Surge in AI-powered automation to gain a competitive edge
In today's digital age, companies are adapting to new business strategies that rely heavily on artificial intelligence to streamline their operations. While some businesses have invested in automation initiatives, many have a disjointed approach that fails to deliver the desired results. To overcome this issue, companies are now turning to Enterprise Automation - a complete solution that integrates AI-powered tools to model and automate business and IT processes. By adopting this approach, businesses can unify their heterogeneous landscape, monitor their processes, make continuous improvements, and achieve complete automation.
Background
Customer is a large American multinational Information Technology company that develops personal computers, printers and related supplies, and 3D printing-related solutions. The customer’s vision is to become an Intelligent Enterprise powered by SAP BTP.
Motivation: Optimize Business Processes and Lower Operational Costs
SAP Build Process Automation helps to rapidly address process inefficiencies by building AI-powered automation and extending applications using low-code solutions and pre-built content. It enables citizen developers to leverage process expertise without coding to build automation using drag-and-drop simplicity by combining workflow management, task automation, and AI in a single solution.
As part of their transformation initiatives customer consolidated siloed operations to improve their business processes through automation and artificial intelligence. As a first step, SAP Signavio Process Insights was used to obtain fast insights into their business processes. The tool identified bottlenecks and optimization opportunities using accelerators provided by SAP Build Products.
Key Business Challenges
- There are over 65K open Purchase Orders without any changes in SAP Ariba, which had to be cleaned up.
- Ensure process compliance, eliminate Risk exposure of Approved Open POs
- Compliance and avoidance of Risk exposure of over 1.9 billion un-invoiced spend
- Establish an Enterprise Platform for automating and improving business processes by citizen developers
MaxAttention Engagement
The SAP MaxAttention team was onboarded to analyze SAP Signavio Process Insights within their business processes and to identify any bottlenecks. Based on an objective assessment of their process performance indicators and process blockers, the team identified many Purchase Orders that had not been changed for over 18 months.
The SAP MaxAttention team was further engaged to assess and resolve existing integration issues by replicating purchase orders between SAP systems and developing automation to close open purchase orders based on business-defined criteria. The expectation from the customer was to quickly realize this automation to demonstrate the key capabilities of SAP Build Process Automation and establish it as a foundation for their citizen developer-centric automation.
Solution Architecture
Below is the architecture of “PO AutoClose” automation.
Process Flow
The following image illustrates the overall end-to-end flow of the productive solution Landscape:
Delivery Scope
Assessment of the functional scope
There were over 100K Purchase Orders in SAP Ariba out of which over 65K Purchase Orders were not changed in over 18 months.
Development of Automation project
Designed and developed hybrid automation involving SAP Ariba and SAP S/4HANA powered by SAP Build Process Automation. The automation can support attended as well as unattended execution. SAP MaxAttention team realized the PoC effectively in less than 3 weeks after the finalization of the functional scope.
Deployment to Production Support
The SAP MaxAttention team proposed an engagement model to safeguard the investment from the customer to deploy the PoC to production:
- Configured customer’s Ariba Procurement realm and Cloud Integration Gateway (CIG) portal to leverage the standard integration offered by SAP Ariba for updating the PO closure based on the implemented automation
- Supported customer in developing the strategy to identify the list of POs eligible for closure
Key Achievements
- Automated solution scalable to be used by the customer for all PO Closure going forward
- Advantage of having a quick low code, no code automation solution catering to digital transformation requirements but also helping to keep the S/4 Core clean.
- Ensures compliance, and eliminates Risk exposure of Approved Open POs
- Scalable to all payable processes enterprise-wide
Key Customer Outcomes
Contact persons for follow-up: Kiran Kola, Rohit Dwivedi, Victor Chan, Kalaimani Tamilarasu
SAP Build Product Management: Steven Jacobson, Andre Borchert
