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SAP Learning Journey

Boosting the Sales Order Management Process with an Automation

Objectives

After completing this lesson, you will be able to:

Explain how bots are executed
Review the Automation Editor
Prepare the Excel file with sales order details
Create and edit the automation
Map the right order using a loop with conditions
Finalize, test, simplify, release, and deploy the automation

Introduction: Boosting Business Processes with Automation

Why use automations? They can really speed up your process and reduce potential errors related to manually transferring data.

Now that you have mastered the basics of setting up your process, it’s time to simplify your trigger form by reducing the number of input fields.

You will use robotic process automation (RPA) to extract data from an excel file that contains the details of the sales order.

You’ll then learn how to map the inputs and outputs of the different artifacts according to the changes of the process. Lastly, you’ll use the Desktop Agent to run your process.

Note

Note: the Desktop Agent does not work on a Mac device. You will need to use a Windows machine to complete this part of the lesson, or a Mac running a virtual desktop with Windows. See prerequisites in unit 1 for more info.

Task automation can run in two ways:

Unattended mode: Bots are working autonomously with human supervision only – there is no human intervention in the part of the process RPA is running.
Attended mode: The attended mode, in which bots will work with humans to assist them, to help the bot.

Reviewing the Automation Editor

The Automation Editor of SAP Build Pro is composed of four main parts:

The Toolbar
The Workflow
The Right-Side Panel
The Console

Prepare the Excel File With Sales Order Details

Preparing the Excel file with sales order details

Ensure that you use the correct format of the cells in the columns, these are:

Cell Formats

Cell	Format
Column	Format
Order Number	Text
Order Amount	Number
Order Date	Date
Shipping Country	Text
Expected Delivery Date	Date
Order Status	Text

Sales Orders Data, Example

Order Number	Order Amount	Order Date	Shipping Country	Expected Delivery Date	Order Status
PO7991	410418.22	1/21/2022	United States of America	1/29/2022	In Time
PO7918	150935.13	1/22/2022	United Kingdom	1/27/2022	Urgent
PO7375	313977.82	1/23/2022	United Kingdom	2/20/2022	In Time
PO7311	755055.4	1/24/2022	United Kingdom	3/30/2022	In Time
PO6858	429358.4	1/25/2022	United Kingdom	2/20/2022	In Time
PO6368	43739.82	1/26/2022	United Kingdom	3/25/2022	In Time
PO6189	483574.12	1/27/2022	Germany	2/5/2022	In Time
PO3115	273993.56	1/28/2022	Germany	3/10/2022	In Time
PO2686	220887.56	1/29/2022	Germany	3/5/2022	In Time
PO8282	436955.64	1/30/2022	United States of America	3/30/2022	In Time

Create and Edit the Automation

Now that your excel file is ready, let’s create the automation. For that you’ll open the process in Process Builder and add new automation between the Trigger Form and the Approval Form. Then you’ll create the automation, then you’ll edit the automation details and map the Excel file variables with the sales order data, then you’ll use a loop to confirm that the result of the inputs look correct.

These are the steps:

Add a New Automation to the process.
Set the Environment Variables of the project.
Use drag-and-drop to design the automation.
Test the automation.
Simplify the start form.
Release and deploy.
Desktop Agent Settings and Registration.
Run the process.

Details about the steps: creation of the automation to extract details from Excel

Creating the Automation to Extract Details From Excel

Test of the automation

Testing the Automation

Simplification of the start form

Map the Order Using a Loop with Conditions

Mapping the Right Order Using a Loop With Conditions

In order to check if we have correctly mapped the order data, we need to loop through the orders and check if we find ours using the condition, and see if the order number that we get from the trigger is equal to the currentMember of the authors.

These are the steps:

Add a New Automation to the process.
Set the Environment Variables of the project.
Use drag-and-drop to design the automation.
Test the automation.
Simplify the start form.
Release and deploy.
Desktop Agent Settings and Registration.
Run the process.

Finalize, Test, Simplify, Release, and Deploy the Automation

Finalizing the Automation

To finalize the automation we will next create an output parameter. The output of the automation will be the sales order we previously found, and we’ll assign it to the end node of the automation, which means the returned value is the selected order.

After that, we’ll add an activity that creates a log message that will show us the order status. Let’s set this up so we can then do the final testing of our process automation.

Testing the automation

In the Automation Editor we will test the automation by clicking Test and wait for our project to be downloaded and the automation to be started.

The desktop agent will extract the project and start it locally, it will open Excel and retrieve the data, then logging activity in the console.

Simplifying the Start Form

After the design of the automation and successful test, now let's simplify the form, deleting all the information that we don't need anymore.

Then we’ll have to map the inputs of the forms again with the data outputs of the automation, because we deleted the fields from the initial form.

Releasing and Deploying the Automation

Now that the process is finished, we choose the version that we want and then we release it.

During the deployment, we have to set the environment variables, that we use inside the project.

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