As customer demands and operational needs increase while talent resources continue to fall short, businesses need a way to innovate faster with less. At SAP TechEd, we launched SAP Build, a low-code tool that enables everyone to easily create and augment enterprise applications, automate processes, and design business sites with drag-and-drop simplicity.
Now, to help customers jump-start their automation programs, we’re thrilled to include a new starter pack of SAP Build Process Automation in the public edition of SAP S/4HANA Cloud.
The SAP Build Process Automation solution integrates seamlessly with SAP S/4HANA Cloud to improve the processes that are already running by decreasing processing times, improving service quality, and reducing manual errors.
As a low-code solution in the SAP Build portfolio, it gives the business experts closest to SAP S/4HANA Cloud tasks the ability to build processes and approvals, automate routine tasks with robotic process automation (RPA), and leverage built-in artificial intelligence (AI) for automatic data extraction of PDFs, excels, and more.
Automation Starter Pack with RISE with SAP
The starter pack of SAP Build Process Automation is included with RISE with SAP for S/4HANA Cloud, public edition at no additional cost. This offer is intended to help organizations jump-start their automation journey and drive meaningful collaboration between process experts and IT users. The starter pack includes:
- Two advanced users who can create workflows and build automations
- Twenty standard users who can initiate and participate in workflows created by the advanced user
- One unattended automation that can be triggered without human intervention
How SAP S/4HANA Cloud Customers Benefit from SAP Build Process Automation
SAP Build Process Automation enables SAP S/4HANA Cloud customers to reduce costs, eliminate manual errors, improve customer satisfaction, leverage KPI process dashboards to make important decisions, and optimize processes even when no APIs are available.
Jonathan Rhodes, vice president of Solution Management for SAP Cloud ERP, shares more:
Q: How do you see automation impacting enterprise resource planning (ERP) customers?
A: Any time you can reduce manual intervention across the core business processes that sit in ERP you’re saving time and money. Increased efficiency at the core of your business: that’s the simple answer. But I think what’s most exciting about SAP Build Process Automation is that it puts the power of automation in the hands of the business users themselves. They’re the ones who work with the processes day in and day out, and they’re the ones most likely to know where the automation potential lies. Empowering employees across every function of your business to make things run smoother is the compelling story behind SAP Build Process Automation.
Q: Can you share a customer example?
A: One of our first customers to adopt process automation with SAP S/4HANA Cloud is Rehau, a developer and manufacturer of innovative polymer-based solutions for automotive, construction, and other industries. Rehau wanted to simplify its supplier invoice processes and achieve greater process efficiency. With process automation, Rehau’s system:
- Automatically recognizes and extracts information from vendor invoices received via email
- Leverages machine learning to identify and predict supplier account details, such as company code, cost center, supplier, tax code, etc., based on the extracted information
- Uses RPA to automate the creation of supplier invoice documents in SAP S/4HANA Cloud
By automating the upload and processing of thousands of finance and manufacturing documents per month in SAP S/4HANA Cloud, process automation has enabled Rehau to reduce days of manual work to mere minutes.
Q: What about customers that are just beginning their move to cloud ERP?
A: The first step in a successful journey to cloud ERP is to take a hard look at business processes. Customers that have chosen S/4HANA Cloud, public edition — our ready-to-run cloud ERP that delivers the latest industry best practices and continuous innovation — have determined that having their ERP systems run standard business processes brings the most value to their business. The addition of SAP Build Process Automation gives these customers the ability to take those standard business processes to the next level of automation.
To jump-start automation with SAP Build Process Automation, customers have access to hundreds of free, pre-built automation features and tools designed specifically for SAP S/4HANA Cloud. Our most common pre-built bot is one that automates the creation of sales orders from Excel. The bot scans the user’s inbox for sales order attachments and extracts the necessary data to create a sales order in SAP S/4HANA Cloud. Once complete, the bot notifies the appropriate sales team.
The new starter pack is a great way to start your automation journey and improve the processes that are already running. Learn more through the following resources:
- Learn how to provision your automation starter pack
- Watch a click-through demo of an invoicing scenario for SAP S/4HANA
- Check out the e-book to explore top automation use cases
Angela Harvey is vice president of Marketing and Solution Management for SAP Build Process Automation.