Creating your first SAP Process Automation Project: Part 2

[Murali_Shanmu]

In this blog post, lets take a deeper look at SAP Process Automation.

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

 

Organizations are finding new ways to boost employee engagement and one of such initiatives is to encourage employees to learn new skills and use their abilities in different ways. Often such initiatives, are handled through a paper-based approach. For demonstration, I am going to show how you could easily automate and digitize such process using SAP Process Automation.

Business scenario realized using SAP Process Automation:

• Employees will use a form to request time to spend on Special Projects


• Depending on the hours quoted, the workflow request would either be auto-approved or go to their managers for approval


• Special Projects are managed by different departments and the corresponding Department Manager will need to review the details (incl cost, start date etc) and approve such requests


• All approved requests will trigger an email confirmation via RPA

Below is how the Process would be modeled and look a the end of this blog series.

Please note that I have simplified the whole scenario for this demonstration to showcase some of the key capabilities. I have not covered the concept of “Actions” which would be used to interact with APIs to update data in a SAP system. That’s a topic for another blog post.

 

Pre-requisites

• Access to SAP Process Automation service in SAP BTP Cockpit


• Windows machine with RPA Desktop Agent. If you don’t have one, you can download it here and follow the setup instructions.

Create Business Process Project

Subscribe to SAP Process Automation following the booster which I have described in the previous blog post.

We need to begin by creating a Business Process Project which will hold all the automation artefacts.

Access the Lobby and create a new Business Process Project.

Provide the below details for the project in the pop-up and click on “Create”

• Project name


• Short Description

 

Create Business Process

From the project overview, create a new process as shown below.

Provide the below values in the pop-up and click on “Create”.

• Name


• Description

In the Process builder, select the “Start Trigger” component and in the Trigger Settings, click on “+ New Form” in the forms section to create a new start form.

 

Create a Trigger Form

In the popup for “Create Form”, provide values for the Form name and description.

Save the Business Process and Use the “Open Editor” option available on the “Start Form”

You can also open the Start Form using the menu on the left-hand side.

This is the form which employees would use to initiate a new request. Notice there set of controls which are available which you can drag and drop to the canvas.

For demonstrations, I am going to create a Headline with a set of input fields. There are basic validations which you can set for the input fields. For example, you can enable field to be mandatory or set character limits.

For demonstration, I have added the below field to my start form

• Employee Name (Text)


• Project Name (Text)


• Description (Text Area)


• Department (Drop Down)


• Hours Required (Number)


• Additional Cost Required (Number)


• Start Date (Date)


• Project End Date (Date)

Save the form and go back to the Business Process.

We now have a Start Form in the Process Builder and have created the UI with few input fields for employees to use and trigger this automation process.

In the next blog post, I will enhance this process with conditions and approval forms.