RPA bots with Automate SAP Data API for Greater Agility and TCO

Key Takeaways:

• Having just one automation solution from a single provider isn’t the answer for all the various automation needs in your business.

• Enhance business agility by integrating RPA bots with the Automate SAP Data API, enabling quick adjustments to automation scripts as your business needs change.

Sometimes when you have a hammer, it’s tempting to strike all of the loose nails in sight.

Some automation providers or customers seem to adopt a similar mindset – they have one automation platform, and try to use it for every automation need in their business.

According to Gartner, though, companies are best served with an automation toolbox made up of different automation solutions from different providers.

To explore this, I’m going to share how robotic process automation (RPA) bots can work with Precisely Automate SAP Data API – a feature of Automate Studio Manager and Automate Evolve. It’s important to keep in mind that the points we’ll cover today also apply for bot usage with the Automate Evolve Digital Access API as well.

The Best Automation Approach for You: Key Considerations

A key component of many businesses’ digital transformation journey is handling the double-digit growth rate of data within the enterprise. We hear it all the time from customers – they want to increase their productivity by putting data automation into the hands of their business data subject matter experts, especially their SAP ERP data experts who manage processes like mass uploads of data into SAP S/4HANA.

Justin Trudeau famously said, “The pace of change has never been this fast, yet it will never be this slow again.” When you apply that kind of thinking to your automation journey, there are a few key factors to keep in mind when deciding on the best automation tool approach to a given problem:

• total cost of ownership (TCO) for automation
• available skill pool for automation
• enablement of business agility

You also need to keep scalability in mind: will this solution have the capacity to move at the speed of your business decision-making and keep up with changes in business direction?

Given these factors, a single automation tool from a single automation provider may not be the best approach for automating your SAP data uploads.

Let’s dive deeper into these considerations.

TCO: divide and conquer – while reducing costs

When it comes to achieving the lowest TCO, we recommend isolating your costly and limited capacity of more technically skilled resources (the RPA developers) so that they’re solely focused on creating RPA bots, without having to be a domain subject matter expert in SAP data.

RPA bot developers don’t have to understand the usage of the SAP GUI, GUI for HTML or Fiori app client. Instead, all that knowledge can reside with the non-technical business user closest to the data, business processes, and practices associated with the data in the SAP ERP system.

This citizen developer approach helps you reduce costs, compared to stretching your technical RPA bot developer resources – and the business user doesn’t need to be technically skilled to use Automate Studio to create a script using any of those SAP clients. We’ve seen this proven true time and time again through more than a decade of SAP customers using Winshuttle Studio and now Precisely Automate Studio.

With that as context, the TCO is less about the cost of automation script generation and more about the cost of ongoing script maintenance and adjustments as your data and business process needs change over time (remember the need to handle data growth, respond to market changes, and make better business decisions with automation agility).

The bottom line? Separating the work into two different areas of responsibility is best for efficiency and costs:

• The RPA bot developer can programmatically call a simple Precisely Automate SAP Data API that launches a Studio script, without having to learn the details about what’s in the data, the Studio script, its associated business rules, and why or how it needs to change over time.
• The Studio developer, on the other hand, has the SAP client familiarity and the data and rules knowledge to create and maintain the no-code Studio scripts at a lower cost.

All of this can be achieved within an IT governance framework that manages entitlements and access to users and automation scripts.

But it’s more than just a TCO decision.

Skill pool management

You need to strategically employ your resources on a best-fit skilled resource and resource capacity basis. RPA bot writers should focus on the automation tasks that:

• are technically challenging to develop
• will require ongoing maintenance

This will accommodate their limited bandwidth and avoid the need to train them on the business data, rules, and processes. This level of automation maturity is served by the combination of an RPA bot automation platform with the Precisely Automate product APIs, which wrap Studio scripts into an easy-to-consume API for each automation solution you need.

Prioritize agility

Business agility is just as important as TCO and your available skill resource pool. Agility is the combination of changes in both speed and direction. As your data grows, the need for increased automation speed with mass data use cases increases; market changes force business practices changes; supply chains and regulatory requirements are always on the move.

Because of these factors and more, your organization needs to be able to pivot business practices, datasets, and rules – fast (think hours or minutes, not days).

Here’s a common scenario we’ve seen through our engagements with customers:

Studio developers in meetings with their peers, internal business data and process owners, discussing how to effectively adapt to rapid business changes. At the end of these hour-long meetings, the question from the boss is often: “How long will it take to adjust our automation to meet these dynamic business needs?” And typically, the Studio developer can respond that they’ve already modified the script during the meeting itself, leaving only the extent of testing to be decided.

Your organization’s data automation and overall automation maturity and capacity must be agile enough to move at the speed of your business decision-making.  This can best be achieved by empowering the employees who are:

• closest to the business function and its associated data
• knowledgeable about the business rules and rationale for them
• familiar with the user interfaces of the systems of record
• up to date on business priorities and practices

These are your citizen developers who can create, modify, and maintain your SAP data as Studio developers using no-code automation. They can then offer a simple integration point (API) for the RPA bot developers to simply associate a data file and automation script to upload your data in SAP ERP systems like ECC and S/4HANA.

Maximize Your Automation Efficiency with a Dual Approach

Ultimately, we’ve heard from countless customers who’ve tried to replace their Studio automation scripts with an RPA bot-only approach, only to realize that it’s the joint usage of these two automation platforms – RPA bots with the Automate SAP Data API – that optimizes their business outcomes, controls automation costs, and provides business efficiency.

So remember, to maximize your results, you need to prioritize all three of the areas we’ve explored: TCO, your available skill pool, and business agility.

If you’re ready to unlock new opportunities today, see the power of automation in action with our product demo Automate Evolve APIs.  This demo provides an overview of the APIs available through the Precisely Automate Platform and provides a technical deep-dive into how to implement them to drive greater efficiencies in SAP-centric processes that involve other applications.