SAP Build Process Automation - S/4 HANA x ECC (6.0)

[LeandroRibeiro]

Hello Build community,

I have been participating in some discussions regarding the implementation of S/4 Hana in a Brazilian utility company. One of the identified significant improvement for the company would be to promote the users' ability to automate processes through SAP Build Process Automation.

The company currently has an ECC (6.0) and several other systems communicating with each other.

A recurring question revolves around the potential differences (functionalities, efforts required for creation and integration, etc.) in the performance of SAP Build Process Automation when using S/4 HANA compared to ECC. In other words, what could they achieve (or achieve more efficiently) with SAP Build Process Automation using S/4 Hana instead of ECC?

Thank you.

[Ivan-Mirisola · Accepted solution]

Hi leandroamr,

It doesn't really matter which systems the BPA is connecting to but rather the UI technology that it is target at.

Both ECC and S/4HANA are capable of running Fiori Apps or Dynpro Transactions. And that's were automation differs radically in terms of how you create the automation scripts. BPA has modules for different UI technologies (i.e: Excel, SAP Gui, Outlook, etc). When your automation target has a specific module, it inspects the UI's handle and looks for screen components that matches the ones you are looking for and once it finds it, it is able to interact with it programmatically. However, when you design a bot script for a Dynpro with SAP Gui Module, it shouldn't work for any Web Application and vice-versa. So, you could develop a single bot for a Fiori App which could be used by an ECC system as well as for an S/4HANA system - just as long as the UI components you want matched exist on both app versions.

You can also design a bot that interacts with a legacy application that can't be integrated with any specific module, you can use the screen capture approach. However, the screen approach has its caveats - such as different screen resolution between developer's screen and agent's screen. When this happens, the expected screen wouldn't be exactly the same and the engine will not be able to identify UI elements - thus it won't work at all.

As you can see, it highly depends on the UI technology being used and not the actual system release.

Please read some more here:

https://blogs.sap.com/2020/12/15/sap-intelligent-robotic-process-automation-2.0-best-practices-serie...

Best regards,
Ivan

[LeandroRibeiro · Accepted solution]

Thank very much ivan.mirisola .

Kind regards