Hyperautomated Companies: Customers who have successfully implemented Enterprise Automation

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Last year at SAP Sapphire, Julia White, SAP CMSO, presented our Enterprise Automation offering during her opening keynote, and Juergen Mueller and Thomas Saueressig went deeper on this topic in their Future-Proof Innovation keynote. 

What is Enterprise Automation from SAP?

We know from our valued customers that business processes are quite complex and pretty intricate: there are many touchpoints between core processes, which have to be optimized end-to-end across complex on-premise and multi-cloud environments.

To help our customers improve and automate their business processes with optimal performance for better efficiency, we are using the combined power of 3 complementary solutions:

1. SAP Signavio and LeanIX provide visibility into business processes, potential bottlenecks, root-cause analysis, Enterprise Architecture and suggestions for improvement based on 200,000 industry benchmarks and best practices.
2. SAP Build Process Automation automates workflow processes and tasks with drag-and-drop simplicity using pre-built workflows, bots and connectors for SAP and non-SAP systems.
3. SAP Integration Suite helps to seamlessly integrate diverse capabilities available in complex IT landscapes with proven pre-built integrations, APIs, connectors, and best practices.

How to make Enterprise Automation a reality? Ask our customers!

To better understand what Enterprise Automation is concretely, let me bring 2 different customer examples:

Blue Diamond Growers

Blue Diamond Growers, the world's largest almond processor and distributor, has embraced digital transformation to enhance its supply chain efficiency. The company utilizes SAP technologies to streamline processes and adapt to market demands.

Initially known for its century-old operations, Blue Diamond recognized the need for modernization to meet the growing demand for almonds worldwide. The onset of the Covid-19 pandemic further underscored the importance of a resilient supply chain. Blue Diamond leveraged SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) with Enterprise Automation capabilities, including SAP Build Process Automation and SAP Signavio, to address disruptions caused by supply fluctuations and transportation challenges, ensuring uninterrupted delivery of products to customers. An SAP partner, The Silicon Partners (TSP), played an instrumental role in the analysis of business processes and evaluation of automation opportunities. They also implemented SAP Build Process Automation and SAP Signavio and worked closely with the customer’s team to review the inefficiencies and process gaps from the SAP Signavio Process Insights report.

 The benefits of Blue Diamond's digital transformation are evident, with significant cost savings and efficiency improvements. The company has reduced logistics costs by $1 million annually, decreased inventory levels by 20%, and accelerated financial closing processes by 40%.

In addition to these great outcomes, Steven Birgfeld, VP of Information Technology and Services at Blue Diamond Growers, explained: “We are prioritizing business values and eliminating inefficiencies and process gaps with automation using SAP Build Process Automation. We leveraged SAP Signavio Process Insights reports to identify the most impactful automation opportunities”.

Read the full story in this blog post and in the presentation for for SAP Innovation Awards 2024 or watch the video.

HomeMade

HomeMade is a startup created to administer “Home Care Packages” to the aging population of Australia. With the demand for in-home care rising among Australia’s growing aging population, HomeMade sought to empower home care participants by giving them and their families greater choice and control. Connecting them with the care they wanted required greater speed and efficiency throughout the process – from onboarding to care selection to payment. The traditional aged care provider model lacked flexibility, control, and transparency. Home Care Package participants often paid large administrative costs that were not clearly communicated up front. HomeMade wanted to change the game for the people who were supposed to benefit from the program in the first place.

The company sought a business application to manage care packages that serve customers and providers alike but did not find off-the-shelf solution that enabled the agile, adaptable approach needed to design and develop a customer portal that’s intuitive and user-friendly. It also needed a solution that incorporates the ability to automate processes such as extracting document information and handling it appropriately and quickly.

Choosing SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) and Enterprise Automation suite has made processes faster and more efficient as well as more cost-effective. With partner Bourne Digital, part of Accenture, HomeMade designed, developed, and deployed a self-service portal for Home Care Package participants. User-friendly, flexible, and transparent, the portal supports its stakeholders: HomeMade’s customers, service providers, and the HomeMade team.

HomeMade used SAP BTP to accelerate rapid growth by automating workflow processes and document processing using SAP Build Process Automation and SAP AI Business Services. Taking a modular approach to composing new functionality, SAP Integration Suite helps provide the connectivity needed to innovate faster. With a single, robust solution to support integration across diverse and complex systems, including governments, banks, and other third-party software-as-a-service business applications, the agile development teams can incorporate access to relevant systems and workflows quickly and securely, as shown in the figure. Automated processes create a more efficient and valuable experience for customers and companies alike.

 HomeMade successfully reduced customer onboarding by 9 days, 10 times faster even with a personalized support plan, and reimbursement time is now 2 times faster.

According to Laura Westhorpe, General Manager, HomeMade, “HomeMade’s vision is to transform home care in Australia, and we are continuously building our capabilities – whether that’s teams, processes, or technology. Using SAP BTP has allowed us to create a solution that better supports older Australians in need of care and has given us an exciting and innovative platform that will help us grow.”

You can read the full story in HomeMade presentation for SAP Innovation Awards 2023. Bourne Digital and HomeMade hosted an SAP BTP Webinar on the HomeMade Portal solution: watch the video with Laura Westhorpe, General Manager, HomeMade, and Selim Ahmed, CEO & Founder of Bourne Digital.

In this example, you see that Enterprise Automation is already leveraging AI capabilities, with Document Information Extraction, an SAP Business AI service. Let’s go a bit deeper into these capabilities that we call Narrow AI.

Narrow AI capabilities for Enterprise Automation

4 years ago, we started integrated AI capabilities in Robotic Process Automation bots, working closely with our colleagues in the SAP AI Business Services team. In a blog post published 3 months ago, Pierre Col explained how AI entered the field of application development and process automation during the last years.

The main AI capabilities that can be leveraged by Enterprise Automation are:

Document Information Extraction

Document Information Extraction service allows an RPA bot to kind of understand a document, at least to extract data from PDFs. We have detailed tutorials explaining how it can be done using Templates or Pre-Trained AI Models. I also invite you to watch this Virtual Workshop “Automate Your Invoice Processing with SAP Build Process Automation”.

Data Attribute Recommendation

Data Attribute Recommendation service helps to classify entities such as products, stores, and users into multiple classes, using free text, numbers, and categories as input. Using machine learning to automate and speed up data management processes is reducing errors and manual efforts in data maintenance, also increasing data consistency and accuracy. You can watch this demo and learn from our tutorials on SAP Learning.

Third Party AI services

Later on we also integrated third party AI capabilities such as Google: in this SAP Community Call video titled “Hyper-automate with Google AI Services and SAP Build Process Automation” our experts Deval Khatri and Chaitanya Priya explained how to involve Google Document AI and Google Vision AI in task automations, and presented “Sales Order Creation in SAP S/4HANA Cloud using Google Workspace and Google Document AI – slides here.

Future of Enterprise Automation is AI-driven

We are convinced that AI, and now generative AI, will play a key role in Enterprise Automation’s future. We are working on new concepts that will allow our customers to further build their own AI agents, leveraging advanced methods with business AI providing context and content from their SAP applications and databases.

We have prepared a demo for SAP Sapphire that showcases what it could be in the near future.

In a second blog post that I will publish after SAP Sapphire, I will share this demo and more technical details on how Enterprise Automation will evolve… stay tuned!