Robotic Process Automation

A week after the DSAG annual congress, one of my employees stormed into my office and asked, gasping for breath, whether we were using Blackline applications in combination with SAP somewhere in the group.

I didn't have to think about that for long: three years ago, I was on a study trip to California with CIO colleagues, and in addition to the obligatory appointments in so-called Silicon Valley, we also visited Blackline in Los Angeles.

This company offers as cloud computing probably the most important and interesting addition to SAP's financials. Simply put, it is about continuous, automated, highly intelligent and transparent account reconciliation. The system impresses with its efficiency, which is probably the biggest asset in reconciliation work.

Yes, I said to my co-worker, and "you should know, I sent you to a blackline congress in London two years ago". He nodded and said that this trip to London was just the beginning of a very funny story.

In London, he said, he met an SAP employee who was now giving a presentation on new financial functions in S/4 at the DSAG annual congress in Bremen.

For my colleague, Bremen was déjà vu: what Blackline presented in London two years ago, the same SAP employee now showed in Bremen as his own performance. SAP likes to partner to experience and learn new things. After all, they have very skilled developers on hand who can quickly implement what they have learned.

Intellectual property is dangerous territory. For me, however, another trend is emerging here that is much more significant for the SAP community: How much longer will we be able to follow the ERP suite mindset?

Whether the suite is now called S/7, S/4 or S/1 - with or without Hana - is irrelevant. It is a matter of a fundamental decision on the direction to take:

Will SAP gradually renew the ERP core and save S/4 as a future, holistic ERP suite or will it be best-of-breed from 2025 with S/4 Simple Finance incl. acquired Blackline, S/4 Logistics, Leonardo with Machine Learning, IoT and Blockchain as well as all other SAP cloud offerings.

SAP's offering already consists of more individual parts than an existing customer might like. The price list has become unmanageable and ERP functions can now be found not only in S/7 and S/4, but also in Hybris, Concur, Leonardo, SuccessFactors, Fieldglass and Ariba.

When you have finally found what you are looking for, the question of integration arises: NetWeaver PI, SAP Cloud Platform, Hana, Vora or Kafka? Many roads lead to Rome - but not all roads are straightforward and safe!

As CIO, I have responsibilities and have to stick to my budget. What could hold the building blocks of the SAP world together? What would need to be done if Hana, Spark, Hadoop, OpenStack, Azure, BW/4, S/4, Leonardo, Vora, Kafka, Simple Finance, HEC, and HCP are "just" best-of-breed and not an SAP suite? Is there even a bracket for best-of-breed? For example, what connects Simple Finance and blockchain? One answer could be Robotic Process Automation.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a new way of automating business processes. Software robots are able to recognize best practice processes, analyze them, optimize them - then learn and subsequently automate them.

I don't yet know where this journey will lead, but perhaps RPA can become a bracket for best-of-breed. And what will our SAP do then? It is hard to imagine SAP becoming a supplier of best-of-breed building blocks.

But the topic of integration and automation will not be taken out of their hands. So it can only be a matter of days before SAP begins to occupy the topic of "Robotic Process Automation" for itself.

SAP will probably call it something else, just as it once called ESA, enterprise service architecture, while the whole IT world was talking about SOA. But SAP will have to address the issue of RPA or lose its supremacy in the ERP market. Blackline is currently being copied, but it remains to be seen whether this will also be successful with RPA.