[MUSIC PLAYING] Welcome, everyone. My name is Natasha
Josipovic, and I'm a Product Strategist at SAP
Build Process Automation. I have the pleasure
to be here today with my co- speaker, Moritz
Martin from Arvato Systems. Thanks, Natasha, and a warm
welcome from my side as well. My name is Moritz Martin. I'm a Business
Transformation Consultant at Arvato Systems with a focus
on SAP and process automation solutions, and I
will guide you later on about the view
of Arvato systems on low-code, no-code
solutions. Thanks a lot, Moritz. So to start with, I
would like to give you a brief overview what SAP
Build and SAP Build Process Automation is all about. The SAP Build portfolio, powered
by SAP Business Technology platform, combines our
low-code, no-code solutions, which enable users
of all skill levels to easily create applications,
to automate tedious processes, and to design engaging
business sites. With SAP Build, pro developers
and line-of-business builders can build visually
using drag-a
nd-drop with simplicity and libraries
of pre-built content. They can integrate smoothly
with SAP and non-SAP systems and can collaborate
effectively, bringing together business and developers
to work in fusion teams. Let's double-click on SAP
Build Process Automation. Before your organization
can adopt it, tools like SAP's
Signavio can help you to identify bottlenecks
and process inefficiencies. Once you've identified
areas for improvement, SAP Build Process
Automation is then available to help
business
users to refine, optimize, and automate processes. For those of you being
familiar with workflow and iRPA solutions, this is the next
iteration of those solutions, bringing together
workflow, AI, iRPA, and a beautiful UI that helps
you to build your processes without any line of code. Let's go through some
of the capabilities that SAP Build Process
Automation offers to you. The Process Builder and the Form
Builder make it very easy to, first of you, define your
process and workflow; and
secondly, create
Request and Approval Forms with the
required input fields that you would need in a
very visual way just using drag-and-drop. Business rules
and decisions help you to include business
logic into your processes. If you want to accelerate
the time to build, you can leverage one of our
pre-built content packages. Embedded task
automation capabilities allow you to automate tedious
and manual tasks that could occur during your processes. SAP Build Process
Automation also allows you t
o take advantage of
embedded document-understanding capabilities to intelligently
extract data from documents. In the unified launchpad
and task center, we offer a central place
for all of your user tasks. And last but not least, we
know that transparency is key. And that's why SAP
Build Process Automation comes with integrated
dashboards that you can enable in just
a couple of clicks that help you to stay on top of
all your relevant process KPIs. All of this can be used together
with other appl
ications, of course, because
we want to support our customers to maximize
the value of automations. Every day, SAP
helps customers with mission-critical processes, like
lead to cash, hire to retire, design to operate,
and source to pay. There are tons of use cases
around those core processes that touch many systems
and departments. Those are often still manual,
distributed, sometimes even paper-based that
our customers now want to automate with SAP
Build Process Automation. Let's take invoice
ap
provals as an example. Processing and approving of
invoices is often a manually distributed process. Various systems and
people are involved. And there's a huge potential
to automate certain steps in that process, such as
extracting information from invoices and routing them
to the right approver based on amount or invoice type. Now, let's hear from Moritz
how Arvato Systems, as part of the Bertelsmann
Group, is leveraging the potential of no-code,
low-code to automate their business. Moritz, ov
er to you. Thanks, Natasha,
for the introduction and the great overview about
the capabilities of SAP Build Process Automation. In the next 15 minutes,
I will give you a brief overview about
why we at Arvato Systems deal with process automation
and low-code, no-code solutions in particular; how our
journey with SAP Build Process Automation was so far
and will continue; and what we think how
processes in general will be optimized in the
future by low-code, no-code. Why do we talk so much about
pr
ocess automation today? Actually, the answer to
this is quite obvious. Nowadays, every company
faces a number of challenges in the area of digitalization. So do we. So do our customers. On the one hand, there are
complex and rapidly-changing markets and customer
requirements as well as the shortage
of qualified employees, especially in the IT sector. On the other hand,
the classic IT stack is not flexible enough to build
autonomous processes quickly and cost-efficiently. We, as Arvato Systems, w
ant
to bring process automation for ourselves and for our
customers to the next level, so we are focusing
on hyper automation. That's why we really
got interested in SAP activities in this area
in a really early stage. So let's get a little bit
deeper about our excitement for low-code, no-code. I already talked
about the problems that we are seeing today. We have increasing data
volumes in companies. Data becomes, in
general, more important, so we want database decisions. Markets becomes more
co
mplex at the same time. And skilled workers,
in the worst case, they should be managed with
complexability and the status. But they are most likely
busy with non-valuable tasks, repetitive tasks, easy
tasks, mailing something, not really designed and
transparent processes. So the increase of
process automation is a must for every company. Low-code, no-code could be a
great solution here because low-code, no-code comes
with some really nice characteristics to face
exactly these challenges. For ex
ample, it cancels
out the trade-off between automation
costs and process size. What does it mean? Now, even smaller
processes can be automated with a positive
price value ratio. Low-code, no-code offers
also employees the power to automate their own processes. So now, you don't need
demand management, pro developers, so on, to
automate operative processes. But you give the
people who operate these processes in
their daily work life the power to automate
their processes themselves by creating thi
s new role
of citizen developers. This also causes a relief of
your professional developers, and you get a high automation
quota at the same time. So a win-win situation. And actually, with
more automation, you can save time and
money and your employees can even focusing more
on value-editing tasks. So you can say it's a
win-win-win situation. Since low-code, no-code
touch an exciting topic, we were obviously
also excited when SAP put it on their roadmap. And we were thrilled
to be able to join
this journey at a
really early stage and create our
own journey on it. So let me elaborate how our
journey started with SAP. We started evaluating SAP
Build Process Automation at a really early stage. And it has been great to see
it become more and more useful for our defined cases,
cases with each iteration. Given the progress that
has been made so far and the roadmap that
has been defined, I'm sure that SAP Build
Process Automation will get even better in the
months and years to come. But even
today, there
are some features that are truly worth
mentioning and that I would like to
mention now or that are maybe even
mentioned by Natasha before in the introduction. So the really outstanding
thing for SAP Build Process Automation is that it is
built for citizen developers. We tried it in our own
company with colleagues that don't come from a
development perspective at all, that were more from a
operative perspective, process managers. And the tool is definitely
easy to use and operate fo
r such roles. It was not a challenge for
them to get along with the tool and also made their first
processes on their own. The other two things
I like to mention that are great
capabilities, I think, are the pre-built content
that become more and more within the last month. That means for us
that we don't have to start from scratch for
most of our processes. We can just search for the best
fit in the pre-built contents and start from there and
just make our adjustments to our processes. And the
third thing is the
easy and natural integration of AI and RPA capabilities. Especially the RPA capabilities
are an amazing thing, that you have
workflow capabilities and robotic process automation
capabilities all in one tool and you have really
sufficient way to put these two things
together in SAP Build Process Automation. So let us see how it works live. For today's session, I
brought a small use case from Arvato Systems
that we have tried to automate with SAP
Build Process Automation. And ju
st to give you a small
introduction into the context, the process is part
of our IT governance and deals with the management
of software licenses. So maybe you have something
similar in your company. For some software products
like, MS Projects, for example, it's not possible to
just use it directly. Instead, you need the
approval of your supervisor. And with this, you can order
the assignment of the software from our skilled service desk. To show you how easy it was to
automate this process wit
h SAP Build Process Automation, we
created a small demo video. A colleague of
mine will guide you through the building blocks
that were necessary to automate this process, and he
will also show you how the design process
can be operated. Have fun. [VIDEO PLAYBACK] Hi, everyone, and
welcome to our short demo regarding process automation. In the following,
I will show you our solution for the
automatization of the process we just described to you. We will start here
in the overview, and the first
thing we want to do is to open the actual process. By clicking on the name,
I open the process view and now we can see
the whole process. Every process needs to
start with a trigger, which, in this case, is a
form, which later will be accessible by a URL. So let's have a look at
this form in the editor. For me, I can edit the form
by simply drag-and-drop layout or input elements from the left
into the form, just like this. But for now, we do not need
additional information, so I will delete
this
object again. In this form, the
requester has to fill in several information, which
is needed later in the process. In this case, he has
to type in his email address, choose the license
he wants to acquire, and his department he works for. All right. So that's all about the form. Going back to the
first overview, we can see that our next
step is the decision. Here, we use a decision table
to assign the correct supervisor as well as the
correct cost center to the different departments. And while
here, we
use the information the requester gave us
with the help of the form. So if the requester,
for example, works at the human resource
department and, of course, types this is correctly
into the form, the supervisor would be Jane, as
you can see here in the table. But what if he
types in the wrong or a not-existing department? Then the fields are all filled
in with the word "missing." So to conclude, this step is
used to identify the right person who has the authority
to make the decision
if the requester is allowed
to license a software or if he isn't. After we have identified
the correct supervisor, an email is sent to him
automatically to inform him about the request. Also, we create
an approval task. The approval task is
very similar to a form with the addition of
two buttons, the Reject and the Approve button. In our process, a supervisor
gets the information, who is the requester,
what license is requested, and what department
the requester selected. With this information,
you
now can make the decision if you want to approve
or reject the request. After the decision,
the requester gets an email, which is
sent automatically to him. The email informs
him about the result so if the request was
approved or rejected. If the request was
approved, a second email gets sent but now
to the help desk. And the help desk
from here on overtake the task of providing
the requester with the correct software. Otherwise, the process
ends immediately after the email
to the requester.
Of course, this was
the happy path and just the path when
everything works fine. But what if the requester filled
in the wrong or not-existing department? As I already mentioned,
if this happens, the variable email get
a value of "missing." And exactly this is
checked by the gateway here at the beginning. So if the email variable
is equal to "missing," we go another path where
the QM team gets the task to fill in the
correct information. If the QM team has the
required information, the process
can be
executed as normal, starting with informing
the supervisor via email. But now, let us
execute a process. Important to mention
here is, for this demo, all tasks are sent to
me or to my account. Normally, of course,
each task would be created by a different person. To execute a process, it
first has to be deployed. After we deploy it, I can
use the URL from the trigger and augment in our browser. What you get is
the trigger form, which, when it is
submitted, start the execution of the proce
ss. Let me just type
in some information and start the process. I use HR to show you
what happens if I type in the wrong department. So now, I start the process. Now, we can go to my inbox
where the task should be listed. As you can see, I got to
task check supervisor. I click on the
task, and now I can see I have to fill in some
additional information. I fill in the
correct supervisor, which is Jane Doe, and
the correct department, human resource. And now, I can click Submit. Now, if I refresh
the browser,
the task request approval, which would normally be sent to
the supervisor, is in my inbox. I checked information
and I can give a comment and now I can click Submit. With this, the
process is executed and we do not have to
take further actions. Thank you for your attention,
and now back to Moritz. [END PLAYBACK] [SOUND EFFECTS PLAYING] As we have seen, it was
possible to automate the complete process with
SAP Build Process Automation. And we also gain some
benefits from this automat
ion with a designed and
automated process to have a fast
processing of requests and avoid unnecessary loops. So before you maybe should
mail the skilled service desk, the skilled service mail has got
back with information request to your supervisor,
and so on, now we have really designed processes. No informations are missing. We also have a
higher transparency about requests via the
built-in monitor functions and visibility scenarios that
are also possible with SAP Build Process Automation. We
haven't even taken
it to the limit yet, especially the last step,
the assignment of a software, could be done by RPA
automation in the future maybe. So there is room for
future improvements, even in this automated case now. Speaking of the future,
so what is the future of low-code, no-code
process automation in general and SAP Build
Process Automation, in particular from
our point of view? First of all, we have to
say that we definitely see a bunch of use cases where
low-code, no-code process au
tomation would be helpful. Natasha already showed some
general fields of interest in the introduction, so there is
a broad range of possibilities where low-code, no-code process
automation can be leveraged. The case is listed here
on the slide, our own or from our customers. And we already got a
little bit deeper there, so we already evaluate the
business case for automating these kind of cases. So for example, we have
this area of IT governance processes, like our licensing
example from the dem
onstration. We have authorization
requests, for example, in the context of SAP
rights management. We have things like the
cost center management so the creation, changing,
deletion of single cost centers. Their special field
of interest is the management of signing
authorities or legal or foreign signing authorities,
so the management of signing authorities
that you are allowed to sign certain kind
of contracts, for example. As you can see, we can
think about many ways where low-code, no-code
au
tomation can be helpful. What does that mean for the
general future perspective on low-code, no-code? In general, we see there
a great future perspective for low-code, no-code obviously. But there are also
some pitfalls that comes with it and some
points that should be clarified before implementing
a low-code, no-code platform, like governance and
architectural guidelines and questions. The role of a citizen
developer should be defined before using
low-code, no-code or with a use of low-code, no
-code. You should think about
the communication model between citizen
developers and professional IT. So these are things
that could be pitfalls when using low-code, no-code
and that you should really consider before using it
or when you start using it. However, using low-code,
no-code changes the way we can face the digitalization
challenges and the challenges that I mentioned
at the beginning. And the capabilities of SAP
Build Process Automation in particular and low-code,
no-code in general a
re, in many cases,
quite useful. So especially, when it comes to
digitalized manual processes, you can really have
a quick start where and really claim fast results. You will have a
possibility of bridging system gaps between
larger platforms because low-code, no-code
solutions and SAP Build Process Automation is a really
lightweight solution for building workflows
between systems like SAP and your CRM or SAP
CRM, for example. So here, you have
really the possibility of bridging gaps between
lar
ger platforms. Therefore, low-code,
no-code will be an important part
of future enterprise architectures definitely. And that's why we, as Arvato
Systems, will stay on the topic and take further steps
in the area of low-code, no-code in the future. With this, I come to
the end of my part and the perspective of
Arvato Systems on the topic. Thank you for the attention
so far, and back to Natasha for the closing. Thanks a lot, Moritz,
for showing us how Arvato Systems
is accelerating business autom
ation with the
power of low-code, no-code. Got interested yourself? Get started today and check
out our community and learning offerings. You can just easily
scan the QR code here. We also offer a variety of
other sessions and workshops at SAP TechEd this year where
you can learn more about SAP Build Process Automation. In addition, here are some
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questions answered. Find all the great content
at learning.sap.com/teched. I hope that you
enjoyed our session. Thanks for joining
us today, and have a gre
at rest of the TechEd. [MUSIC PLAYING]
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