There are a num­ber of rea­sons why arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence has become such a hot top­ic late­ly. Just a few of these include increas­es in pro­cess­ing pow­er, access to afford­able data stor­age, and the devel­op­ment of sophis­ti­cat­ed ana­lyt­ics. Plus, we can tie these ben­e­fits togeth­er through the cloud and its abil­i­ty to cre­ate net­works built from all of the com­po­nents men­tioned here.

These devel­op­ments give us a new chance to cre­ate soft­ware func­tions that work smarter, per­form bet­ter, and (in some cas­es) start to devel­op a lev­el of learn­ing that allows them to get smarter over time. 

In the most basic of terms, this is soft­ware engi­neer­ing that can do more for us in an auto­mat­ed way, with­out hav­ing to always be told what action to take next. The IT indus­try likes to call this Robot­ic Process Automa­tion, or RPA for short. 

Rec­og­niz­able and Vir­tu­al Robots

Robot­ic Process Automa­tion isn’t relat­ed to robots like the humanoid assis­tants at your local bank or the whirring kind that will mow your lawn for you. But it is all about the soft­ware robots (often just called bots) that can exe­cute tasks inside sys­tems run by any device.

When intel­li­gent­ly archi­tect­ed into enter­prise IT stacks, RPA can start to auto­mate many of the iden­ti­fi­able and quan­tifi­able process­es that a busi­ness must exe­cute every day. These could be tasks such as invoice match­ing, employ­ee vaca­tion time log­ging, or sched­ul­ing reg­u­lar meet­ings. It could also take care of pro­cure­ment for office facil­i­ties right down to mea­sur­ing how much paper is in the copi­er then auto­mat­i­cal­ly plac­ing a re-order or iden­ti­fy­ing when the air con­di­tion­ing needs ser­vic­ing by not­ing an unusu­al rise in the tem­per­a­ture. These hid­den or ​“vir­tu­al” bots could be an incred­i­bly pow­er­ful way to bring effi­cien­cy to a business. 

Bring­ing in Robot­ic Mus­cle

SAP has been work­ing to engi­neer a sig­nif­i­cant amount of RPA mus­cle into the SAP Leonar­do machine learn­ing port­fo­lio ever since its incep­tion. In addi­tion to expos­ing SAP Leonar­do to SAP’s own algo­rith­mic intel­li­gence (which SAP HANA ana­lyt­ics is part of), the com­pa­ny has been keen to devel­op this obvi­ous­ly valu­able adjunct to its own offerings. 

The lat­est addi­tion to the SAP RPA stack is its acqui­si­tion of Con­tex­tor SAS, a French RPA design and inte­gra­tion com­pa­ny with head­quar­ters in Paris. ​“Ooh la la,” you might say. ​“Why would busi­ness users want to per­form repet­i­tive tasks across their appli­ca­tion port­fo­lio when they could be sip­ping fine wines on the Champs-Élysées while watch­ing the world go by?” Now SAP has an answer for its cus­tomers. It has zeroed in on Con­tex­tor to gain its envi­able track record in soft­ware bot development. 

100,000 Bots Strong

How envi­able? To date, Contextor’s cus­tomers have deployed more than 100,000 bots automat­ing busi­ness process­es. SAP insists that Contextor’s approach to RPA will help sim­pli­fy user inter­face inter­ac­tions across both SAP and non-SAP applications. 

Contextor’s RPA tech­nol­o­gy will now com­bine with SAP Cloud Plat­form, con­ver­sa­tion­al AI tech­nol­o­gy, and doc­u­ment pro­cess­ing capa­bil­i­ties pro­vid­ed by SAP Leonar­do machine learn­ing to deliv­er what SAP calls Intel­li­gent RPA, or IRPA. 

“With intel­li­gent RPA accel­er­at­ed by Con­tex­tor, busi­ness­es will be able to achieve the high automa­tion lev­el nec­es­sary to become intel­li­gent enter­pris­es,” said Markus Noga, head of machine learn­ing at SAP. ​“The acqui­si­tion is a big step toward orches­trat­ing process automa­tion and will help SAP inject RPA capa­bil­i­ties into our appli­ca­tions, first and fore­most into SAP S/4HANA.”

Tune Up Now for Orches­tra­tion

Noga’s key word was ​“orches­trat­ing.” The way to ben­e­fit from RPA is to start using it to orches­trate (and then stand back from) busi­ness process­es that make sense to dri­ve auto­mat­i­cal­ly. These may be process­es that are tedious for human work­ers to com­plete, that require a high lev­el of resources, or that are prone to human error. 

The hard­er part (and rea­son why the Con­tex­tor acqui­si­tion makes sense) is that you need some­thing to feed those process­es into to orches­trate them. Now that engine will be SAP Leonar­do and its machine learn­ing capabilities.

To be clear, Con­tex­tor bots worked effec­tive­ly on their own (100,000 bot cus­tomers can’t be wrong). But now this tech­nol­o­gy offers what both firms are hop­ing is an eas­i­er route to consumption.

What’s Next for Contextor?

The inte­gra­tion of intel­li­gent RPA into SAP S/4HANA is expect­ed in the first half of 2019. Oth­er SAP appli­ca­tions will fol­low soon there­after. With Contextor’s RPA tech­nol­o­gy, SAP plans to auto­mate half of the busi­ness process­es sup­port­ed by its SAP ERP soft­ware over the next three years. So, fear not: The bots are com­ing. It’s time to fig­ure out what you can do with them. 

Want to bring arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence and machine learn­ing into your busi­ness? Join us on Decem­ber 11 at the NVIDIA head­quar­ters for an ASUG Exec­u­tive Exchange event.