RPA Use Cases for Business Users: Examples of SAP automation

With the recent development of SAP automation tools that don’t require any coding skills, SAP automation has stopped being a prerogative of RPA developers and is now available to business users. So, it is not surprising that they are becoming increasingly interested in automating their everyday tasks in SAP.

In one of our previous blog posts, we wrote about top RPA use cases for SAP that can be implemented without a single line of code, including invoices, human resources, and warehouse automation. In this post, we will review 3 more use cases that business users can start automating right away.

3 RPA use cases for SAP

Supply chain management

Various supply chain management processes can be automated in SAP with RPA. Here are some SAP RPA use cases you might want to consider:

• Production, purchase, and delivery orders. The bot can read information from an email or another source, log in to SAP SCM, create an order, and, if required, send an email to interested parties. A similar process can be applied to updating and canceling orders, as well as regular tracking of the order status.

• Goods issue. The bot can use the information in the order to register an issue of goods and quickly update the information about the available material.

• Supplier evaluation. A bot can read and compare information about different suppliers, thus simplifying the selection process. It can constantly monitor and detect any changes in the supplier data and help to react to these changes more quickly.

Automating these SAP tasks will not only decrease the manual effort in these processes but also greatly enhance their accuracy due to the elimination of human errors.

Accounts Payable

Accounts payable automation in SAP helps increase the accuracy of data that is used in the processes. There are several examples of how RPA can be used in this module.

You can automate all operations with vendors, including creating new vendors, updating their master data, deleting and blocking vendors. Another good fit for automation is invoice payment operations, such as posting invoices to the system and creating outgoing payments. The data that needs to be fed into the system often comes in non-digital formats like scanned PDF files or images and require OCR capabilities.

Reports generation

Another process on the list of SAP RPA use cases is automating reports generation. The process is strictly rule-based so it can be easily automated using RPA capabilities: log into SAP – fill in the required data in the report – click the Generate button – send the report via an email or share with interested parties in any other way.

How business users can get started with SAP automation

Getting started with robotic process automation in SAP is easier than you might think. You just need to follow this short step-by-step guide:

Step 1. Select and install the SAP automation tool

While SAP now offers its own RPA, a lot of processes involving SAP also use other applications, such as Excel, Outlook, various web applications. So, look for an RPA tool with out-of-the-box SAP support that will also be able to work with other applications that are used in the automated business process.

Step 2. Prepare SAP client for automation

Before getting down to automating your tasks, make sure that SAP client is set up according to the instruction. It is always a good practice to consult with your IT team at this stage.

Step 3. Read learning materials and take the training

Now that the RPA software is installed and SAP is set up and ready for automation, familiarize yourself with general rules and best practices of robotic process automation in SAP. If you don’t like studying the learning materials haphazardly and prefer structured and guided training, take a short course Automation Kit for SAP - it will not only guide you through all required Knowledge Base articles and video tutorials, but also show examples of RPA in SAP that you can download, run, and study.