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SimonaM
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert
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The small, monotonous, time-consuming, administrative tasks that never seem to end. Invoices, purchase orders, travel expenses, proof of deliveries. These documents normally end up in your inbox as PDFs or on your desk as papers. Then you must open, read-thru, and manually input all that data into your ERP. But what if you didn’t have to? Do you remember our “Hands-Free ERP for SME” discussion from Intelligent Business Document Processing: Blockbuster or Netflix?

Now SAP Best Practices for Intelligent Automation for ByDesign give you access to use out of box or adapt to your needs the first wave of automation bots and with one click, to get your own SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation application with 2 licenses per customer embedded at no extra costs, in order to build and run your own attended or unattended automation scenarios

You may probably wonder what the SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation is. That’s simple: your employee must perform every day repetitive and time consuming: downloading and classifying all attachments from your mailbox before processing them, creating Sales Orders from Purchase Orders received from customers or simply refreshing all their excel reports with fresh data before using them.

 


It may seam trivial at first sight but if you transform the seconds spent for each operation in minutes spent per day and hours spent per months and you multiply with the number of employees you have, you definitively realize that these tasks take a lot of time (and money) which could be spent on other activities relevant for your business. Here, the Intelligent Robotic Automation comes into the game, taking over these repetitive tasks and freeing up the hands of employee. Soon you realize that not only the job is done, but thanks to automation, the job is done more accurate with less manual mistakes as it is done by the bot.

This is in a nutshell, but in details every SAP Business ByDesign customer may:

 

    • use any of provided by SAP Best Practices bots out of box with no additional development or integration work (see the SAP IRPA Store)

 

    • modify any of provided by SAP Best Practices bots and adjust them to customer specific needs with minimal amount of effort

 

    • Create brand new bots tailored to their custom needs for the areas where automation will bring the highest value.



With the release of SAP Business ByDesign 2108, we are providing you on SAP IRPA Store the first 6 best practices bot templates available out of box and ready to implement in minutes:

    • Business Document Extraction from E-Mail (1x1)

 

    • Proof of Delivery Note Upload in the Outbound Delivery (1S1)

 

    • Schedule Report Refresh (1X2)

 

    • Supplier Invoice Upload for Intelligent Invoice Scanning (1R1)

 

    • Sales Order Creation from Customer's Purchase Order (1C1)

 

    • Account Master Data Enrichment for Document Information Extraction 1C1 (1C2)



 

How to start?

There are a few steps you will need to conduct in the system to see new capabilities available:

    1. Provisioning of SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation, please refer to our guide available at: SAP Help for SAP Business ByDesign – Provisioning for IRPA and see this video.
      In a nutshell: To enable Intelligent Robotic Process Automation in your SAP Business ByDesign tenant, you will need to change to scoping of your SAP Business ByDesign implementation. By doing this a new SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation Factory tenant will be automatically provided to you

 

    1. Add users who should run bots into your Identity Authorization Service, to do so please refer to our guide available at: SAP Help for SAP Business ByDesign – Provisioning for IRPA and see videoIn a nutshell: Each user who would like to use bots, need to be added by the administrator on the Identity Authorization Service.

 

    1. Download a Desktop Agent from ByDesign Download Center and install it on the machine (click here for installation details) where you will be running bots and then register the Desktop Tenant as explained here



In a nutshell: Desktop Agent is an application which resides on your Windows machine and allows to execute bots. The bots are automatically assigned to a specific agent via the SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation Factory

    1. Login to your SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation FactoryIn a nutshell: SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation Factory is a center of command, where administrator can configure, schedule, and monitor execution of bot or farm of bots running of various machines.

 

    1. Enter the SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation Store to acquire SAP Best Practices bot templates for SAP Business ByDesign. Please note that each bot available in the store is equipped with three documents (additional documentation and enablement videos for each bot can be found under: SAP Help for SAP Business ByDesign – How to Work with SAP Best Practices for Intelligent Automation ...)

        1. Business case – describing the business purpose of the bot.

        1. Technical specification – describing the setup of the bot and the technical process behind.

        1. Test scenarios – describing on how to perform test of the bot on your environment.


 

    1. Configure bots (please refer to our guide available at: SAP Help for SAP Business ByDesign – How to Configure and Orchestrate your IRPA Cloud Factory and see this video)
      In a nutshell: each bot needs to be configured based on information provided in the Technical Specification, usually there are two configuration entries:

        1. Configuration of the bot in the SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation Factory. Here usually we are providing technical parameters, such as Tenant URL, URL of the Document Information Extraction services, User credentials, etc.

        1. Configuration of the bot on the Windows Machine are usually stored in the excel file with predefine structure. This configuration files usually contains certain parameters which specifies behavior on particular machine, this can be filtering conditions for e-mails, type of documents which should be processed, setup of specific rules which bot should considering while processing.


 

    1. Execute bots.
      The bots might be executed in two ways:

        1. Triggered manually from the SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation Factory

        1. Scheduled for automatic execution based on the predefined timetable also in the SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation Factory




 

Upon fulfilling the above, you are ready to run your automation.

 

We are aware that this is a completely new solution available for SAP Business ByDesign and some learning will be required at the beginning, therefore below you may find a list of interesting training materials which are available from SAP:

OpenSAP courses:

 

 



Additional helpful links and documentation you can find on Useful Links from SAP Help Page

 

At SAP we hope that provided innovation will help you to run your business better. SAP Business ByDesign side by side with SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation are starting a new journey allowing companies to optimize and automate processes and in spent most valuable resources on most valuable tasks, rather all these repetitive things which needs to be done precisely on regular basis.

Good luck and in case of questions on this blog, Maciej Fuchs, Product Manager for Intelligent Automation for SAP Business ByDesign and I will be happy to answer your questions.

UPDATE: for the latest information on this topic please read 2111 release of Intelligent Automation for SAP Business ByDesign includes Document Information Extra...


 

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