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How to get started with Enterprise Automation

Manuel_Namyslo
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert
‎01-29-2024 12:54 PM

Thanks @EvgeniyGorbunov for co-authoring this whitepaper 🙂

If your organization is already looking into process automaton capabilities within SAP, you have probably encountered the term Enterprise Automation and wonder how to use it to your advantage. There is certainly not a shortage of content around this topic online, where you can find demo videos, tutorials or technical documentation – but since Enterprise Automation includes many domains of process excellence of a company, one can get easily lost in the jungle of information. That’s why we came up with this whitepaper on “how to get started with Enterprise Automation” to provide a comprehensive guide to integrate applications, discover inefficiencies and automate processes across heterogenous environments.

SAP offers a unique and comprehensive AI-powered solution to integrate applications, discover process inefficiencies, and automate processes across heterogeneous enterprise environments.

This document will show you how to identify the right use-cases to leverage your highest automation potential, how to activate the relevant components and where to find the latest news and relevant assets on Enterprise Automation with SAP. The target audience is anyone that engages in process excellence within your organization. It can used by following target audiences:

  • The IT-department or system integrators which make sure that all processes are integrated to the respective system landscape.
  • It can be used by the business unit or citizen developers who are close to the actual use-case and want to engage in the ideation- or development-process.
  • Or it can also be used by system-administrators, process owners or CoE department to bring lifecycle management and governance into the picture.

 

1. What is Enterprise Automation?

 

Enterprise Automation L2 (1) (1).jpg

 

But first we need to get a better idea on what is Enterprise Automation exactly and why should you consider implementing it? - Organizations recognize that automation has become an increasingly important competitive differentiator in the modern business landscape. While most stakeholders understand the importance and the benefits of automation, there remain several key challenges on the journey to the autonomous enterprise. Enterprise Automation with SAP is the only solution that provides a complete and integrated set of tools required for process mining, automation, integration, and monitoring and optimization of your processes and workflows.

Enterprise automation with SAP lets our customers leverage best-in-class tools – SAP Integration Suite, SAP Signavio and SAP Build to quickly and easily gain insight into business processes and automate with the right tool for the right outcome. And these tools work seamlessly with your existing business applications–without added complexity.

  • SAP Integration Suite is an integration platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) with thousands of pre-built integrations, APIs, and connectors to SAP and non-SAP applications. It reduces complexity across on-premises and multi-cloud environments helping you achieve optimized end-to-end business processes.
  • SAP Signavio provides visibility into business processes, potential bottlenecks, root-cause analysis, and suggestions for improvement based on 200,000 industry benchmarks and best practices. A detailed understanding of inefficiencies helps organizations optimize and automate processes.
  • SAP Build is a low-code solution to create automations and apps with drag and drop ease. It includes pre-built automations and connectors for SAP and non-sap systems. Business experts can use SAP Build to rapidly address process inefficiencies.

Here you can see an overview about the key services and capabilities, which are included:

Enterprise eL2 (1) (1).jpg

Customers are already succeeding with Enterprise Automation to achieve actual business outcome. Here you can review some reference stories of our customers Avaya Inc., Blue Diamond Growers and Mahindra & Mahindra Limited. These customers leverage SAP Build in combination with SAP Integration Suite and SAP Signavio to automate their business processes holistically.

 

2. Use-Cases and pre-built content

The easiest way to start with Enterprise Automation with SAP is to use pre-built content. Content provides technical artifacts, which you can implement, and best-practices and recommendations which come directly from SAP’s development team and partners. You can find our content here:

SAP Build – Pre-built content

SAP prioritizes pre-built content by customer feedback and practice. For instance, you can start with financial processes, where we can find a lot of common scenarios like invoice processing, financial closing general ledger posting and interaction with many other document types. But you don’t have to look for a long time to find other areas of improvement in End-to-End process streams like Order-to-Cash, Procure-to-Pay, Plan-to-Produce or Hire-to-Retire. Here we see very common demands in streamlining sales orders creation, invoice processing without purchase order, manage credit-limit block on sales order and many more. There are three common themes for processes worth automating:

  • Manual & repetitive: The current process involves mundane and repetitive activities, making people bethe glue between SAP, non-SAP and local file-systems like Excel, PDF and Word.
  • High volume: Its not wise to start your automation journey with a process that happens once or twice a year. You should focus on frequent scenarios. guaranting a fast ROI
  • Multiple systems: Its rarely the case that an end-to-end scenario like Order-to-Cash is only happens in one single SAP instance. Usually there are multiple SAP systems involved, non-SAP application or various document types. With our integration capabilities you can easily integrate any process to a complex IT-landscape.

In this blog-post series, you can also get a better understanding how to use Enterprise Automation for End-to-End scenarios:

 

 

Here you can also find some examples of what such a use-cases can look like and what type of benefit you can achieve:

If you still struggle to identify the right use-case to start with, we recommend using SAP Signavio Process Insights. SAP Signavio Process Insights is a process analytics solution that helps you rapidly discover areas for improvement and automation within your SAP business processes. Here you will receive an excellent overview about your entire process landscape and end-to-end scenarios. You also get direct recommendations of pre-build content from SAP Build which maps to your individual requirements. Once, identified, this process content can be activated and implemented to resolve this issue, which will be reflected in the Signavio Process Insights report.

Before we close this chapter, let’s have a closer look to the SAP Business Accelerator Hub, since it not only includes pre-built content coming from SAP Build but also valuable integration content that can be leveraged within SAP Integration Suite. Basically, the SAP Business Accelerator Hub is a great place to explore, discover and learn more about line-of-business (like Hire-to-Retire, Lead-to-Cash or Source-to-Pay) and industry-specific content that is designed to enhance SAP applications like SAP ECC, SAP S/4HANA Cloud, SAP SuccessFactors, SAP Ariba, SAP Concur and more. The SAP Business Accelerator Hub has something for everyone. With years of experience and industry expertise, the pre-built content is proven to provide value across solutions and industries. Here you will find:

  • More than 3000 pre-built integration scenarios
  • Over 300 business events to initiate processes based on event-based communication
  • More than 200 connectors to SAP and non-SAP applications
  • And more than 1200 automation content

Go to the SAP Business Accelerator Hub now and take a look on all the integration- and process-content coming from SAP and our trusted partners:

 

Screenshot 2024-01-26 162149.png

 

3. Clean Core & SAP S/4HANA-Transformation

 Enterprise Automation with SAP is an agnostic approach, which can be used cross-industry, cross-LoB and cross-technologies. But one of the most common use-cases to use Enterprise Automation is to accelerate your transformation from SAP ECC to SAP S/4HANA and help you maintain a clean core. And since “clean core” it is deeply connected to the concept of Extensibility, let’s first define that word:

Extensibility is a functionality added to standard software, which extends it to address organizational needs that are not met by standard

With the rise of new technologies, especially in a cloud and hybrid environment it can quickly become a complex challenge to navigate. And the mission of the SAP Business Technology Platform in general, is enabling you to build cloud ready and future proof architectures of your extensions in a clean core fashion.  Let’s talk about Clean Core Strategy a little bit more: with the move to the cloud, we aim to decrease the adoption effort. That, of course, is supported by the decreasing effort for upgrades, feature deployments and the integration of cloud solutions. This can be achieved by having the transactional system unmodified and transparent, while developing extensions, like automations and integrations, on the scalable and trusted SAP Business Technology Platform.

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Historically ERP systems were heavily customized. Processes landscape can also be very specific and not maintained centrally and at scale. With the help of Enterprise Automation, we can not only support the migration effort, but also ensure the continuous process improvement after we move to the SAP S/4HANA. Enterprise Automation offers a huge set of capabilities to support your business processes, automations and integrations. also It supports your SAP S/4HANA transformation by identifying the best practices for business processes and enabling automations to help  migration – while supporting our day-to-day operations within SAP ECC and SAP S/4HANA.

The Plug & Gain approach from Signavio functions as the cornerstone to re-evaluate your process landscape by understanding the status-quo and identifying custom code that serves your unique business purpose. It can also give you a better understanding about processes that are not in use and can be consolidated during your transformation. Signavio then gives you recommendations and standardized capabilities in SAP S/4HANA (which you should consider using) or pre-build content, which can be found in the SAP Business Accelerator Hub. If neither of those scenarios applies to your custom code, you can still leverage the development tools of SAP Build to generate your custom extensions from scratch. While developing you custom extension you might want to consider SAP Integration Suite to make sure that your process or application is integrated to your hybrid IT-landscape – because you can’t automate what you can’t connect to.

Another great advantage, that helps you directly with your migration projects are pre-built RPA-Bots which automate the transition phase with activities like system-analysis, data-transfer and deployment & execution.

Screenshot 2024-01-26 162424.png

 To further explore how to extend your ERP while keeping its core clean with SAP BTP, here are a few resources that have been published recently here on SAP Community that I recommend reading or watching:

 

4. How to get started

4.1 Assess Your Situation

Now, the situation among customers can be different. It might be that you are starting from scratch, without process mining or process automation capabilities in place. Or you may already use certain solutions, e.g. that are able to perform RPA automations. In this case your entry point can be different.

Let’s look into the following common questions:

  • Are you using any process mining, automation or integration tools?
  • Are you using such solutions from SAP?
  • Do you have a visibility across your processes?
  • How do find which processes should be improved?
  • How do you implement the improvements?
  • How do you manage cross-systems connectivity?

Based on these, we can see three main patterns among our customers:

First pattern: Completely new to SAP Build Process Automation, SAP Signavio or Integration Suite

In this case you can start from any part of the circle. Enterprise Automation diagram is drawn as a circle for a reason. You can start at any point and then build on that. You should look for the most challenging part. Of course, change and improvement starts with the understanding. Hence If you would like to gain more insights into your processes and act based on this, you should look for SAP Signavio Transformation Suite to kick off the analysis. In case you are aware of the certain processes and understand the improvements to be done, you can proceed directly to start with SAP Build Process Automation. After addressing these specific processes, you can look at the bigger picture with SAP Signavio and find more improvement opportunities.

And whenever you are looking for the cross-system connectivity or event-driven architectures, you should start from the Integration Suite. What is important is that those can be combined, whenever that is required, afterwards to ensure end-to-end process transformation, improvement and integration.

Second pattern: Completely new to the Enterprise Automation by SAP but using third-party tools for RPA, LCNC-development or Process Mining. In this case it is particularly important to see the opportunity of connected end-to-end process improvement.

Say, if you are using RPA tool, you can perform tactical automations and scale, but it might be challenging to find new improvement opportunities due to the lack of process visibility. On the other hand- if you are in possession of the process mining tool, it might not be that easy to address all the findings by applying the relevant automations or integrations (e.g. trigger certain approval from or a bot to react to the threshold being exceeded). With the Enterprise Automation framework, SAP can offer end-to-end portfolio to directly connect your process insights to actions, be it a workflow, RPA bot, or integration scenario. It is important to highlight that we embrace an open ecosystem framework, where SAP Build Process Automation owns the process orchestration layer and 3rd party RPA tools can be used at various steps of the process execution.

Here are a few examples:

Third pattern: SAP Customer already using one or more Enterprise Automation solutions: SAP Build Process Automation, SAP Signavio or Integration Suite

SAP Customers, using one or more Enterprise Automation solutions, can benefit from the direct integrations and specific SAP-related product capabilities, provided by the listed solutions. Again, we can start from any part: process mining, process automation or integration, depending on the specific tasks. After we feel the need to extend the scope from mining to improvement, or combine automations with integrations, we can benefit from existing integration touchpoints between the products. Here are a few examples:

 

4.2 Governance Resource Center with SAP Build

Enterprise Automation with SAP is an excellent initiative to enforce a holistic approach for managing and automation business processes on a larger scale. But it also raises a lot of questions which can not only be addressed by technical functionality or software components. Having the right mindset and overarching strategy that affects both IT-department and business organization will deliver faster value, avoid shadow-IT, and ensure trust between business users, Process Owners and central IT. This will unavoidably lead you to the subject of proper Governance, Change Management and the establishment of a Digital Center of Excellence to address those issues:

  • On one hand, IT Organizations wants to ensure security and compliance for all the components of the IT landscape, from infrastructure to processes and integration scenarios. IT’s mission is to avoid so-called “shadow IT”, and to reduce risk of proliferation of dubious applications created by citizen developers.
  • On the other hand, citizen developers expect to work within a scalable governance framework appropriate for the use case risk level and their skill level, to have enough flexibility for development and scaling, and to benefit of enablement and support.

Finding the right balance between empowerment and control allows for successful low-code development while mitigating potential risks. That balance defines your governance model for a low-code based approach for process development.

In order to manage a comprehensive Governance concept, we provide the SAP Build Governance Resource Center. It is a one-stop resource hub that can greatly simplify your governance-related efforts: it provides a wealth of information, assets and practical templates designed for IT administrators, such as governance guides, a toolkit for building a citizen developer center of excellence business site, and the new Use Case Evaluator for SAP Build projects. Just go there and take over everything that will be off value for your organization!

 

Screenshot 2024-01-26 162819.png

 

Here are some additional resources that will give yoU a better understanding about the Governance Resource Center:

 

4.3 SAP Business Technology Platform – Account Setup

A critical step of your journey to Enterprise Automation with SAP is the setup of your Business Technology Platform account because it includes the key components SAP Build Process Automation and SAP Integration Suite. If you already have a BTP-Account you might need to skip some of those steps and move directly to the activation of SAP Signavio. If not – we want to give you all the necessary steps to get started with those two services. Since we have talked about the topic of Governance in the previous chapter, I also want to highlight that any development project follow the same principles as for other projects on SAP BTP: topics like setting up an account structure, assign roles and authorizations, manage cost and monitor operations also apply to projects for Enterprise Automation. Here you will be forwarded to useful documentation and best-practices, that will help you during the setup.

First Step: Activate your BTP Account and generate a Subaccount

Before you can activate SAP Build Process Automation and SAP Integration Suite your need to get access to a BTP Subaccount with the corresponding entitlements. I don’t really want to re-invent the wheel, especially since we already have a great blogpost from my colleague Oliver Stiefbold, which you can find here:

Get Started with your SAP BTP Enterprise Account (Onboarding)

In this blogpost he will introduce you to all the necessary steps in great detail. Here you can find a summary of all the required activities:

  • Check your first mail: The “IT Contact” for your SAP BTP global account
  • Check your second mail: Logon information for your SAP BTP global account
  • Your initial login to your Global Account
  • Assigning additional global account administrators
  • Check your Entitlements and Quotas
  • Create a Subaccount for your global account
  • Create a Cloud Foundry Subaccount with a Booster
  • Configure Entitlements and Quotas for Subaccounts

You also might wonder, what is the best approach in terms of subaccount-hierarchy, security, user-management and dev-ops. Here I would like to introduce you to our official Best Practices guide for SAP Business Technology Platform, which you can find here:

Best Practices for SAP Business Technology Platform

Second Step: Activate SAP Build Process Automation

If you want to leverage the power of low-code based process development and create workflow processes and automation, you require to activate SAP Build Process Automation as part of your SAP Business Technology Platform Subacount. Here you can find all the relevant documentation to get access to the service:

Third Step: Activate SAP Integration Suite

If you want to integrate complex IT systems and leverage integration capabilities like API Management or Event-based communication, you require to activate SAP Integration Suite as part of your SAP Business Technology Platform Subacount. Here you can find all the relevant documentation to get access to the service:

 

4.4 Signavio Setup

Before your organization can kickstart any automation endeavor, your need to get a better understanding about your current process landscapes and areas, which require improvement. That’s why SAP Signavio is one of the most critical components of Enterprise Automation with SAP. Because SAP Signavio provides visibility into business processes, potential bottlenecks, root-cause analysis, and suggestions for improvement based on 200,000 industry benchmarks and best practices. A detailed understanding of inefficiencies helps organizations optimize and automate processes.

If you want to get started with SAP Signavio, here is an overview of the most relevant assets, that can guide you:

  • The SAP Signavio Onboarding Resource Center is your one-stop shop to get familiar with your SAP Signavio solutions. On this page we have compiled all the information and resources you need to successfully start your process initiative.
  • Getting Started: Start your SAP Signavio journey here. You will find important product information, workspace configuration guides and additional services options.
  • Enablement Material: Become an SAP Signavio expert by scrolling through our enablement content. Our offerings range from e-learnings and product guides to personalized trainings on demand. 
  • Support & Community: Get support on your technical and non-technical questions. We listed all SAP Signavio support options for you to ensure a quick resolution of your issues.

In case of questions or feedback please reach out to signavio_success@sap.com Have fun exploring it!

With the completion of the acquisition of LeanIX you also have an additional companion to support you with the S/4HANA transformation. Enterprise Architecture is an organizing principle that aligns business & IT and determines how an organization can most efficiently achieve its current and future objectives in the transformation. LeanIX is a leader in the enterprise architecture management (EAM) and technology transformation space to help customers manage and optimize their IT landscape. Here you can find some additional information on LeanIX:

 

4.5 Getting Support

In the ever-evolving landscape of business and technology, successful implementation of new solutions has become a critical factor for organizations aiming to stay competitive and meet their objectives. Implementation services and partners play a pivotal role in ensuring that the transition from planning to execution is smooth and effective. This also applies for Enterprise Automation – if you want to accelerate time-to-value, maximize ROI and also mitigate implementation risks, we usually recommend three approaches that can also be used simultaneously.

  • Self-Help: In chapter 4.5 you can find a great collection of documentation, enablements and guided experiences. These assets can be used by Citizen Developers, IT-specialists or Process Excellence Officers to to receive a technical introduction to SAP Build, SAP Integration Suite and SAP Signavio. Many organizations such as Freudenberg or Mahindra use those assets for self-enablement an to facilitate a Digital Center of Excellence, which serves business units and provide competences to develop processes.
  • Partners: Partner support is a cornerstone of success in SAP projects, offering organizations a wealth of benefits that extend beyond the initial implementation. As businesses increasingly rely on SAP solutions to streamline operations, enhance efficiency, and drive innovation, the significance of having a reliable partner to provide ongoing support becomes paramount. Leverage the SAP Partner Finder to rely on our ecosystem and achieve tailored solutions that address your unique business needs. Our partners are heavily invested in our Enterprise Automation initiative and contribute pre-built content to their industry-specific customer base. You can filter our pre-built content store by publisher and see what types of artifacts are deliverd by our partners.

 

4.5 Find further Enablement and Tutorials

Most of the components of Enterprise Automation are based on Low-Code/No-Code or simplify the development experience with graphical layout-designers and pre-built content. This makes the project-lifecycle much easier and improves the Go-Live. But it certainly does not mean that the ideal process is developed and managed overnight. Enterprise Automation entails a steep learning curve for everyone that is new to it and is a constant ongoing lifecycle from problem assessment to development & implementation and governance & monitoring. To support you in this process improvement lifecycle we provide plenty of learning content, hands-on enablement, documentation and best-practices coming from both SAP and our communities of customers and partners. This content is mostly free of charge and can be accessed via those links:

Learn more about Enterprise Automation with SAP

Activate the services

SAP Discovery Center – SAP BTP Resources 

  • Be Inspired by Customer Stories: Look at other customers’ success
  • Get Support Connect with SAP Community Collaborate with Experts
  • Realize the Use Cases as a Mission 
    • Step-by-step guidance and tutorials
    • Structured project board with phases and tasks
    • Collaboration with SAP Experts and Partners
  • Gain More Insights Into the Service(s) Roadmaps & Service plans
  • Analyze & Estimate Costs: Check pricing with the integrated estimator

And of course, if you want to start your low-code journey with no further ado, join our SAP Builders community and start learning SAP Build!

 

5. Conclusion

Now after we introduced you to the main concepts of Enterprise Automation with SAP and explained you how to get started you might be a little bit overwhelmed with all this information. But please remember it is only a guide not a fixed manual of steps that are absolutely mandatory to achieve business outcome.

If you are completely new to this topic, we recommend starting small and perhaps picking only one of the three main components of Enterprise Automation. Ideally the one that serves your acute business pain-points and low hanging fruit. For instance, you can start with an instant process report from Signavio Process Insights – or and RPA-package in Build Process Automation - or a simple integration flow from the Business Accelerator Hub to integrate multiple applications. After your first success you can expand your automation journey with additional capabilities like Process Mining, Event-based communication, or advanced workflow-process, that utilize Generative AI – there is just some much that you can achieve!

Enterprise Automation is currently the hottest topic at SAP and it allows you to integrate applications, discover inefficiencies and automate processes across heterogenous environments. Investing in this initiative will certainly provide long-lasting business results with a well-rounded approach to automate and manage automations inside your organization.

 

Stay tuned!

 

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