SAP automation: uniting disparate systems with singular automations

SAP automation uses automation and AI to run business processes across multiple enterprise systems including SAP. You can automate processes that exist only within an SAP environment, or you can automate processes that spans SAP and multiple other environments.

SAP automation can refer to several different areas, including:

• SAP-to-SAP automation

• Multi-system automation

• Intelligent automation

SAP-to-SAP automation

SAP-to-SAP automation makes it easy to build workflows within an SAP-only environment. These automations simplify time-consuming, repetitive tasks within the SAP application ecosystem.

Multi-system automation

Most businesses rely on more than just SAP applications. Multi-system automation lets you automate more complex, multi-system processes, like employee onboarding, integrating SAP seamlessly with non-SAP systems. Multi-system automation is key if your goal is to develop a wider, more robust enterprise automation strategy.

Intelligent automation

Intelligent automation supercharges the capabilities of your SAP-to-SAP and multi-system automations. By incorporating AI, you can automate even more complex SAP-inclusive processes, like those that require document understanding, communications mining, or unstructured data extraction.

If you’re used to performing multi-system processes on your own, you know just how time-consuming they can be. You constantly need to switch back and forth between programs. Each interface is different, meaning you need to constantly adjust. And sometimes you might just forget some piece of information that you need to transfer from one to the other. Overall, it just feels clunky.

With automation and AI, you can cut out the mess:

• Complete more processes in less time

• Avoid mistakes and eliminate human error

• Create more opportunities for human employees to add value

By eliminating these tedious tasks, you can save costs through operational efficiencies and give more attention to the higher strategic priorities. Additionally, you can reinvest these cost savings into R&D and drive new AI-fueled growth and innovation. 

Automating SAP processes is not much different from automating other multi-system processes. You need to first determine which processes are best suited for automation, then you define and incorporate the automations.

Here's what an end-to-end customer AI-powered automation journey might look‌ like:

Step 1: Discovery

The first stage is process discovery, in which you identify your business processes and the steps that make them up. It is here that you determine the highest-ROI opportunities for continuous process optimization and automation. UiPath AI-powered technologies like task mining and communications mining can help in the identification process.

Step 2: Automation

Once you’ve identified the processes and sub-processes to automate, you can build the AI-powered automations. Leverage UiPath UI & API automation and Low-code development to quickly create automations and run them anywhere and everywhere.

Step 3: Expansion

Once you start automating one process and see the efficiency gains, you can expand and automate more complex cross-functional processes. Now imagine you’ve automated all SAP processes. You’re saving more time, completing more tasks, and being more productive than ever before. Essentially, the wider the net you cast, the greater the catch. And you can track these efficiencies and maintain continuous process optimization with UiPath real-time & trend analytics and UiPath continuous testing.

As mentioned at the top of the article, SAP software is widely used across both industries and departments. Therefore, the use cases for SAP automation are practically endless. Still, one common use case for SAP automation includes:

Order-to-cash process

The end-to-end order-to-cash process begins when the customer sends in an email with the signed purchase order. A UiPath robot watches the inbox and then extracts the contents of the attached purchase order into the system. It then alerts the account executive, who marks the deal as "closed won" in a CRM application.

The event of a closed and won opportunity triggers another robot which automatically enters the data into SAP, creates a sales order, and updates the information in any other required applications, like Microsoft Excel.

When performed manually, this order-to-cash process could involve multiple people, including a human to input the necessary data into the correct systems. The manual process could take many minutes or even hours to complete. Using automation, it completes in seconds. SAP automation enables business users to fulfill requests faster and with far greater accuracy, improving efficiency and generating a higher ROI.

The AI-powered UiPath Business Automation Platform empowers businesses to take advantage of the full benefits of SAP automation. With SAP and UiPath, you can:

• Unify your SAP and non-SAP processes

• Build larger, more complex automations

• Create more value throughout your organization

Additionally, with AI and ML, you can use real-time process insights to instantly discover test automation opportunities based on your SAP system usage.

It doesn’t matter if you use SAP across departments or for one single task. SAP automation from UiPath gives you the ability to automate exactly what you need, big or small, simple or complex. Discover more about how UiPath and SAP work better together.