SAP runs SAP: Scaling enterprise automation with a center of excellence to simplify process and task automation

There are currently over 60 live automations produced with SAP Build Process Automation, with the same number again in the pipeline and another 30 currently being evaluated. Global finance and administration is leading the charge, followed by the Customer Success organization and HR, who use automations to extend processes such as lead to cash and hire to retire.

Global finance and administration worked with the process automation CoE to create the “order-to-cash cockpit VBO invoice automation” bot. In the lead-to-cash process, invoice creation for volume-based orders (VBO) required the operations team to perform manual checks in both the finance and IT systems. These checks help ensure correct data and pricing as well as customer access to the license. Then, the team had to manually create invoice documents in SAP S/4HANA. This was a repetitive, time-consuming, and error-prone process step. The unattended bot is now scheduled to run twice daily at certain hours, allowing for time zones and invoice dates. Automating information spot checks and the creation of invoice documents for correct orders means that up to 80% of these invoices can now be issued without manual checks. The bot surfaces only orders that may contain errors for the operations team to rectify, freeing the team to do more value-adding work, such as contract analytics. It also improves the first-time-right rate, reducing the time-consuming process of canceling and reissuing incorrect invoices and improving customer satisfaction. The finance team is using another bot (“termination of cloud contracts”) to automate processing when customers trigger a termination request. The automation helps ensure that the information on the request is accurate and then automatically updates the changing contract status across multiple back-end systems. The time to process a termination request has been reduced from 15 minutes to almost zero.

The Customer Success organization uses multiple process automations to help with data accuracy. Busy sales teams often have priorities other than constantly updating data in their customer relationship management (CRM) applications. This may lead to stale information in back-end systems, which has implications for operations teams wanting to contact customers about technical, licensing, pricing, or marketing matters, and may generate incorrect pipeline projections or even impact board decisions. The “key executive contacts hygiene” bot identifies accounts with aging, incomplete, or missing key executive contacts in CRM applications. It then generates an e-mail for the responsible account executive to remind them to update the data. If they don’t act, a report is sent to their manager. The bot also provides operations teams at global, regional, and market-unit levels with summary reports so they can engage when needed. Since the introduction of this automation, data accuracy for key executive contacts has more than doubled. Based on this bot’s success, the “sales genie” automation was created. It performs hygiene checks on opportunity data in CRM applications and automatically sends e-mails to sales teams flagging potential data quality issues that should be reviewed and validated to keep pipeline information up to date. Similarly, the “top deal reminder” bot sends an e-mail to opportunity owners when an opportunity has been flagged for board review. By helping ensure that opportunity information is up to date before it’s presented to the board, potential misunderstanding can be avoided, risks can be identified and mitigated, and decision-making can be improved.