Hyperautomation

What is the Hyperautomation hype all about? Sebastian Schroetel, Head of SAP Intelligent RPA, has shared with us his insights on Hyperautomation, Business Process Automation, Low-Code / No-Code and how to make everybody in the company a part of it.    

Dear Sebastian, Hyperautomation is currently one of the hottest topics in tech. What is new and different about it?

The goal of Hyperautomation is to automate everything from a simple task to complete processes. Through globalization and especially the worldwide pandemic, we’re facing accelerated market changes and the need for faster business process solutions. Hyperautomation combines several technologies such as machine learning, robotic process automation (RPA), work management tools and business process management, and provide a unified end-to-end experience that is agile and quickly adaptable. This combination gets us to a stronger overall solution that is greater than the sum of its parts.

A lot of companies are using automation tools. How can these augment the new potential of Hyperautomation?

This is where process mining and user behavior mining comes into the game. Through business process insights applications like Spotlight by SAP, you can mine and analyze operational data from existing business processes. For example, I can see how long users spend time at a specific process task and thereby discover frequencies and repetitions. This holistic approach reveals inefficiencies to derive potential for Hyperautomation.

In the era of Low-Code / No-Code solutions, automation applications can be created by citizen developers.

Is it true then, that most employees will soon automate processes by themselves without requiring support from professional developers?

Exactly! According to Gartner, low-code development will be responsible for more than 65% of application development activity by 2024. And the reason for this is obvious – the employees working with processes and applications every day are best informed about what is needed.

Just to be clear: We’re not talking about developers with a degree in computer science. Low-Code / No-Code empowers everybody in a company to build their workflows and implement them in their daily work, fully independently of IT support and without code. That is why it’s called "Citizen Development" - Hyperautomation can be executed by everybody.

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) as a system to manage main business processes, was born by SAP half a century ago. How is SAP approaching this topic today?

The SAP founders started our company with the simple idea that it is more efficient to run business processes with software than with pen and paper.

Today, SAP is investing in a wide set of business process automation technologies. Let’s look at our Business Technology Platform: We offer a BPM workflow tool set with SAP Ruum’s strong no-code workflow. Additionally, we have Ruum’s work management and collaboration features. Plus, with SAP Intelligent RPA we have strong SAP and non-SAP integration points.

For AI, we are offering AI business services to do automatic processing of documents and Conversational AI for vocal user interactions. Our low-code and multi-experience application development tool set allow our users and customers to build their own application or extend their SAP applications. Improving business processes is in SAP’s DNA, and that hasn’t changed within the last 50 years.

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Selected and published by EM Fahrer