How can Robotic process automation (RPA)
from SAP increase your business processes
Introduction
Digital transformation is now the new technological paradigm that not only
organizations are facing. Strong investments are being made in technologies that
can aid this transformative process with worldwide spending on this being
estimated to exceed $2 trillion by 2021. Conversational AI, analytics, Machine
Learning, IoT, Robotic Process Automation are only a few of the trends that will
also shape 2020 according to Forbes and the business landscape. The rhythm of
change and transformation can make businesses struggle to be agile, flexible and
stay ahead of the competition.
RPA is one of the solutions sought out to solve pain-points in businesses such as
human errors, streamline processes and optimize them, cut costs, process data
faster and more accurately, while also raising the levels of compliance. The RPA
solution has been at first piloted and deployed in fields such as accounting,
finance, and procurement-related functions, mainly because it solves the issues of
the high volume of work, standardizes such a time-consuming process and
eliminates the repetitive tasks, while employees can focus on other value-adding
activities for the business. According to Gartner the Robotic Process Automation
(RPA) software revenue grew 63.1% in 2018 to $846 million, making it the
fastest-growing segment of the global enterprise software.
There are many misconceptions about what RPA can do for a business and many
executives are disappointed when the actual implementation of RPA happens and
it doesn’t bring the expected results. This is not because RPA doesn’t bring real
value and saves time and money, but rather because people do not understand
the real actual capabilities of this technology. According to Forbes, RPA doesn’t
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make bad processes better, it makes them faster keeping the same quality.
Therefore, the end-to-end redesign of processes cannot be done with simple RPA.
There is a need for human intervention here.
This paper is addressed to managers and executives that seek to understand what
can SAP’s Intelligent Robotic Process Automation can do for their businesses,
how is it different than the basic RPA and how it can enhance the digital
transformation of their processes so that organizations stay competitive in the
market.
There are many enthusiasts that expect RPA to grow and overtake all mundane
tasks of employees, automate and increase the profits. Until this point is reached,
this whitepaper will shed light into to actual functionalities that SAP’s intelligent
Robotic Programmatic Automation can aid a business.
1. What is RPA?
RPA is an emerging technology, defined as the automation of rules-based
processes that are mundane, repetitive and involves high volumes of data and
work. It is the most simple form of AI and the work is based on bots or “digital
workers” that can mimic the human tasks. They are deployed through software
that utilizes a user interface and it can run on any software, including web-based
applications, ERP systems, and mainframe systems. RPA improves the accuracy,
speed, and quality of output of processes while reducing the risk of human error
and freeing up the employee’s time to focus on tasks that require human
strengths (empathy, emotion, face-to-face negotiation, etc.).
To dissipate any misunderstanding and shed light on the terminology, there are
differences between RPA and intelligent RPA. On a spectrum (see figure below)
the basic RPA is process-driven, which means that it focuses on executing an
autonomous combination of processes, activities, transactions, and tasks. This can
be either “attended”, which means that bots run on the desktop, they are
triggered by an end-user on its workstation, or “unattended”, which means that
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they do the work alone on the server, automatically executing a whole process
that is triggered by a schedule or cue. This automation is very different from
actual redesigning and digital transformation that a business can undergo, mostly
because if the process is not configured or optimized properly, the RPA will only
perpetuate it, not analyze, redesign and improve it as it should be done for a
digitized business. Trying to use unattended RPA to improve processes, not only is
the process not improved, but errors and bottlenecks are likely to occur, which
only creates new problems, diminishes the digital transformation and ROI, all
while employees also have to deal with badly thought processes.
This is where the iRPA steps into the game. It is a step higher in the AI hierarchy
by simulating human intellect and using machine learning technologies. It is more
advanced compared to RPA in terms of comprehension, intelligence, and
precision. With the automation tool iRPA has is analyzes prior to decisions and
actions, learns them over time, gets smarter and supports businesses in making
more informed decisions, back-up by data. RPA is the doer, while iRPA is the
decision-maker.
iRPA is maturing quickly, with SAP even acquiring Contextor at the end of 2018 to
augment its intelligent technologies portfolio and drive the automation of
processes within S/4HANA and other cloud solutions.
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The main components that are part of the SAP’s Intelligent RPA hybrid solution
are:
● Design the automation processes with the on-premise Desktop Studio
(Windows only);
● Orchestrate the automation processes with the cloud Factory;
● Execute the automation processes with the on-premise Desktop Agent(s).
2. The Integration of SAP’s iRPA in your business
Starting the process of integration of iRPA into business processes can leave
companies confused, with many IT issues, unrealistic expectations and complex
processes that they do not know how to approach. When a business tries to
implement and scale RPA in general, the top challenges that appear according to
a recent Deloitte report are:
1. Process standardization
2. IT buy-in and support
3. Integration and flexibility of the solution
4. Stakeholder buy-in and expectations
5. Employee impact
This migration to SAP’s iRPA requires specialists that can help in the
implementation and setting up everything to work properly. “IT is absolutely
critical to the successful deployment of RPA. This was a lesson we learned early on
in our own RPA deployment in Deloitte. I have found there is a significant
difference in both speed and cost to deliver between clients that have an engaged
and supportive IT function and those where IT is less supportive.” (David Wright,
Director, Deloitte). Such support can range between turn-key solutions to a
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collaboration project to developing in-house teams and build internal-RPA
capacity and capabilities in people. When such a capable team is needed, SE16N
can step in the game as a certified SAP partner and facilitate the implementation
and offer support across all steps of the project.
What is important to take into consideration when a iRPA project is outlined is
that trial & error is a normal part of the process or implementation and adequate
resources need to be enabled for this as well. Main steps to follow when planning
to improve business processes through this solution are:
1. Determining the needs
What are the needs such a solution answers to? What challenges does the
business need to overcome? What are the processes that will be automatized?
Here discussions with employees can prove to be very insightful because this way
a business can understand where energy, time and money are invested too much
and could be simplified so that employees focus on higher-value activities. Also,
starting the RPA journey doesn’t necessarily need to happen across all the
enterprise. It is indeed important to think big in terms of objectives in the
long-term but also start small, by optimizing through iRPA business processes in
only one area, where there is a bottleneck. Once results are achieved, it becomes
much easier to present and gain support from key stakeholders in the
organization for a wider project. It is necessary to ensure that the automation
addresses a high-volume process for which a rules-based process can be applied.
2. Integration into a wider strategy, not only tactical cost savings
Rather than thinking about how many lay-offs can a “digital worker” replace, and
how much money the business saves, it is advisable to ask questions such as
“Does it increase customer satisfaction?”, “Does it provide employees with more
interesting and challenging tasks for them to grow?”, “Does it improve
compliance?”. Such a digital transformation project needs to fulfill higher
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elements in the overall business strategy. Complementary to this, RPA can be
incorporated into employee training to raise the technological capabilities in the
organization, have less resistance to change and not create panic among
employees that they might lose their jobs in favor of the “digital workers”.
3. Assigning a project champion
There is a need here to find a suitable person in the organization that can
coordinate and has the necessary know-how for such a project and can establish
realistic expectations regarding the automation. For example, in Deloitte’s report
organizations estimated that only 20% of their total enterprise operations can
realistically be automated with RPA, which is actually aligned with the initial
expectations at the proof of concept or pilot stages. Another option is to
collaborate with a third-party partner who can advise and guide along the
implementation process. The deployment needs to be managed as rigorously as
any other IT project in order to ensure quality and ability to operate properly. A
team that implements well the project can help build the business case for a
wider opportunity.
4. Milestones & analytics
Having in mind the overall goal for the software implementation, a few smaller
goals to achieve throughout the process need to be set. Passing milestones help a
business measure the new product’s success. For example, let’s say a business
implements iRPA in order to save employees time. A milestone could be
delivering a task at increasingly shorter intervals. Or it could be accomplishing a
higher volume of work in a given time frame. Quantifying and analyzing the
success of the implementation is essential for the business case that will be built
later to gain support across the whole organization.
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5. Gaining support for change
Gaining support should include here C-suite and functional leadership, as well as
employees. With a business case well built the chances of getting onboard the
organization grows. In Deloitte’s survey, C-suite and functional leadership have
been found to be the most supportive stakeholder groups in companies that have
implemented and scaled RPA.
6. Building capability in time
For maximum productivity in the long-run, employees should be taught how to
work with these “digital workers”. This means they need to know how to utilize
the interfaces, their functionalities, what operations can be modified and
streamed and how to also check and maintain the bots. Also, training and growing
people that know how to evaluate the feasibility of a proposal, how to configure a
bot, install, change, improve it and how to integrate it into the human work is also
advisable to take into account. These kinds of skills will possibly give in time new
roles for enterprises, roles strictly related to RPA.
3. Benefits of using iRPA from SAP
Using the iRPA from SAP, besides emulating human interaction within the
enterprise system, can interpret text-heavy communications, or make process
suggestions to end-users for definable and repeatable business processes. After
capturing user activity, intelligent bots delivered by these services can emulate
user interactions with software and digitally execute some of the user’s tasks.
Because these bots can take advantage of SAP Leonardo Artificial Intelligence
(SAP Leonardo AI) capabilities and SAP Conversational AI services, they can
automate actions that involve more than a traditional user interface. They can
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work with process metadata to support hands-free execution of much more
complicated processes.
The expected results of such an investment are:
a) Quality improvement
Compared with humans, “digital workers” do not need to rest and can keep
running 24/7. Even more, errors and mistakes are greatly reduced, with a high
precision in place. This kind of precision reduces greatly the risks of dissatisfaction
from stakeholders due to data inaccuracy.
b) Improvement of speed
While some tasks could take up to a few days, the RPA can process faster and
continues in the background, while employees focus on more complex and
demanding activities that can benefit the business. RPA accomplishes tasks in a
few minutes compared to the few hours employees need to put into the work.
This results in an increase in the speed of operations. It increases productivity by
executing faster processes that before could have taken a few days and be done
with them in one hour.
c) Higher efficiency
RPA can run its operations with virtually no resource constraints. The speed of
operations also means average handling times reduced by up to 40% and
processing costs that could be even up to 80% lower.
d) Wide-usage across industries
RPA can be used by organizations in completely unrelated fields, mostly because
all organizations have some types of common activities such as quote-to-cash and
procure-to-pay processes. Also, all businesses have some form of repetitive tasks
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that could be handled by RPA. This makes the technology a viable option in any
industry.
e) Productive employees
It replaces the need for employees to execute boring and low-skilled tasks, such
as checking, completing forms, copying and pasting information from one
document to another, answering to users, emails and so on. Their time and skills
can be transferred to other more stringent business activities. Also, it relieves
employees of the rising pressure of work.
f) Customer satisfaction
iRPA brings a new level of operational speed and efficiency to respond to
customer needs proactively. Customer service is improved because bots can deal
with inquiries 24/7, giving more power to employees to deal with more
complicated requests. Using SAP Conversational AI services, bots can interact with
customers and users in the same manner a person would. And you don’t need to
predefine inputs and outputs or code into the bot every conversational possibility.
Also, iRPA can analyze the available data about each customer to see in what
phase of the sales funnel that person is and what kind of personalized offer can
be made and also send it to them in a few minutes instead of hours. Customer
experiences become disrupted in positive ways.
g) Execution in multiple systems
Employees usually need to spend a lot of time moving between applications. This
is where intelligent bots alleviate one of the pain-points of employees: they can
execute processes spanning multiple systems, multiple cloud solutions, and
software. The ease of transfer of data from one part to another and fast access
from one application to another is related to the improvement of speed,
reduction of costs and efficientization. Another added benefit here is that the
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bots present a low risk due to them not interfering with anything from the
back-end systems.
h) Increased compliance
With the general increase in audit regulation and bureaucracy, iRPA increases
compliance with an almost 100% cases of accuracy. This offers a sense of relief
and security regarding information and accuracy across the organization.
i) Improved HR
Many HR professionals lose precious time each month navigating through all the
payroll data, reading all information, updating the system, calculating and sending
the information forward. iRPA is a great solution here for the whole process,
giving time to HR to focus on the employees of the organization and on more
strategic initiatives that can benefit the business. And payroll is only one of the
functions out of many that could be improved with iRPA.
4. Increasing your business processes
Before a business decides to implement RPA to increase their operations, it is
noteworthy to keep in mind that the “Digital workers” cannot do all the processes
that a business desires. A very good example has been given by Leslie Willcocks,
professor of technology, work, and globalization at the London School of
Economics’ Department of Management in an interview.
“In an insurer we studied, there was a particular process where it used to take two
days to handle 500 premium advice notes. It now takes 30 minutes. It worked like
this: a range of brokers would write business for clients, and there was a central
repository into which the business written had to go, and a process that someone
had to manage to get the premium advice note from the broker into the
repository. A number of operations had to occur for that advice note to be fully
populated by all the data, and the process operator might find that the data had
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not been completely filled out, perhaps because the advice note wasn’t structured
very well. So the data had to be structured to standardize it so that it could be a
common document like all the other advice notes. And if any data was missing,
that person might have had to go back to the broker or add things from the
systems of record in the back office. Then, once the note was complete and signed
off by the process operator, it went into the repository.
Now a lot of that sort of work can be automated. But some of it requires human
intervention, human reasoning, judgment. So an RPA engineer would look at that
type of process and say, “Which bit can we automate?” The answer is not
everything—it can’t structure the data. There may at some stage be cognitive
automation technology that could structure the data but RPA can’t, so the human
being has to structure the data at the front end and create a pro forma ideal
advice note. Clearly, the RPA can’t deal with exceptions either. The engineer has to
intervene and look at the exceptions and create a rule to deal with them, so that
gradually you educate and configure the RPA to do more and more work.
Eventually it can do 90 or 95 percent of the work and very few exceptions have to
be dealt with by a human.”
As the example above says, there are only some types of operations that an RPA
can deal with, therefore embarking on a digital transformation journey with RPA
at the center of the change, there should be selected those processes that if
automated have the biggest impact in the organization. In order to recognize such
processes, they need to be:
● High-volume and rules-based
● Impacting costs and revenue
● Error-prone
● Time-consuming
● Speed-sensitive
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● Fault tolerant
To assess better how RPA can be leveraged across different industries and gain a
better understanding of what processes can be automated, below there are a few
such examples:
Retail
Improving supplier process
Regarding the supplier process, a “digital worker” can compare current prices and
availability of goods and raw material. The process can be automated further
through the bot that will check for delivery times from different suppliers, and
evaluate suppliers and material ratings. It can analyze data and give answers to
questions such as:
Has the vendor received the purchase order and has he accepted it?
Has the PO been fulfilled?
Are related documents (such as a goods receipt or invoice) available and do they
match the order?
The bot can also be programmed to execute actions related to the follow-up
process.
Healthcare
Improve patient experience
Patient scheduling and insurance check-up processes can be assigned to an iRPA
to speed up the overall operations and improve the patient journey, while the
clinical staff can attend to more value-adding tasks.
Boost operational efficiency
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Medical staff no longer has to spend hours of manual labor to enter data and
operate multiple electronic medical and healthcare records systems. RPA can
introduce all the necessary data, perform extraction tasks and update the
databases with almost no errors.
HR
Recruitment processes
The iRPA can help with the recruiting process, by receiving the incoming emails,
analyzing them through NPL capabilities. After it comprehends the message, the
system carries out the necessary follow-up steps and also gets back to recruiters if
the candidate matches the desired profile.
Banking & financial services
Automatize data management
An RPA bot automatically extracts account payables–related e-mail messages
from an accountant’s mailbox. It analyzes the PDF in the attachment using
machine learning and injects the relevant extracted data into an ERP system.
Faster processing
iRPA makes eligibility checks faster (for example, for a loan or credit) and
guarantees the traceability of mandatory “know your customer” processes such
as background verification and evaluates autonomously the criteria for each
client.
Potential threats
iRPA can detect suspicious activities for a bank client and it can send reports
within minutes to the involved stakeholders. Optimizing all the manual labor tasks
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reduces the processing time to a few minutes and increases the trust that the
bank is indeed preoccupied with the well-being of the clients.
Sales
Optimize sales funnel
With the help of bots and integrated OCR software (optical character recognition),
you can automate the entire sales funnel. These can read the received data, enter
it automatically into your SAP ERP system, update statuses, send notifications to
the sales people about what potential leads are the closest to making a decision
to purchase.
For example, there is the case of a leading global insurer that uses smart RPA
robots to classify inbound customer requests. The problem that RPA solved was
that a single inbound email channel lead to inconsistent customer service.
Therefore, through RPA the email queries received were read, sent to a machine
learning model to classify the request to route it to the appropriate channel for
follow-up. The better turnaround time resulted in better customer service,
proving the effectiveness of the RPA.
5. What’s next?
This whitepaper highlighted how SAP’s iRPA can benefit businesses across all
sectors of activity through improved speed, accuracy, compliance, increased
productivity of employees and raising customer satisfaction. Moreover, 53% of
the respondents in Deloitte’s survey have already embarked on their RPA journey,
with 78% of those who already implemented RPA in their organization expecting
to significantly increase investment in RPA in the next 3 years.
Statistics show that SAP is one of the most popular ERP choices when a company
decides to upgrade their business processes and invest in the long-term. This kind
of digital transformation can be done through specialized companies that are
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official SAP partners. Choices about third-party support are driven by specific
criteria such as the nature of the digital workforce that an organization is seeking
to establish and by factors such as the complexity and number of roles required,
the need for flexibility and the need for quality assurance. SE16N can be such an
option, due to the continued qualitative support in the implementation of SAP’s
iRPA projects. Furthermore, SE16N is also an SAP Certified Development Associate
that qualifies us as a trustworthy partner. We can help businesses see their digital
transformation project taken care of from start to end.
6. About SE16N
SE16N is a team of highly qualified consultants, specialized in SAP technology,
that has an extensive design experience. Our industry knowledge is combined
with many years of professional experience, and these two components allow us
to deliver state-of-the-art solutions for any challenge that businesses face. Main
services that we offer are SAP Technology, Amazon Web Services technologies
and IBM Power Systems.
Let’s build a foundation for your digital transformation project. Get in touch with
us at:
SE16N Sp. z o.o.
Aleja KEN 55/64
02-797 Warsaw
[email protected]Tomasz Brzozowski
[email protected]
tel. +48 606 456 002
www.se16n.com
