What is SAP Automation?

In the modern world, SAP solutions are extremely popular. They streamline the efforts of industry professionals and enable business processes to be integrated. This involves a huge quantity of template solutions. Nonetheless, SAP system deployment typically centers around complex, large scale tasks.

One recent trend with SAP systems is the use of robotic, specialist process automation tools to automate tasks. Let’s look at the key challenges, obstacles and benefits of this technology as well as how to choose the best SAP automation tool:

What is SAP Automation?

System Applications and Products, or ‘SAP’, automation allows repetitive, tedious business tasks within the SAP ecosystem to be completed quickly, using certain tools.

In 2020, The SAPinsider released a Benchmark Report, which surveyed over 200 SAP clients. This showed an increase in the adaptation of automation technology to make processes more efficient. Businesses use this technology to facilitate digital upgrades, and improve the work/life balance of staff members.

The case for automation rests on a couple of facts. Firstly, due to the complexity of the SAP interface, users have to undergo a lengthy learning curve. And secondly — by the start of 2028, there will be no more support for SAP Business Suite 7 applications. Therefore, the only option is to migrate, ahead of time, to SAP S/4HANA – a new machine learning and artificial intelligence ERP (enterprise resource planning) system.

Issues to Take Into Account

Staff members are the main consideration, when it comes to automating tasks robotically. The aim is to free up the workforce to concentrate on intellectual activities, rather than manual work. Another key factor is the upcoming migration of businesses to the SAP S/4HANA system. The above mentioned report lists the following automation goals for SAP clients as the most important:

• Set up and run RPA (robotic process automation) software (forty percent)
• Process standardization during the migration to SAP S/4HANA (forty percent)
• Top to bottom automation between business systems and SAP solutions (fifty-eight percent)

Understanding the Main Obstacles

The primary challenges that restrict automating tasks with SAP solutions are non standardized workflows and enterprise legacy IT systems. Lots of the clients that SAPinsider surveyed use isolated and customized ERPs. This makes it difficult to scale and introduce automation systems.

It would be easier for enterprise architects to scale automation solutions across organizations, if all ERP systems and departments used identical standardized processes. For this reason, numerous clients said that they regard SAP S/4HANA as a chance to start afresh, and introduce automation to make processes more streamlined.

Businesses must integrate automation seamlessly, across all their systems, for it to work effectively. Therefore, for a large percentage of businesses, a major barrier is the complexity of their current systems.

SAP Automation Suggestions – Use Cases for RPA

The most suitable processes for automation tend to involve the migration of data – data processing, data reading, sending data to another location, and checking that it has been transferred accurately.

Although some tasks involving data are fairly complex and need human creativity/intelligence, other tasks are vulnerable to human error. Frequently, these tasks are also tedious and repetitive, so people don’t mind robots completing them.

One great thing about robots is that they don’t experience tiredness or information overwhelm. This is a huge benefit when it comes to SAP automation, because the software involved is usually complex. This means that it is hard to navigate quickly and efficiently. Robots only monitor what they are programmed to monitor – i.e. what fields to complete, what buttons to push and what data to extract.

Once automation frees up the time of staff members, they can concentrate their efforts on tasks that need human creativity/intelligence and analytical thinking.

So, what is SAP Automation?

The outcome of this resource reallocation is a notable boost in efficiency and productivity. This reduces costs overall. There are more benefits to be had by incorporating the use of automation tools, for fast automation flow designs. Needless to say, both staff members and business owners have much to gain from SAP automation.