Make your business resilient by adopting Hyperautomation

Introduction

More than ever there is pressure on businesses to transform and innovate under the current challenging market conditions. COVID-19 has disrupted supply chains and organisations are investigating their processes to improve and optimise their business operations. Challenges during COVID-19 include:

• Increased load on call centers and service centers
• An unexpected change in workload
• Need for true E2E business process digitalization
• Need for IT solutions that can be implemented and operated remotely
• Need to process workflows and documents remotely (e.g. invoices, expenses, etc.)
• No Capex budget for big IT projects

 Organisations are seeking better tools to identify business process issues including bottlenecks.  However, as greater challenges are met with remote work from home environments, employees are requesting greater support to assist them with their daily tasks. From automating the end of month financial closing, bank reconciliations to automating simple help desk tasks such as resetting your user account password. Simplifying approvals from your mobile device or automating PO's matching all your Ariba invoices. This is where the term “hyperautomation” takes precedence.

Defining Hyperautomation

Gartner’s Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2021 identifies “hyperautomation” as one of the strategic trends. According to Gartner, hyperautomation is “the idea that anything that can be automated in an organization should be automated.” Gartner estimates that automation has the potential to save 25,000 hours of manual work in finance departments and that 69% of routine work currently done by managers could be fully automated by 2024. Hyperautomation is the combination of our technology solutions to execute enterprise-wide business processes. IDC released a report, "The Business Value of AI-Enabled SAP Applications" and discovered that companies execute business processes 81% faster and 44% more efficiently. Hyperautomation allows a business's employees to focus on high-value tasks allowing technology to manage repetitive manual tasks such as receiving emails with invoices and processing them. Figure 1 represents how these services are combined to provide the Hyperautomation vision, this diagram was created by Bornet, Barkin and Wirtz who have published a book where they cover Intelligent Automation in greater detail. Fundamentally, humans are at the centre, the concept of Human In the Loop to govern and control the hyperautomated business processes. Let the machines complete the tedious repetitive tasks and let your employees invest in new concepts, ideas, methodologies, or products to enhance their current offerings to their customers.

Figure 1: Intelligent Automation from Bornet, Barkin and Wirtz

There are many sections in this diagram, I’ll focus purely on the technologies that are critical to business processes and where SAP has solutions to support a hyperautomation journey. I’ll append a section under Execution for user experience (UX). A well-researched UX can improve productivity and I’ll cover this in greater detail in the execution section. We’ll start with the bottom left section Language and work clockwise around the circle. I've provided an SAP equivalent of the hyperautomation tools offering (Figure 2), ensuring that we always keep humans in the centre and always in control.

Figure 2: Hyperautomation portflio from SAP

Language

For a system to be able to automate its processes, it must be able to understand the language that it is processing. Many solutions provide a natural language processing (NLP) solution so users can chat to a system to gain insight. For example, in my previous blog, we detailed how SAP Conversational AI (CAI) can be used to manage and monitor COVID-19 events and information. We are enhancing our NLP capabilities and providing FAQ features to simplify user interaction. The comprehensive toolset can be located at https://cai.tools.sap/, a blueprint document and guidance is avalable and includes a reference architecture (Figure 3), many customers have already embraced this approach including the Translation Hub that can simplify translating documents into different languages.

Figure 3: A reference architecture for Conversational AI

A great customer story in APJ is NHK since they were able to streamline customer support requests from 20,000 employees using Conversational AI and Service Ticket Intelligence. NHK were able to reduce a ticket issue that would take 30+ minutes in a call centre to under 5 minutes, improving customer/employee satisfaction. Rabobank utilised our Conversational AI technology to improve employee communications during COVID-19. Similar to our chatbot Bridge-IT, Rabobanks chatbot Billy provided automated responses 24x7 improving employee engagement and responding 100-150 messages per day. In APJ, we are also blessed with the Digital Lab team lead by Ashvini Kadaambi to support innovative case studies. Some great technical articles from her team members including Joni Liu who published embedding video in the chat, and combining the different chatbot capabilities.   In the next section, we’ll explore how you can utilise our Business Technology Platform (BTP) services to provide insights.  

Think and Learn

For an organisation to transform, the Think and Learn section is critical. Structured enterprise data is key since it is the repository of all the transactions and processes. The reality is organisations are struggling to apply AI Innovation to business processes (Figure 4).

Figure 4: Business struggling to implement AI to improve business process [1][2][3]

SAP has released a portfolio of services named SAP AI Business Services (Figure 5). These tools have been developed to target automating a specific business process. There are many examples of AI Business Services that will be covered in the following sections, the service I’ll document in greater detail is Invoice Object Recommendation. 

Figure 5: SAP AI Business Services and Applications

This is a powerful automation service that improves the CO-PA process by matching general ledger accounts and cost object assignment types with a given probability. Vodafone was one of the first customers to trial this with great success and spoke about this publicly at SapphireNOW 2020 (Video 1).

Video 1: Invoice Object Recommender at Vodafone

An AI Business Application that automates an organisations accounts receivable process by reconciling incoming payments is the Cash App. There are many customer examples, one example in APJ is Mistui that delivered 90% accuracy in reconciling accounts and reducing the manual effort.

SAP is a leader in data management and governance because you can only gain insight and apply intelligence once your data is in a format that can be understood. Severstal implemented Data Attribute Recommendation to improve the creation of new materials improving productivity by 21%. Moen reduced their customer support requests by 97%, they implemented Data Quality Management in combination with microservices for location data, simplifying retrieving the right address details. Having relevant data is even more essential during a crisis, with Parkland hospital, they turned to SAP to develop their Emergency room Grease Board using HANA and SAP Analytics Cloud. This provided:

• Increased visibility of current and trending ER patient volume creates better-informed ER decisions.
• Improved bed utilization allows for better throughput; increasing the number of patients seen each day.
• Increased patient satisfaction due to reduced wait times for admittance, care, and discharge.
• Improved clinical outcomes due to more efficiently managing ER volumes.

More on this great story can be found here. There are many more tools that can be listed, my colleague Vriddhi Shetty has provided a great overview of our tools (The rabbit hole that is SAP’s AI Landscape) including Data Intelligence, Data Warehouse Cloud, SAP Analytics Cloud.

Vision

Automating business processes that are dependant on documents requires the solution to understand the type of document, the information in the document, and what is required to settle the document. A great example of where this has been applied is at Villeroy & Boch, who implemented Document Classification to classify emailed documents and Document Information Extraction to process the contents of the documents. Document Information Extraction is far more extensive than a regular OCR service since it identifies data and how it is applied to master data to ensure governance and compliance with your enterprise data (Figure 6). This examples demonstrates why customers should use AI Business Services since these services are pre-trained and configured services to support enterprise business processes.

Figure 6: Document Information Extraction identifying master data. 

In many instances, organisations are unsure which processes can be improved. Therefore we need to provide the tools to diagnose, visualise and understand the current challenges in an organisations business processes. Business Process Intelligence (BPI) is key to understand the efficiency of your process. At SAP, a tool that identifies challenges in user behaviour is Spotlight. Spotlight is currently in Beta, so I’ll be happy to share customer experiences once the product has officially been released. 

To further strengthen SAP's capability in BPI, SAP recently acquired Signavio. Signavio provides a holistic solution and seamless user experience for process insights to actions which helps customers drive the digital transformation. It allows fast, agile and streamlined process optimization based on real-time insights, immediate recommendations for improvements, and automation. As a result, companies will be able to deploy resources more effectively and focus rather on innovation and high-value tasks. This will turn for them the digital transformation from an eventual difficulty into an actual opportunity to not only go with, but to even lead the way, there is a detailed explanation of this from our CFO Luka Mucic (Figure 7).

Figure 7: Business Process Intelligence framework.

Signavio will identify where automation can be applied and identify root causes using machine learning algorithms. To complement this further, SAP provides Process Visibility with embeddable real-time, event-driven views on process instances including process performance indicators and machine learning-based predictions. A customer reference, AkzoNobel improved 20% to 30% of their savings by accelerating order-to-cash and procure-to-pay business process. SAP identified that after analysing 255,000 lead objects and 1,000 process variants, 85% of these objects can be managed by standardising process in-line with 9 most common variants. Hyperautomation can be applied to an organisaitons migration and transformation as part of SAP's RISE program. For local Australian customers, looking beyond the global hyperscalers, these are Australian organisations leveraging Dell’s leading technologies (at the - edge, core & cloud) including VMware, Data Protection Suite. The benefits of Dell Cloud Service Providers (CSP) are:

• Locally owned/ operated datacentre’s (Macquarie, Zettagrid, Rackspace, NTT, Datacom.. etc.) ensuring 100% data sovereignty, improved latency & performance
• Flexible and customizable solutions to suit the customer's workload requirements – true benefits of as a Service – but more control over the design 
• Lower TCO and more ability to compare spend from different providers 
• MultiCloud deployments available – as the CSP’s have direct access to the various Hyperscalers networks for access to their Services. For example, customers may want to leverage different hyperscalers based on their service offering, whilst maintaining control of their data
• As CSP’s customer base may not be large, with this option, GB/ SMB businesses too can expect priority treatment and allied services
• Lastly, we could also involve Dell Financial Services (DFS) wherever appropriate to offer the customer/ partner amortized payment options

If you're interested in the Dell offering, please feel free to reach out to Subhi or Hanish for ANZ opportunities and Kevin ORielly for greater APJ.

Execution

In the previous sections we covered the ability to humanise technology with NLP, use data to think and learn and BPI to identify issues, but how do we execute? There are several services available in our BPI suite including SAP Intelligent RPA, SAP Business Rules, SAP Workflow Management, and Ruum. Intelligent RPA provides the ability to automate repetitive tasks in an attended or unattended mode. There are many great examples including the ability to extract invoices from email and our earlier reference in the vision section of Villeroy & Boch, Intelligent RPA was used to sequence the processes from extracting invoices in emails, identifying the documents using Document Classification and then processing them using Document Information Extraction. Daewoong Pharmaceutical launched 22 Intelligent RPA bots, which resulted in Savings of 5,720 person-hours by automating the downloading of the external open-market order information and create sales orders.  

Companies depend on SAP to provide standardised business workflow such as Lead to Cash, Recruit to retire, and numerous other processes (Figure 8). SAP has identified that these standard buisiness workflows make up 80% of an organisations workflow with only 20% being non-standard. SAP Workflow Management can be used to support automate these standard business workflows.

Figure 8: The number of standardised process in the enterprise

Delivery Hero processed 370 million orders in 2018 and this number increased expotentially during COVID-19. Using our BPI tools including Business Rules, Workflow Managerment and Document Service, we automated and expedited numerous processes for this customer to reduce their approval days from 20 down to 2 days. There are a number of predefined business processes we can utilise, including Purchase Requisition Approval, Vendor Onboarding and many more you can discover in the Discovery Centre. Another great customer story in our region is Zuellig pharmaceutical. They implemented a skew of our Bridge-IT bot named ZIA to support employee requests during the pandemic. They were also one of the first adopters of our Intelligent RPA and are about to implement Document Information Extraction to expedite their cases, more than 10,000 backlog auditing cases were expedited.

 One last area I will cover is UX. I’ve been involved in numerous customer engagements where the customer requested a simplified approach to entering and managing data. One of my favourite engagements was with Fonterra, we managed to improve their process order management function by 88% by developing a simplified Fiori application. There are many customer stories that include the combined collaboriation of SAP, Apple and the AppHaus network. The Vestas Application is a great reference on how they’ve improved maintaining their remote windmills using a mobile application, reducing 400,000 hours each year. A local example is the Stax application developed for Taronga Zoo by Bourne Digital, this allows their field staff to complete their approvals on the go and spend more time with the animals and managing the Zoo. SAP recently addressed these challenges with SAP Work Zone, this solution integrates workflow, external systems and mobile capability in a unified employee experience. 

Whats Next?

  SAP is your trusted hyperautomation partner since SAP can provide detailed preconfigured trained services and have the tools to sequence these services and automate business processes. SAP can provide the critical foundation of governance, enterprise-level support, and vision so you can succeed in your hyperautomation journey. SAP has been automating business processes for almost 50 years with different technologies. Hyperautomation is not only about supporting the different services but combining them in a logical sequence to complete business processes. I’m excited to see more services applied especially after our recent Signavio acquisition to enhance our BPI portfolio. 

Beyond automating business processes, SAP has began to heal enterprise systems with Business Operations Self Healing Service (BoSH). HPE was one of the first customers to embrace BoSH through their Max Attention contract, this provided 100% automation on restarting troubled systems through CAI. There are many more areas we are exploring this year including Federated Machine Learning for remote/distributed processing and tinyML where we process capabilities at the edge. SAP will continue to embed AI in the ERP core with our AI Factory approach (more will be shared in future blogs). 

If you’re interested in any of the topics above or would like our assistance to guide you through your hyperautomation journey, feel free to contact me or our team through the SAP Experience Centre. We'll organise a workshop to understand your business process using our BPI tools, meet with your users and identify recommendations to assist you on your hyperautomation journey. We look forward to working with you on innovating and enhancing your current business process.  

This article was possible with the great support of our SAP team and partners. Thank you to Anil Bhaskaran, Vriddhi Shetty, Nadine Hoffmann, Pierre Col, Boris Andree, Selim Ahmed Subhranshu Sekhar (Subhi), Hanish Tharakan and Kevin O'Rielly for your input.