eBook
Smarter SAP® Process Automation: From Using Fiori Apps to Leveraging APIs and More
Introduction
Manual data entry, disconnected workflows, integration challenges – these are all common issues that can slow down your business operations and compromise data quality.
The good news is that automating your complex, data-intensive SAP® processes can solve these challenges and transform the way you work.
Read on to explore how automation – powered by APIs, form-based workflow solutions, and no-code tools – can streamline your SAP-centric processes. You’ll discover:
- how to improve data management with a combination of desktop and workflow automation created and maintained by citizen developers
- the role of RESTful APIs in seamless system integration and end-to-end business process automation
- why a hosted automation solution is best for security, scalability, and cost-efficiency
- how Automate Studio for SAP Fiori and GUI for HTML expands easy-to-learn-and-use automation to web-based SAP client interfaces, beyond just automation for SAP GUI
With the right automation tools, your business can move faster, ensure better SAP process governance, and set the stage for a smooth transition to SAP S/4HANA. Let’s dive in.
Embrace a Cloud-First Future
Today, more organizations are adopting a “cloud-first” strategy for their core business applications – and it’s beneficial if you take the same approach to the automation of complex, data-intensive SAP processes.
SAP process automation delivers a combination of desktop and workflow automation capabilities that help you streamline and automate processes across your SAP landscape – helping you move faster, be more agile, and improve initial data quality. Doing this enables your business teams to make an impact at scale.
With cloud-based automation solutions, you can easily connect, combine, and enable automation solutions that span multiple application ecosystems while still maintaining your data security and controlling the rate of change caused by product upgrades. “Cloud-first” also means that employees, customers, partners, and vendors can be quickly and easily integrated into automated processes via browser-based web portals to access SAP data and initiate form-based process workflows.
Precisely Automate delivers the most capable, complete, and easy-to-use automation platform for complex, data-intensive processes centered around your SAP ERP systems.
Specifically, hosted Precisely Evolve is a workflow and process automation solution that gives you access to both desktop automation and integrated workflow management that can scale to handle your most demanding business process automation use cases without degrading performance. At a glance, this platform delivers:
- workflow automation – enabling you to reduce manual work and streamline your most complex processes to keep pace with a dynamic business landscape
- API connectivity – which further enhances your digital transformation and automation efforts, especially for unattended data uploading into your SAP ERP system
- a no-code/low-code environment for citizen developers – so your business users can scale up automation efforts while still maintaining tight control over user capabilities
- secure data management automation for mass data processes – enabling you to free up time and devote resources to more valuable tasks
- SAP process governance and data quality – with the ability to work faster, standardize and govern processes, and get SAP master data right the first time (and keep it right)
Let’s take a closer look at APIs in particular, and how they support your end-to-end business process or data management automation needs.
End-to-end automation of SAP-centric processes using APIs
In a 2024 survey of SAP customers, conducted in partnership between Precisely and the Americas’ SAP Users’ Group (ASUG), respondents were asked about their biggest challenges or pain points around process automation.
A significant finding was that integration with existing business processes was the top automation challenge, cited by 61% of organizations – this represents a surprising 22% increase from our 2023 survey.
What drives this trend? It’s likely several factors, including the growing use-case-by-use-case approach to automation, and the overall increase in automation adoption – which exposes the need for integration to deliver significant business improvement in SAP-centric processes.
If this integration struggle resonates with you, you’re likely wondering about the best way to solve it. That’s where Automate’s APIs – specifically, REST APIs, come into the picture.
What is a REST API?
Before diving into the details of three types of Automate Evolve REST APIs and the value they can offer your organization, let’s take a moment to start with the basics: what exactly is a REST API?
REST API stands for “Representational State Transfer Application Programming Interface.” This is a type of web service architecture that allows your applications to communicate with each other, without requiring developers to know the internal technical details of each
other’s systems.
They follow a set of design principles to access and manipulate data through web URLs, giving you a flexible, lightweight way to integrate different systems. This is key – because your business processes often
span multiple systems, from ERP to CRM platforms like Salesforce.
Automate Evolve REST APIs
Precisely Automate Evolve supports seamless end-to-end automation with a family of REST APIs, enabling you to manage and automate broader, end-to-end processes by connecting multiple systems and cloud services with SAP.
These APIs fall into three types:
- SAP Data APIs: Provides direct integration with SAP ERP for scenarios that don’t require data enrichment – it enables fast, secure process automation that doesn’t necessitate RPA bots to screen-scrape your UI. A software program like an RPA bot would call this Automate Evolve API to launch a Studio script.It’s important to also note that a combination of automation tools is the best way to connect your various systems. Many organizations using RPA bots are finding that having just one automation tool from a single provider isn’t answering all automation needs. Each use case is unique, and some may require multiple automation solutions from different providers. Find out more about why you want to leverage these APIs with other tools like RPA bots.
- Use case examples: embedding SAP Data APIs into generic RPA bots, partners, and third-party applications like Salesforce, Mulesoft, or Dell Boomai that need to interact with SAP ERP data.
- Digital Access APIs: A collection of Evolve APIs that enable external applications to connect to an Automate Evolve workflow – this includes, for example, APIs for launching a workflow process, interacting with tasks in a workflow, and querying workflow assignment data into another system. Users can add or update data before it’s posted to SAP.
- Use case examples: Using Salesforce with a customer data creation across CRM and ERP systems or product data creation across PLM and ERP.
- Third-Party API Support: Evolve’s outbound API support simplifies integration with other systems that have RESTful APIs, like ServiceNow or SAP systems that support Odata to read or update data easily. This can also be used in conjunction with the Digital Access APIs to manage and govern data using Evolve through complex process workflows, supporting your broader digital transformation initiatives.
- Use case examples: collecting data from multiple systems with data needed for a given use case, like new product introduction, that have complex process automation requirements.
It’s important to remember that a combination of automation tools is the best way to cost-efficiently scale automation throughout your organization. Don’t force an automation tool, or the developers that use it, to handle tasks it isn’t well suited for or that the people aren’t knowledgeable about. Use the best set of tools for the use case you’re working with.
Using these REST APIs, you’re able to efficiently integrate systems and processes while eliminating error-prone manual data management. That means better data quality and stronger SAP process governance.
Once you understand the value and possibilities Evolve offers, you may never run out of use case ideas that will bring more value to your organization.
For extra inspiration, watch and learn more with this demo of a Customer Business Partner Create with Evolve.
Automating SAP Fiori Processes with Automate Studio
Now, let’s talk about some exciting developments that will help you as you modernize or SAP ERP environment or continue to navigate your journey with SAP Fiori.
If you’ve adopted SAP S/4HANA ERP systems, are you still encountering challenges with data creation, collection, and management – even when using web-based interfaces like native Fiori apps and the SAP GUI for HTML?
Continued reliance on manual data entry for complex data tasks can slow down your business and result in low-quality, error-prone data. It’s time to unlock a better way to create and manage your data using SAP Fiori and GUI for HTML.
You can address many of these challenges with Automate Studio 24.1 or later, which delivers a simple way to automate and govern the creation and collection of SAP data through Excel spreadsheets. This data can be validated, corrected, reviewed, approved, and enhanced in the spreadsheets before being posted to your SAP ECC or SAP S/4HANA ERP systems.
What is SAP Fiori?
SAP Fiori is a design system used to create web-based business data applications that maintain a consistent user experience across different SAP systems. Built on the SAP UI5 framework, the three types of Fiori web browser apps are:
- factsheets that display information about specific objects, like purchase orders
- analytical apps that combine information from multiple sources, often displayed in dashboards
- transactional apps that support data creation or updates – this is the only app type that Automate Studio for Fiori automation supports, as these are for data creation tasks
Fiori apps are accessed through the Fiori Launchpad, a customizable, role-based interface where users can access both Fiori apps and classic SAP GUI apps (like GUI for HTML or WebDynpro).
It’s important to note that while some classic apps resemble Fiori, they don’t follow the Fiori design system – therefore, they aren’t true native Fiori apps and are based on dated technology.
Common challenges with Fiori apps
In our 2024 research with ASUG, almost all respondents (95%) said their organization is currently using or planning to use modern Fiori apps in some capacity – and the majority (58%) are using a combination of the Fiori apps and the SAP GUI client, rather than moving entirely to web-based UIs.
Common challenges remain with Fiori apps when compared to SAP GUI transactions:
- Manual data entry is still required, and Fiori apps can be complex – this leads to slow and error-prone processes.
- Some new functionalities are exclusive to Fiori – so you need to learn new workflows instead of relying on familiar SAP GUI transactions.
- Inconsistent user experience – The Fiori Launchpad can mix different app types (as mentioned earlier, it can be hard to differentiate true Fiori apps from classic SAP GUI apps), which causes inefficiencies and errors.
Automate Studio expands automation to web-based UIs
To address these challenges, Automate Studio now supports easy-to-learn and use automation for SAP Fiori transactional apps and GUI for HTML apps. This marks a major step forward, as SAP’s own Fiori App Library includes over 16,500 documented apps, with SAP UI5 Fiori and GUI for HTML apps making up the majority.
With the new Automate Studio capabilities, you’re able to:
- mass-create and update data using familiar Excel-based automation
- empower data stewardship by validating information before uploading it into SAP
- leverage deep SAP integration for fast and reliable uploads to SAP
- adopt a no-code/low-code approach so your business users can automate tasks without technical expertise or reliance on IT
Overall, you’ll gain greater flexibility and governance capabilities across your SAP ERP environments, with two new modules for SAP Fiori and SAP GUI for HTML that complement existing automation tools.
Here are a few other considerations to keep in mind:
- Fiori automation leverages API-based integration (OData) for scalable data upload speeds rather than running slowly using surface-level RPA screen scrapping. This boosts time to value and performance.
- No additional installation of a function module is required in SAP S/4HANA, aligning with SAP Clean Core strategies.
- Known limitations: The first release supports only data uploads (download automation will be added this year), and Fiori scripts cannot yet be used in Evolve Web Forms workflow solutions – this is on the roadmap.
Begin a seamless transition to SAP S/4HANA today
By automating data uploads for both SAP GUI and web-based interfaces, Automate Studio simplifies data-intensive processes, so you can ensure a seamless transition to SAP S/4HANA.
If you’re ready to explore these capabilities, the time to start is now. Request a free 30-day trial of Automate Studio and experience the best SAP Fiori automation solution in the market.
Elevate Your SAP Automation Strategy
Automating your SAP processes results in benefits like greater efficiency, data quality, and business agility.
As you’ve seen, a cloud-first, API-driven automation strategy that incorporates the most used SAP clients can transform how your organization manages SAP workflows, integrates systems, and maintains high-quality data.
When you leverage Precisely Automate solutions, you can:
- reduce manual effort with workflow automation and API connectivity
- improve SAP process governance and data integrity through streamlined automation
- scale your automation efforts with no-code/low-code automation – removing IT complexity
- seamlessly integrate SAP Fiori and GUI for HTML apps into your automation strategy
Stay ahead of the competition and try Automate Studio with a free trial, or get in touch with our Precisely experts directly to explore the best automation path for your business.