Tech­nol­o­gy is chang­ing the way we do busi­ness. We can accom­plish every­thing from cus­tomer inter­ac­tions to exe­cut­ing and opti­miz­ing process­es more effi­cient­ly. Some say more intel­li­gent­ly. This means that busi­ness­es look­ing to stay rel­e­vant and com­pet­i­tive need to start adopt­ing end-to-end intel­li­gent tech­nolo­gies to keep pace with these changes — and the competition. 

The phrase ​“intel­li­gent enter­prise” isn’t new. And SAP cus­tomers have been hear­ing about it since SAP­PHIRE NOW in June 2018 as SAP start­ed ramp­ing up its efforts to be at the core of busi­ness trans­for­ma­tions. It’s not sim­ply imple­ment­ing the newest ERP sys­tem—SAP S/4HANA. Although that’s cer­tain­ly a step in the right direction. 

Sim­ply put, the intel­li­gent enter­prise is all about build­ing mod­ern end-to-end busi­ness process­es. It’s about col­lect­ing both expe­ri­ence and oper­a­tional data and using that to influ­ence busi­ness out­comes. ​“It’s about lis­ten­ing, under­stand­ing, and then act­ing on that infor­ma­tion,” said SAP SVP and Glob­al Head of Cus­tomer Inno­va­tion Tech­nol­o­gy and Inno­va­tion Anja Schnei­der. ​“The role of tech­nol­o­gy is to con­nect those bridges.” 

Build­ing Bridges to Intelligence

SAP recent­ly held its SAP Inno­va­tion Day for Part­ners, where it laid out the road map for next-gen­er­a­tion part­ner­ing, which is a mul­ti­year trans­for­ma­tive move­ment aimed at accel­er­at­ing part­ner-led inno­va­tion to work togeth­er to help cus­tomers real­ize the pow­er of becom­ing an intel­li­gent enterprise. 

“Cus­tomers feel the pres­sure to go on a dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion jour­ney,” Schnei­der said. ​“Now, more than ever, our cus­tomers have a strate­gic need for the right tech­nolo­gies that help them become intel­li­gent enter­pris­es and ful­ly cap­ture the unprece­dent­ed val­ue of the expe­ri­ence economy.” 

So, what are those ​“right tech­nolo­gies” and how do they con­nect one process with the next to form that bridge? Accord­ing to David Judge, VP of intel­li­gent enter­prise solu­tions at SAP, those tech­nolo­gies include robot­ic process automa­tion (RPA) and con­ver­sa­tion­al AI. Both these tech­nolo­gies help auto­mate human tasks and labor, allow­ing a busi­ness to be more effi­cient, and ulti­mate­ly, more effective. 

“The cen­ter point of intel­li­gence where many of our emerg­ing tech­nolo­gies sit, be they with­in ana­lyt­ics, or our data­base tech­nol­o­gy, appli­ca­tion devel­op­ment tech­nolo­gies, or the intel­li­gent tech­nolo­gies — things like blockchain, or Inter­net of Things (IoT), RPA, machine learn­ing, and con­ver­sa­tion­al AI — these are the tech­nolo­gies we believe will start to dri­ve inno­va­tion to the future and ulti­mate­ly cre­ate effi­cien­cies, but also new expe­ri­ences between the expe­ri­ence and oper­a­tional data sets,” Judge said. 

Mak­ing Intel­li­gent Con­nec­tions on an Enter­prise Level

Since its acqui­si­tion of Qualtrics in 2018, SAP has put an empha­sis on expe­ri­ence (X) and oper­a­tional (O) data work­ing in con­cert to answer both the what and why of a busi­ness. ​“Most orga­ni­za­tions under­stand what’s hap­pen­ing in their busi­ness,” Judge said. ​“But they don’t always under­stand the why. ​“They know what’s hap­pen­ing because they have sys­tems that cap­ture oper­a­tional data, cus­tomer trans­ac­tions, infor­ma­tion around the sup­ply chain, man­u­fac­tur­ing and spend­ing, the activ­i­ties of the work­force, etc. They can see the data through reports and dash­boards, and they can see trends, and some can even pre­dict what will hap­pen next with­in a cer­tain res­o­lu­tion. But if they want to influ­ence what will hap­pen next, the oth­er half of the pic­ture is necessary.”

SAP says to win the expe­ri­ence econ­o­my, orga­ni­za­tions need to con­nect the X with the O with­in as many touch points as pos­si­ble — cus­tomer, employ­ee, prod­uct, and brand— and on an ongo­ing basis to help guide busi­ness deci­sions. The most effi­cient way to do that, the most intel­li­gent way to do it, is to auto­mate as much of the process as possible. 

Tech­nolo­gies such as SAP Intel­li­gent RPA and SAP Con­ver­sa­tion­al AI are at the heart of how busi­ness­es can be more effec­tive. ​“These things togeth­er will form what we believe will be the prag­mat­ic end of what arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence will deliv­er to busi­ness­es,” Judge said. ​“Automa­tion is not just about effi­cien­cy. It’s about what orga­ni­za­tions can do with the freed-up effort and how the most effec­tive orga­ni­za­tion now can focus on high­er val­ue-added activities.” 

What Is SAP Intel­li­gent RPA? 

ASUG has cov­ered SAP’s ​“For­ay into Robot­ic Process Automa­tion,” but just to recap, what makes RPA at SAP intel­li­gent is that its opti­mized for use on SAP Cloud Plat­form (SCP), and that it can inte­grate with any SAP or non-SAP application. 

“Tra­di­tion­al RPA has a his­to­ry of bru­tal imple­men­ta­tions, where even small changes to under­ly­ing sys­tems can cause the upstream of automa­tion to break,” Judge said. ​“The SAP Intel­li­gent RPA approach, how­ev­er, sim­pli­fies inte­gra­tion by lever­ag­ing native con­nec­tors.” SAP solu­tions such as SAP S/4HANA have invest­ed in road map­ping pre­built skills in automa­tion that cus­tomers can lever­age to accel­er­ate deployment. 

The SAP Intel­li­gent RPA can be used in two modes: unat­tend­ed, which is a ful­ly auto­mat­ed process where bots are work­ing autonomous­ly with human super­vi­sion, or attend­ed, which is a par­tial­ly auto­mat­ed process where bots are cowork­ing with humans. This is also called Robot­ic Desk­top Automa­tion (RDA). You can auto­mate process­es via APIs and user inter­faces (UIs), and you can run SAP Intel­li­gent RPA on-premise or in the cloud using three dif­fer­ent solu­tions. The first is the Desk­top Stu­dio where you han­dle project devel­op­ment of work­loads and process­es you want to auto­mate. You can then move those work­loads or process­es to the Cloud Fac­to­ry where you orches­trate, mon­i­tor, and con­fig­ure your bot. And then last, but not least, the run­time of your solu­tion is the Desk­top Agent which runs in both attend­ed or unat­tend­ed mode. 

Work­ing with its ecosys­tem of part­ners, SAP aims to be the best inte­grat­ed RPA solu­tion for automat­ing SAP appli­ca­tions. It looks to offer robust and effi­cient solu­tions that reduce imple­men­ta­tion time and main­te­nance efforts, and to expand the pres­ence of AI by embed­ding it in the RPA core. 

What Is SAP Con­ver­sa­tion­al AI?

ASUG also has explored ​“Under­stand­ing SAP Con­ver­sa­tion­al AI and How It’s Being Used on SAP Dig­i­tal Chan­nels.” We learned that SAP is using this intel­li­gent tech­nol­o­gy to improve its own cus­tomers’ expe­ri­ence, but dur­ing the SAP Inno­va­tion Day for Part­ners, the focus was on how cus­tomers can use this tech­nol­o­gy with­in their own enterprises. 

“Like RPA, con­ver­sa­tion­al AI can be lever­aged to cre­ate automa­tion ben­e­fits,” Judge said. It can also dri­ve new cus­tomer expe­ri­ences that can be supe­ri­or to tra­di­tion­al inter­faces.” SAP’s Con­ver­sa­tion­al AI is SAP’s plat­form where cus­tomers and part­ners can build pow­er­ful con­ver­sa­tion­al inter­faces and chat­bots. There are cur­rent­ly more than 120,000 bots avail­able, and SAP has begun to embed con­ver­sa­tion­al inter­faces into its core plat­forms, includ­ing SAP S/4HANA and SAP Suc­cess­Fac­tors.

In 2018, 67% of con­sumers used con­ver­sa­tion­al inter­faces such as Ama­zon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri, just to name a cou­ple. They used the tech­nol­o­gy to auto­mate a task such as shut­ting off the lights or start­ing the car. But this tech­nol­o­gy can be used to not only light­en the load of tasks a con­sumer needs to com­plete, but employ­ees also. 

SAP has recent­ly made it eas­i­er for end-to-end bot build­ing on a col­lab­o­ra­tive plat­form with an intu­itive user expe­ri­ence while pro­vid­ing for seam­less inte­gra­tion with SAP prod­ucts. As SAP looks ahead, the plan is to include enhance­ments such as advanced dia­log mod­el­ing and sup­port for cus­tomer-spe­cif­ic data sets. It also plans to deliv­er bots as part of a prod­uct out of the box. 

Ways to Dri­ve the Intel­li­gent Enter­prise Journey 

To help cus­tomers along their adop­tion and con­sump­tion of these tech­nolo­gies, SAP has devel­oped two intel­li­gent tech­nol­o­gy pack­ages — Sil­ver and Gold — cur­rent­ly avail­able for SAP S/4HANA, SAP C/4HANA, and SAP Suc­cess­Fac­tors. The Sil­ver pack­age includes SAP Intel­li­gent RPA, SAP Con­ver­sa­tion­al AI, and SAP Machine Learn­ing Foun­da­tion. And the Gold pack­age includes all three plus SAP Ana­lyt­ics Cloud. 

SAP also offers 15 Guid­ed Out­comes solu­tions, which have a defined busi­ness out­come for mul­ti­ple lines of busi­ness. These guid­ed out­comes also address an end-to-end process, lever­age intel­li­gent tech­nolo­gies, or both to help a cus­tomer along their jour­ney to become a more intel­li­gent enterprise. 

“As a core part of our intel­li­gent enter­prise strat­e­gy,” Judge said, ​“we’ve begun to embed intel­li­gent tech­nolo­gies across the SAP appli­ca­tions suite. The ben­e­fits of automa­tion, con­ver­sa­tion­al AI, and of machine learn­ing will be lever­aged wher­ev­er they will derive cus­tomer value.” 

ASUG mem­bers have a lot to con­sid­er as they look to become intel­li­gent enter­pris­es. What does that look like, where should we start, and how do we get there? As you con­sid­er your options, start by under­stand­ing the process­es you cur­rent­ly have and the ways you want to improve them. 

Inter­est­ed in becom­ing an intel­li­gent enter­prise? Reg­is­ter for the ASUG on-demand webi­nar, ​“Deliv­er­ing the Intel­li­gent Enter­prise from Strat­e­gy to Action.”