SAP Best Practices for Intelligent Automation for SAP Business ByDesign

[SimonaM]

The small, monotonous, time-consuming, administrative tasks that never seem to end. Invoices, purchase orders, travel expenses, proof of deliveries. These documents normally end up in your inbox as PDFs or on your desk as papers. Then you must open, read-thru, and manually input all that data into your ERP. But what if you didn’t have to? Do you remember our “Hands-Free ERP for SME” discussion from Intelligent Business Document Processing: Blockbuster or Netflix?

Now SAP Best Practices for Intelligent Automation for ByDesign give you access to use out of box or adapt to your needs the first wave of automation bots and with one click, to get your own SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation application with 2 licenses per customer embedded at no extra costs, in order to build and run your own attended or unattended automation scenarios

You may probably wonder what the SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation is. That’s simple: your employee must perform every day repetitive and time consuming: downloading and classifying all attachments from your mailbox before processing them, creating Sales Orders from Purchase Orders received from customers or simply refreshing all their excel reports with fresh data before using them.

It may seam trivial at first sight but if you transform the seconds spent for each operation in minutes spent per day and hours spent per months and you multiply with the number of employees you have, you definitively realize that these tasks take a lot of time (and money) which could be spent on other activities relevant for your business. Here, the Intelligent Robotic Automation comes into the game, taking over these repetitive tasks and freeing up the hands of employee. Soon you realize that not only the job is done, but thanks to automation, the job is done more accurate with less manual mistakes as it is done by the bot.

This is in a nutshell, but in details every SAP Business ByDesign customer may:

• use up 1 block of 1 unattended concurrent session and 1 block of 10 attended concurrent sessions of SAP Intelligent RPA as a service of SAP Business ByDesign for no additional fee (see Additional Licensing Implications under SAP Help)

• use any of provided by SAP Best Practices bots out of box with no additional development or integration work (see the SAP IRPA Store)

• modify any of provided by SAP Best Practices bots and adjust them to customer specific needs with minimal amount of effort

• Create brand new bots tailored to their custom needs for the areas where automation will bring the highest value.

With the release of SAP Business ByDesign 2108, we are providing you on SAP IRPA Store the first 6 best practices bot templates available out of box and ready to implement in minutes:

• Business Document Extraction from E-Mail (1x1)

• Proof of Delivery Note Upload in the Outbound Delivery (1S1)

• Schedule Report Refresh (1X2)

• Supplier Invoice Upload for Intelligent Invoice Scanning (1R1)

• Sales Order Creation from Customer's Purchase Order (1C1)

• Account Master Data Enrichment for Document Information Extraction 1C1 (1C2)

 

How to start?

There are a few steps you will need to conduct in the system to see new capabilities available:

1. Provisioning of SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation, please refer to our guide available at: SAP Help for SAP Business ByDesign – Provisioning for IRPA and see this video.
   In a nutshell: To enable Intelligent Robotic Process Automation in your SAP Business ByDesign tenant, you will need to change to scoping of your SAP Business ByDesign implementation. By doing this a new SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation Factory tenant will be automatically provided to you

1. Add users who should run bots into your Identity Authorization Service, to do so please refer to our guide available at: SAP Help for SAP Business ByDesign – Provisioning for IRPA and see videoIn a nutshell: Each user who would like to use bots, need to be added by the administrator on the Identity Authorization Service.

1. Download a Desktop Agent from ByDesign Download Center and install it on the machine (click here for installation details) where you will be running bots and then register the Desktop Tenant as explained here

In a nutshell: Desktop Agent is an application which resides on your Windows machine and allows to execute bots. The bots are automatically assigned to a specific agent via the SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation Factory

4. Login to your SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation FactoryIn a nutshell: SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation Factory is a center of command, where administrator can configure, schedule, and monitor execution of bot or farm of bots running of various machines.

4. Enter the SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation Store to acquire SAP Best Practices bot templates for SAP Business ByDesign. Please note that each bot available in the store is equipped with three documents (additional documentation and enablement videos for each bot can be found under: SAP Help for SAP Business ByDesign – How to Work with SAP Best Practices for Intelligent Automation ...)
   
   
   1. Business case – describing the business purpose of the bot.
   
   
   1. Technical specification – describing the setup of the bot and the technical process behind.
   
   
   1. Test scenarios – describing on how to perform test of the bot on your environment.
   
   
   

4. Configure bots (please refer to our guide available at: SAP Help for SAP Business ByDesign – How to Configure and Orchestrate your IRPA Cloud Factory and see this video)
   In a nutshell: each bot needs to be configured based on information provided in the Technical Specification, usually there are two configuration entries:
   
   
   1. Configuration of the bot in the SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation Factory. Here usually we are providing technical parameters, such as Tenant URL, URL of the Document Information Extraction services, User credentials, etc.
   
   
   1. Configuration of the bot on the Windows Machine are usually stored in the excel file with predefine structure. This configuration files usually contains certain parameters which specifies behavior on particular machine, this can be filtering conditions for e-mails, type of documents which should be processed, setup of specific rules which bot should considering while processing.
   
   
   

4. Execute bots.
   The bots might be executed in two ways:
   
   
   1. Triggered manually from the SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation Factory
   
   
   1. Scheduled for automatic execution based on the predefined timetable also in the SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation Factory
   
   
   

 

Upon fulfilling the above, you are ready to run your automation.

 

We are aware that this is a completely new solution available for SAP Business ByDesign and some learning will be required at the beginning, therefore below you may find a list of interesting training materials which are available from SAP:

OpenSAP courses:

• SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation in a Nutshell

• What’s New with Bot Building in SAP Intelligent RPA

• Enter Next-Level Bot Building with SAP Intelligent RPA 2.0

Additional helpful links and documentation you can find on Useful Links from SAP Help Page

 

At SAP we hope that provided innovation will help you to run your business better. SAP Business ByDesign side by side with SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation are starting a new journey allowing companies to optimize and automate processes and in spent most valuable resources on most valuable tasks, rather all these repetitive things which needs to be done precisely on regular basis.

Good luck and in case of questions on this blog, Maciej Fuchs, Product Manager for Intelligent Automation for SAP Business ByDesign and I will be happy to answer your questions.

UPDATE: for the latest information on this topic please read 2111 release of Intelligent Automation for SAP Business ByDesign includes Document Information Extra...

[Yannick1]

Dear Simona,

I have a question about the licenses. What is included in one license? Can I run all the 6 Bots with one license or is one license needed to run 1 Bot?

Thanks in advance!

Kind Regards

Yannick

[SimonaM]

Hi Yannick, please read the information provided under Additional Licenses page in SAP Help. If you scroll down in that page you will find the next examples:

• 
  

  You can run as many bots as you want in 24 hours as long as they are scheduled one after the other. However, you cannot run 2 bots scheduled in parallel (not even if one starts at a later point in time, while the first one is still in execution)

  
  


• 
  

  If 20 users want to run attended bots, they can do it, but only 10 users can run in parallel at one point-in-time. If 10 users are already running bots in attended mode at 10 o’clock and the 11th user will try running his bot at the same point-in-time, an error will occur, but if he tries again once one of the others has been finished (so only 9 users are actively running attended bots), then he will run it successfully.

  
  

https://help.sap.com/viewer/2754875d2d2a403f95e58a41a9c7d6de/2108/en-US/1309df22a08a4143b1570ef1261d...

[alex_sinel]

Dear Simona.

WOW!!! Great-great thanks for your efforts to bring such promising opportunities up!

Best regards,

Alex

[former_member774291]

I loved your response and loved Yannick's question. Learned a lot, thank you!

[former_member774291]

Hi Simona,

I have a few questions:

1. Could you please explain what "1 block of an unattended concurrent session and 1 block of 10 attended concurrent sessions of SAP IRPA" means in a simpler language, please?


2. What do 1x1, 1S1, 1C1, 1R1 in the brackets mean? Are they just "serial numbers" of the particular bot, as in an SKU number?

By the way, since I couldn't speed up the video, and time is money, as I noted in one of my previous comments, I only skimmed through it, but it is so enjoyable and helpful to see things applied in practice.

Thank you for your help in advance!

 

[SimonaM]

I believe you found the answer of your first question in my previous replay but in case you need more information see the SAP Help page: https://help.sap.com/viewer/2754875d2d2a403f95e58a41a9c7d6de/2108/en-US/1309df22a08a4143b1570ef1261d...

The codes are only unique identifier for each bot to easily point to them in Support Tickets or othe conversations.

[former_member774291]

I might have, but it remains difficult to navigate the wording. To be honest, I was hoping for a very straightforward to the point answer.

I guess I'll find the answer sometime in the future. One of my mentors always repeats, the right knowledge comes to you when you're ready. Seems I am not ready yet to solve some of the riddles I asked about.

[richardbourne]

Hi,

Would you be able to put link in here directing us to the price list for extra BYD bots. We have plenty of use case in which parallel bots are require.

 

Many thanks

 

Richard

[SimonaM]

HI Richard, Here is the link from SAP Store for IRPA which provides the list price for this product. However as you know there are many commercialization channels with different types of discounts and conditions for different stakeholders and usage behaviours (partners sell, partner build, CPEA, Pay-as-you-Go, etc). Those one you need to discuss your your Account Executive.

[richardbourne]

Thank you Simona

[SimonaM]

The cool thing is that recently IRPA licence is incorporating also unlimited use of Document Information Extraction from AI Business Services at no extra cost. That's also including templating from what I know. So you may let your imagination wild in terms of possible use cases 🙂

[richardbourne]

This is great. Thank you.

[richardbourne]

If i'm using a BYD automation to extract documents from email (unattended and scheduled) then I set up Supplier Invoice Upload to BYD (unattended and scheduled) at a different time am I correct in thinking that the service is running one bot at a time so that's included as standard?

 

Can you also scheduled a automation to start once a predecessor has finished?

[SimonaM]

Sure, if you schedule the bots one after other you can run it in the included licences. Either more you can run up to 10 attended bots (by 10 users) and in the same time another scheduled (because 1 attended and 1 unattended concurrent sessions are included). But you can't run 2 scheduled bots at the same time.

[SimonaM]

Also see the demo included in the Technical Specifications of the SO creation from PO extraction. That is showing exactly this scenario where you schedule first the download bot and then a bit later the scanning and upload bot will start. You may schedule as many bots as you can in 24 hours as long as they don't overlap.

[former_member783895]

Hi Simona

How can I move a client from a IRPA trial to a production tenant?

 

Thanks

 

Andrew

[SimonaM]

Hi Andrew, the Unit 3 or our OpenSAP course for the Intelligent Automation for SAP Business ByDesign explains this. I would higly recommend you to actually attend the entire course if it's first time for your company dealing with IRPA for your customers. Of course in order to activate you IRPA productive license you need to have a valid ByDesign license as described in the SAP Help page - Additional licensing implications.