At its annual SAP TechEd online conference, the company unveiled new capabilities within the SAP Cloud Platform Extension Suite set to help businesses better configure and automate enterprise workflows.
The three new offerings are geared toward helping businesses better configure and automate enterprise workflows. The process automation tools include SAP Cloud Platform Workflow Management for low-code automation of enterprise workflows, including between its ERP and Qualtrics customer experience platforms. There is also SAP Ruum for business users with no coding skills to automate departmental processes. And finally, SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation 2.0, a limited edition which will be included with every S/4HANA Cloud subscription from January 2021.
This marks an important milestone toward achieving a complete transformation for the 48-year-old company and 40-year-old CEO Christian Klein.
The Cloud Platform Workflow Management tool is set to enable people with little or no coding experience to build operational workflows. The platform includes predefined workflows, such as employee onboarding, and can be used in combination with Qualtrics, the company SAP acquired in 2018 for $8 billion.
SAP CTO Juergen Mueller told Tech Crunch that the company sees these types of activities in a much larger context. In the hiring example, that means it is more than simply the act of being hired and getting started. "We like to think in end-to-end processes, and the one fitting into the employee onboarding would be recruited to retire. So it would start at talent acquisition," he said.
Ruum is currently undergoing beta testing. SAP Ruum provides tools to business users who have no coding experience with a way to model departmental work processes in hours instead of days—or longer.
The new and improved version of SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is targeted toward developers who need to automate repetitive, manual tasks using software bots. SAP announced the initial version of RPA at SAP Sapphire in 2019. The latest Intelligent RPA release includes pre-built bot templates for SAP S/4HANA applications and 12 lines of business. Starting in January SAP will include a limited edition of SAP Intelligent RPA in S/4HANA Cloud subscriptions.
The new offerings will ramp up the cloud war between competitors, SAP and Oracle, as SAP races to offer fully integrated SaaS applications and solutions before Oracle.
