The back office employee from the cloud

Numerous systems are usually involved in the execution of end-to-end business processes - ERP systems such as S/4 Hana play a central role. However, the automation possible with the systems is often not sufficient to achieve the greatest possible efficiency in the execution of the processes. This is because employees are usually left with repetitive tasks that are time-consuming and sometimes error-prone.

Prominent examples of this are the checking and maintenance of master data, data transfers from or to Microsoft Office applications, or the collection of data from the systems for reporting purposes, for example. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) can provide necessary relief here as a back-office worker from the cloud.

In this context, the software solution SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation (SAP Intelligent RPA) is increasingly becoming the focus of companies in order to overcome the system and media discontinuities that occur in a cost-efficient manner and to keep processes as stable as possible. SAP Intelligent RPA is a software solution hosted on the SAP Cloud Platform (SCP) that controls orchestrated interactions of graphical user interfaces as well as programming interfaces of the systems.

The central management of the automations takes place on this cloud service, which distributes the executions to local execution instances. This supports employees in their daily business processes. SAP Intelligent RPA can even take them away completely.

Thanks to the SAP Cloud Platform, integration into an existing SAP system landscape is extremely simple. After successful activation of the SAP Intelligent RPA service, any systems can be integrated into the automations. The recognition of the user interfaces of the systems is handled by connectors of the software solution.

These include all user interfaces from Microsoft Office applications to web applications and SAP GUI interfaces. Especially in the integration with S/4, numerous predefined automations are provided by SAP, which also facilitates the creation of automation.

The greatest potential benefits of using SAP Intelligent RPA lie in costs, quality and time. Compared to many conventional process automation solutions, automations based on SAP Intelligent RPA can be implemented more easily and thus cause lower costs. The concrete savings potential of an automation can be measured in saved man-days, which are eliminated for manual processing.

The manual processing of repetitive tasks is prone to errors. Here, automation that has been adequately implemented can eliminate the possible processing errors. For critical processes, however, the automation should be sufficiently tested to avoid systematic errors of the automation and to achieve an increase in quality.

The time savings that are achieved through automation are usually also synonymous with the following savings in process costs due to the process processing time saved. In addition to the process time saved, increases in processing speed can also result, which also leads to advantages.

At the same time, it is equally possible to execute processes without any time delay, which brings a further speed advantage in addition to the concrete process execution. It can be assumed that the processing time saved leads to an increase in productivity instead of a reduction in jobs.

SAP Intelligent RPA makes an important contribution to being able to carry out business processes in an integrative and automated manner across multiple systems. Manual, repetitive activities are ideal for automation. In most cases, employees are too highly qualified for these activities. In addition, careless errors easily occur due to manual processing, which can be eliminated by adequate automation.