The need for enterprise automation
Organizations recognize that automation has become an increasingly important competitive differentiator in the modern business landscape. While most stakeholders understand the importance and the benefits of automation, there remain several key challenges on the journey to the autonomous enterprise.
Automation projects often begin with replacing repetitive, manual tasks. For example, bots can mimic the keystrokes of people for common tasks like order entry. While these saved minutes translate to big impacts when repeated hundreds—or even thousands—of times, they still stop short.
What enterprise automation provides
While some business processes needing automation are easy to identify, others may be less obvious. Identifying the right business processes to automate for maximum benefit in the least amount of time can lead to a significant competitive advantage.
Organizations need tools to:
- Quickly and securely connect disparate systems – even ones without APIs – because you can’t automate what you can’t connect to.
- Map out existing processes to see where they can be simplified and automated, and to understand current performance as a baseline. This critical step in the automation journey helps build consensus across teams about priority areas for improvement. From there you can monitor and adjust for continuous improvement.
- Implement automation across the enterprise with technologies like workflow management, RPA, and business rules. Fusion teams of business experts and IT should collaborate to develop automations balancing security and governance with empowering business experts closest to their processes.
Most importantly, these solutions should work securely and work together.
Enterprise automation with SAP
That’s why we’re announcing here new functionality to enable enterprise automation with SAP– a low-code approach to identifying and then automating as many business and IT tasks as possible.
Enterprise Automation with SAP is the only solution that provides a complete and integrated set of tools required for process mining, automation, integration, and monitoring and optimization of your processes and workflows.
Enterprise automation with SAP lets our customers leverage best-in-class tools – SAP Integration Suite, SAP Signavio and SAP Build to quickly and easily gain insight into business processes and automate with the right tool for the right outcome. And these tools work seamlessly with your existing business applications--without added complexity.
SAP Integration Suite is an integration platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) with thousands of pre-built integrations, APIs, and connectors to SAP and non-SAP applications. It reduces complexity across on-premises and multi-cloud environments helping you achieve optimized end-to-end business processes.
SAP Signavio provides visibility into business processes, potential bottlenecks, root-cause analysis, and suggestions for improvement based on 200,000 industry benchmarks and best practices. A detailed understanding of inefficiencies helps organizations optimize and automate processes.
SAP Build is a low-code solution to create automations and apps with drag and drop ease. It includes pre-built automations and connectors for SAP and non-sap systems. Business experts can use SAP Build to rapidly address process inefficiencies.
Delivering enterprise automation
SAP customers already benefit from using SAP Build alongside SAP Integration Suite to integrate modern, API first, solutions alongside legacy systems (where they use RPA). And actions in SAP Build remove the complexity from APIs, so they can be used by business experts to easily connect low-code apps, processes and business sites to enterprise apps.
SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh is our solution for capturing high-scale business events from applications (you can see a comprehensive list of events in the Business Accelerator Hub). Announcing at Sapphire, business events can now trigger automations. Take the example of goods movement in SAP S/4HANA. SAP Build Process Automation can subscribe to SAP Advanced Event Mesh and listen for that event. When it occurs it can trigger a corresponding workflow, for example adding an approval step.
But that’s not the only automation we automate. SAP Signavio can help identify bottlenecks or areas for improvement. Now rules and thresholds can be set within Signavio to trigger remedies in SAP Build Process Automation. For example, in the Sapphire keynote we explored the common scenario of purchase requisitions that are missing a material code. When Signavio detects that a process is held up for this reason, it can initiate SAP Build Process Automation, which uses AI to search past purchase orders matching the description in the purchase requisition. When a match is found, it sends an email to the purchasing team, asking them to confirm the material code. At confirmation, the purchase order is created directly in SAP S/4HANA.
Given SAP’s leadership in Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Human Capital Management and Digital Supply Chain, only SAP can help you jumpstart your enterprise automation with hundreds of pre-built components and then track and benchmark your automation journey with hundreds of thousands of industry data points to better understand where you rank in your process transformation. This tracking and benchmarking is critical to reaching your industry best-practices faster and accelerating your journey towards your autonomous enterprise.
Learn more
I’d love to hear from you in the comments about your experience or plans with enterprise automation.
You can learn more about enterprise automation at sap.com/enterprise-automation or join me (virtually) July 27 to learn more.
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