SAP Business Technology Platform enabling digital and resilient supply chain

[parikh_sagar]

Technology-led disruption helps global businesses to scale faster than ever and hence enterprises need to be agile in all facets of business operations. Procurement, once seen as a cost-saving function, has now become a strategic function of digital and sustainable supply chain enabling robust demand planning and fulfillment at one hand and resolving environmental, social, and governance issues at the same time. The modern procurement function has evolved from order processing to leveraging partner ecosystem enabling an agile and resilient supply chain. This requires standardization, digitalization, and automation of the end-to-end procurement process.

As per Gartner, by 2024, 50% of the supply chain organizations will invest in applications that support automation, artificial intelligence, and analytics capabilities. Also, as per Mckinsey, Hyperautomation has the potential up to 60% to automate repetitive and non-productive tasks of overall procurement processes. Automation can reduce spent up to 3.5% by improving compliance, control, efficiency, and potential reduction of the transaction cost. For example, an organization with an annual spend of $2 billion, eliminating the leakages could send $70 million a year straight to the bottom line. Hence, Hyperautomation leveraging chatbot, RPA, ML is no more a value add on rather an integral part of every business process.

SAP as a leader in cloud base ERP solution provider also providing SAP Intelligent Technology services like Predictive Analysis, Machine Learning, Intelligent RPA, SAP Conversational AI (CAI), and SAP AI Business services via its Business and Technology Platform (BTP).

Let’s understand it with a use case of a global energy company offering electricity, gas, solar, and renewable energy services.

Smarter assets maintenance integrated with the digital supply chain for undisrupted energy supplies for one of the global utility companies.

• During scheduled maintenance, a team of technical experts working in the field operation has come across an urgent need to replace one component. If the component is not replaced soon, there will be an unplanned disruption in service to its customers, leading to revenue loss and unhappy customers. However, the technician having a mobile-enabled smart companion (built with SAP CAI and Intelligent RPA), immediately confirms whether the required component is available at a warehouse to get it issued for the site on priority. In case of unavailability at the warehouse, smart companions helps the technician to raise an urgent request for the required material component. So, operation teams are now enabled to get required material from the right source, the right price, and able to fulfill the demand directly from the field without any delay and dependencies. It helps the global energy company to ensure undisrupted customer service.


• Further, urgent procurement request once automated with business rules & workflows makes approval process transparent, convenient, and fast. Subsequent logistic functions such as goods receipt, invoicing and payments are now fully automated integrating SAP Intelligent RPA with mailbox and SAP AI business services such as document information extraction, document classification, etc.


• With this, business users are completely free from mundane tasks such as handling paperwork, mailbox-based transaction processing, order & contract tracking, supplier follow-ups, and notification management.

 

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To summarize:

SAP Intelligent Technologies not only automates end-to-end processes spread across SAP Ariba, SAP S/4HANA, and other legacy or non-ERP applications, it also helps the workforce to be free from mundane time-consuming tasks which are often error-prone, empowering them to ignite innovation and to focus on business-critical functions. It provides a superior experience and enhanced business value to all stakeholders. It enables clients to embrace market changes to achieve new business opportunities and long-term value with agility and speed. Such intelligent process automation helps to improve business metrics such as process turnaround time, process accuracy, on-time demand fulfillment, warehouse operations efficiency, timely processing of invoices & payments, and many more such business KPIs.

TCS provides Hyperautomation services enabling Digital and Resilient Supply Chain through AI-driven Smart Companions (intelligent bots) - TCS Intelligent SAP Assistant (TISA) & TCS Intelligent Enterprise Assistant (TIEA). These are built on SAP BTP leveraging SAP Conversational AI, SAP Intelligent RPA, Machine Learning, and AI Business Services for transforming and automating end-to-end business processes across industries.

Stay connected to learn more about such industry use cases transforming finance, customer services, and HR processes with SAP Business Technology Platform.

Thanks

TCS SAP Hyperautomation Team

I would like to thank and appreciate the contribution of my colleagues a_banker, hrshjrwl, priyank14, and parthchoksi

 

[HemantRachh]

Great example of how businesses can realize Hyperatuomation using BTP!

[satishgunda]

Great work. Very nicely articulated , BTP is the way to go for all the Hyper-Automation and can be fully integrated  within and outside the landscape.