The monotony of administrative tasks like processing invoices, purchase orders, and travel vouchers can be cumbersome for most administrative personnel. As more of these business files and documents are received on email addresses, users need to check them and decide what to do next.
In short, even ERP tools like SAP Business One requires manual entry of data into their system. This is no longer the case. Using Intelligent Automation for SAP Business One, you can now automate these manual processes and simplify your administrator’s job.
What is Intelligent Automation for SAP Business One (or B1) – and what are some of its best practices? Let’s explore.
What is Intelligent Automation?
Also referred to as SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation (RPA), intelligent automation is the first wave of automation bots (or bot templates) released by SAP. These out-of-the-box bots can be customized to your business requirements and used to automate your repetitive business processes.
How does it work? Simply put, it uses tools like SAP Process Automation and RPA along with technologies like Document Information Extraction to automate end-to-end business processes.
What is the impact of automation on SAP? Intelligent automation can be used across various use cases, including the following ones:
- Uploading and processing vendor invoices.
- Creating sales orders based on received purchase orders.
- Downloading and classifying email attachments.
Intelligent automation can save both time and money for companies by taking over manual and repetitive tasks performed by their employees. Although this may sound trivial, intelligent automation can multiply cost benefits for companies having a large workforce. Besides reducing costs, automation can also improve work efficiency by eliminating “manual” errors.
Next, let us take a detailed look at how Intelligent automation works in SAP B1.
How does SAP B1 Intelligent Automation Work?
As part of SAP Business One, the “Document Information Extraction” service feature can now be used to extract relevant information from unstructured business files. This service feature is available at no extra cost and is part of the SAP Process Automation license.
Also Read: How Easy to Maintain Cost of SAP Business One
With this service, you have access to a set of pre-trained machine learning models for invoices, purchase orders, and payment advice. Additionally, you can use the template functionality to extend this service to your customised business documents. Here are some of the bot templates that are available out-of-the-box with this service:
- Email business document extraction
- Proof of delivery note uploading to invoices and outbound deliveries
- Sales order creation from a local customer purchase order
- Supplier invoice uploading for intelligent scanning
- Master data enriching for identifying business partners
Next, let us look at how to set up the best practices for process automation for SAP Business One.
How to Set Up Intelligent Automation in SAP B1
To set up Intelligent automation for SAP Business One, you can use the set of best templates for services like business process automation (BPA) and AI.
Here are the main 3 steps you need to execute for setting up intelligent automation in SAP B1:
- Configure and orchestrate the application development.
- Set up and deploy template bots (for best practices) during application development.
- Set up the Windows generic credentials.
Let’s look at each of these steps in more detail.
1. Configure and Orchestrate the Application Development
With a no-code/ low-code approach, SAP users can use the Application Development environment of the SAP Process Automation tool to design bots, automate tasks, and build workflows.
Also Read: How does the Mobile Application of SAP Business One Help?
For instance, with a no-code approach, SAP users can use an intuitive and user-friendly interface to build their bots. Expert developers and business users can also use this interface to build (or edit) their cloud projects (without writing any code).
2. Set Up and Deploy Template Bots.
In the next step, you need to set up the best process automation templates for SAP B1 using the application development. This involves the following steps:
a. Acquire a project template from the SAP Process Automation store for use in SAP B1. From the application development tool, you can retrieve the bot from the Store > Publisher > More Information panel.
The acquired bot is released and is ready to be deployed. Each of these template bots also contains the following documents:
- Business case: that describes the business purpose of the bot.
- Technical specification: describes how to set up the bot including the technical details.
- Configuration file: that can be used as a template for specifying the rules for the bot.
b. Deploy the project template package and add a scheduled trigger to the automation project. The trigger executes the automation project – and creates multiple jobs based on the defined schedule.
You can execute the project template bot in either of the following ways:
- Trigger manually using the SAP Process Automation tool’s Application Development environment.
- Schedule the bot execution automatically based on a predefined timetable using the same SAP Process Automation tool.
c. After bot deployment, download and register the Desktop Agent and install it on the machine where you plan to run the process template bots. Effectively, the Desktop Agent application runs on any Windows machine and is used to execute the bots. The bots are also automatically assigned to specific agents through the SAP Process Automation Development.
3. Set Up the Generic Windows Credentials.
To run the automation bots on SAP B1, the bots need to have some user credentials for authentication. You can configure the credentials on the Windows Credentials Manager tool to secure the user data. From the “Generic Credentials” tool, define your username and password for SAP B1.
Conclusion
In summary, the intelligent automation feature in SAP Business One can help your business save time and money incurred in manual and repetitive processes. Irrespective of your industry, SAP Process Automation enables you to simplify and streamline your business processes. Can SAP customers in India also leverage intelligent automation capabilities? Not yet, but SAP is gradually rolling out this feature across the globe.
Through this article, we have discussed the impact of intelligent automation on your business processes – and how to set up this automation on SAP B1.
At Praxis Info solutions, we have an esteemed list of customers who have successfully leveraged the capabilities of SAP Business One to grow their businesses. Here is a recent blog on how to control project costs using SAP Business One.
Are you looking for professional expertise in SAP Business One? We may be the right people. Contact us with your business queries today.