenant settings.

In the “Create Automation” popup, provide the name and description for the automation. Also, enable the flag “Can only be started from another automation” to indicate that this does not need to be configured as an attended or unattended bot.

Before we model the automation, we need to add dependencies to access the SDKs. Since we would be dealing with Outlook, use the Project settings to add the Outlook SDK

In the Tools section, search for “Open Outlook Instance” and “Send Email (Outlook)” and drag them as steps in the canvas.

In the Input/Output Tab, we would need to provide the parameters which the bot would be using when sending an email. Ensure that a description is provided for each of these input fields. We will be using the value of Employee/Manager details within the email body.

Select “Send Email(outlook)” step and update the step properties.

• Set the emailItemParameters to customData


• For the “To” field, open the expression editor and select the input parameter “EmployeeEmailAddress”

Set “isHtmlBody” to true. Set "Body" with a code snippet as below

"<h3><img src=\" https://i.ibb.co/ZJJTP9X/284287-Total-Workforce-Management-R-green.png\" alt=\"Image Banner\" width=\"576\" height=\"192\" /></h3> <h3>Hello " + Step0.EmployeeName + ",</h3> <p>your project has been approved</p> <p>Your manager <strong>" + Step0.ManagerName + "</strong> has approved this request with following comments:</p> <h4>" + Step0.ManagerComments + "</h4> <p>Thank you for your interest in participating in the Special Projects Program</p><p>Your Employee Engagement Team</p>"

Save the changes and navigate back to the Process Builder. We would need to map the Input properties for the RPA bot to use.

Finally, connect the Success output of "Email Confirmation" node to an end event.

This is how the automation would look like after being modeled in the process builder.

With this we have completed the design and configuration of the automation scenario. In the next blog post, I will walk through the steps to deploy this automation and test it.