To efficiently manage procurement, we must minimize the amount of manual work that is required and automate repetitive steps. Fortunately, SAP has created a solution which allows us to automate these manual processes while improving the efficiency. In this session we will see how SAP Process Automation can automate the extraction of purchase orders based on their status.
Today we will go through a brief demo about how we can use sap process automation to extract information from sap ariba before we take a look at the use case let’s talk a little bit about what sap process automation is first of all you need to know that we’re going to be working on sap business technology platform or btp whose goal is for every enterprise to become
Intelligent and sustainable so everything that we do is working towards that goal with a focus on intelligence and sustainability we can achieve that goal by using sap process automation which is sap’s solution for automating all sap processes it gives us a great toolbox of different functions that we can use within our automated processes which in turn allows us
To address a wider range of processes whether it’s a workflow that maybe needs to occur over days weeks or years or if it is an automated process that maybe takes just 30 seconds to execute we’re able to leverage the different components of sap process automation to meet those different needs while at the same time delivering it all in a citizen developer focused
Experience sap has developed process automation in a way that allows you to build all of your automations in a low code no code format with drag and drop development tools and even lets you record yourself going through a process to create your automation sap also brings in advanced workflow features as well as rpa capabilities leveraging the strengths from sap
Intelligent rpa and sap workflow management finally we also are able to assist end users by providing a wide range of pre-built content and reusable artifacts as well as then being able to put all of this into one single environment with a unified launch pad along with a task center that connect users take over and work on all the processes that may require some
Human intervention now let’s take a look at the challenge that we have today we need to extract some information from sap ariba and we want to be able to save it into an excel file so that we can run some reports but the information we’re looking for isn’t accessible via an api we’re looking for just basic high-level information about the purchase orders that were
Submitted during the last year in order to get this information what we would typically do is log into sap ariba go to the invoicing section search for all purchase orders and then specify that we want to get all of the purchase orders for the last year then we would select all of the line items that come back as the records we would then go through and select
Them all and say that we want to then export them out to a table and we would ultimately end up with an excel file but this is a process that’s very repetitive if we wanted to be able to use a very similar process for maybe extracting requests for proposal rfp information everything would be the same except for selecting that rfp so why should we be doing these
Things in a manual way we shouldn’t instead we should be looking to automate them using sap process automation now we will take a look at how we can apply sap process automation and specifically its rpa features in order to automate data extraction from sap ariba instead of having to log into ariba and click through a variety of screens to get this information
Out we will be able to leverage an automation that is as simple to access as going into the sap fiori launchpad and accessing a form end users can now just submit a form putting in the information they want so that they can get the proper data extracted and then just hit run and in just a couple of seconds the automation will run it will extract that information
And it would provide it to them in an email so we will be able to take a process that’s well sure it’s a very short process that maybe takes five minutes to do manually but if it’s a high volume activity and we can make it accessible to our end users we’ll end up with an on-demand automation that people can use to simplify their day-to-day jobs without having to
Continually perform manual tasks that have no added value so now let’s turn our attention to running this automation let’s take a look at the demo in this use case we’re going to look at using sap process automation to create a data extraction process that’s very accessible to all of our end users in this process we’re going to see that we have a form which kicks
Off the entire process as soon as anyone puts information into that form and submits it it will start this process which will extract a variety of data from sap ariba based on the information that they have entered now let’s see how this automation this bot is able to go through and extract purchase order information and again we can also use this automation to
Extract rfp data as well as invoicing data first let’s take a look at the form that we’ll use to actually start this process within the form we see that we have just three simple fields to enter information into the information we enter will be used to run this process and determine which data to extract so to get started let’s take a look at the data that we’re
Going to extract as we’re going to be taking a look at extracting purchase order information we’ll select that for this field then the next question it’s going to ask is what date range we want to be able to choose this information from for our demo we’re looking to get all of the purchase orders from the last year so we’ll choose last year as the date range and
Finally the last bit of information that is looking for is an email address to send the results to since at the end of this process it will send the information which it has extracted as an attachment in an email the field can accept just a single email or it can accept a list of emails if you’d like to send the results to a variety of people once we’ve put in this
Information the last thing to do to start the process is to simply click the submit button on the form with that we can now wait for the automation to run the data extraction as a first step we can see that the automation has now opened up sap ariba the next step that is going to take is to log in using the data that is stored securely within the tenant and once
The bot has logged in it’s going to navigate from the home page to the invoicing module and then from the invoicing module it’s going to navigate to the purchase order search where it’s then going to enter the information which we submitted in the form once it has entered the information and the system has returned the search results we’re going to see that the
Automation can select every single record and then choose to export all of the line item data for those purchase orders after selecting the records it will extract and copy them into an excel file which the bot will then send in an email to the email address which we put into the form and it will also close sap ariba so we see that at the end of the process the
Result arrives in our email inbox meaning that we now have the purchase order information that was extracted from sap ariba saved as an attachment which we can then open to see all of the purchase order information for the last year so we can see how relatively quickly we can use sap process automation to extract information from sap ariba without ever actually
Logging into it this excel file contains all of the purchase order information that we can use in our further reporting now that we’ve taken a look at how we can use sap process automation to extract information from sap ariba let’s take a look at some of the other use cases that we can handle as you can see we’ve broken it down into three main categories we’re
Looking at use cases for data entry for data extraction and then in the middle we’re seeing some opportunities for mass action these are going to be the three areas for which we found the biggest opportunities to apply process automation within sap ariba you can use this kind of framework to find other appropriate use cases for automation as you can see we’ve been
Able to find use cases around extracting information for purchase orders as well as for rfps and then on the other side looking at data entry we have opportunities for master data upload such as being able to take transaction rate details from sap ecc and upload them into sap ariba to keep our exchange rates up to date or to go through and enter an order based on
A purchase requisition that’s created with either an email or a chat bot finally we can look at the mass action which is where we can take some of these very manual repetitive tasks and apply automation to do things like checking that each item is in the catalog or not if it’s a non-catalog order we may be able to find a suitable replacement with something that’s
From the catalog that maybe we get a better rate on and then we can provide that as an option so that we can work together with a procurement manager to provide an automated solution to try and reduce their spend and leverage more of the catalog items additionally we can create a bot that can do things like content localization which means going in and extracting
Information that’s in one language leveraging a translation service and then putting that information right back in the system in the new translated language there are some great opportunities for improving the way that we work with sap ariba by leveraging automation now that we’ve seen a few examples of how we can leverage sap process automation with sap ariba
Let’s review some of the major takeaways and some of the best benefits of sap process automation sap process automation combines sap intelligent rpa and sap workflow management both of which have great strengths in their respective areas when sap wanted to combine them it took professional developer tools and put them into a low code no code format to make them
Friendly for citizen developers because we can’t all learn how to become developers instead we need to be able to leverage the people who are already working in those business processes today and enable them to build and manage their own automations even with no coding experience all this helps drive the idea of having more and more process automation because as
We empower those business experts to become citizen developers and have them leverage low code no code tools we’re able to see that automation can spread across the business you can start tackling use cases like purchase order extraction something that is a very short process but can have a great benefit when scaled building that process took only a couple of
Hours and now it’s going to be something that can save somebody five minutes each time it’s run this means that at a certain point we’re going to see a benefit there and as we build more and more automations on top of it we’ll continue to see great benefits from applying automations to sap ariba processes
Transcribed from video
Automate the extraction of purchase order information from SAP Ariba using SAP Process Automation By SAP Technology
