Identifying the Need for Automations

Let’s understand what automations in SAP Build Process Automation are and how they come about.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) accelerates the digital transformation of business processes by automatically replicating tedious actions that have low added value.

By bringing Chat Bots into the equation, using APIs rather than just UI elements, and combining Machine Learning (ML) and AI, we can push RPA to the next level, and the journey has just started.

At the beginning of the last century, during the industrial revolution, in the textile and automotive industries in particular, there were large warehouses with many employees performing countless manual tasks. Employees performed the same tasks over and over again, often hundreds to thousands of times per day.

Gradually, automation chains started to appear and robots were introduced. Robots freed humans from painful tasks. The robots mastered the tasks assigned to them, significantly boosting production.

At the arrival of information technology age, at first, we didn't consider automation. Applications were created by IT departments for a specific purpose. Nobody envisioned a workstation as a collection of windows and applications. Each individual application worked well, but what about the links between the applications?

Today, most processes require switching from one application to another. Yes, it's possible to develop APIs or web services specifically to handle the interaction between some applications. However, an application often lacks all the right APIs or services to call upon. Therefore, users spend countless hours clicking, navigating, copying, and pasting, often bored by the repetitive nature of those tasks.

In general, users prefer to spend their time on customer care rather than repetitive tedious tasks.

The business value that Automation in SAP Build Process Automation brings can be described in four different perspectives.