Does Process Automation support parallel processing?

[Pyc]

G'day all,

Is parallel processing supported in SAP Build Process Automation?

I'm working on an inbound email PDF Invoice process based very much off the Discovery Centre SBPA Invoice Processing Journey and want the ability to spawn parallel flows for each Invoice taken from Outlook (there can be mulitple mails, muliple Invoices per mail, multiple Invoices per PDF). I can't see how this can be achieved.

I'm trying to avoid processing sequentially mostly because the DOX OCR elements take so long. I don't want the AP clerk waiting after each Invoice for the next one to process.

I contemplated running a job on a short time interval and only processing one email per instance, but there is still the potential for multiple invoices per mail.

Any and all advice greatly appreaciated.

Have fun,
Mark

[Archana]

Hello Mark,

In your case, I would suggest that you run RPA Bots in parallel. Design RPA Bots to (a) extract Invoices from emails to store in some folder, (b) extract invoices from multiple PDFs in another folder, (c) extract data from each invoice. All these Bots can run in independently in unattended mode or you can create a process will parallel gateway and add these Bots to run in parallel whenever the process is triggered.

Hope that help,
Archana

[Pyc]

thanks so much for replying Archana!

that’s a sensible suggestion based on my post and makes me realise I wasn’t specific enough.

My process has a UI to verify the extracted data and to confirm vendor master etc and decide which supplementary attachments should be attached to the final S4PC Supplier Invoice.

Since you can’t have a UI5 component directly in SBPA (I think you may have confirmed this for me) I am using a BTP WF to wrap the UI5 component.

It’s this UI Workitem that I want happening in parallel - maybe it’s better to say I want it happening asynchronously.

I don’t have a volume issue as such. It’s not that a BOT is overloaded by the volume, just that I want spawn a human centric process to occur per Invoice and let the BOT just keep chugging through the emails/attachments.

At the moment my UI WF is called as a graphic step in the PA which means it’s Synchronous and the process stops till that UI decision is made.

I think I know what needs to happen. Store the Attachments in BTP DMS and then use API’s rather than a WF Step type to invoke the WF so that it becomes Asynch. I either make API call to trigger the WF directly or API call to a PA that contains the WF.

Thoughts?