Automated sales order processing in affidavits

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Hello. This is Enterprise Automation for SAP S/4HANA. My name is John Luu and today, we’ll find out how you can automate your financial processes to improve your business operations. Today, I'm joined by seasoned SAP Enterprise Automation experts with over 10 years of experience, Dwayne DeSylvia and Shantanu Sharma. Thank you both for joining us today. So, companies often receive sales orders in the form of Excel spreadsheets in large volumes and employees are often expected to manually enter the details to create sales orders in the system. So, how does this pose as a challenge to companies? Many companies, even those that have set up integration channels with large business partners, still receive order requests in shared folders or email attachments in the form of Excel spreadsheets. Internal members of their sales team must manually open and validate these spreadsheets for completeness and accuracy of the data such as around shipping and billing addresses, or even material codes in SAP. They must then manually create these sales orders in their SAP system which involves opening multiple transaction screens and manually typing in data for each and every order. And this approach is very time-consuming and error-prone. It increases the risks of inaccurate and incomplete sales orders that will delay delivery and reduce customer satisfaction. This seems like a common and tedious challenge that many companies face. What solutions is SAP offering to deal with this challenge? One of the solutions is a bot in SAP Build Process Automation, that automates the sales order creation process, allowing companies to create a large volume of sales orders in less time with reduced error. The bot monitors a specified base folder with Excel files and/or scans unread emails with Sales Order in the subject line, having the Excel files as attachments. The bot then transforms the Excel files to a structure that can be used by the sales order API. After that, the bot creates the sales orders in the system based on the details in the Excel file. And finally, the bot notifies relevant stakeholders with details of sales orders created in the system. Ah I see. So, that seems quite useful. How many sales orders are we talking about here? Large organizations can have 100s of business partners that operate in this fashion. So, let’s say that a company has a 100 business partners that each submit around 10 orders a month, resulting in around 12,000 orders a year that need to be manually processed. If each order takes around 10 minutes to process, this is around 2,000 hours, or approximately one full time equivalent. If any issues are encountered such as order form errors or the need for additional approvals, this can become hours or more per order. By using automation such as the prebuilt bot that Shantanu discussed, just this single activity of processing sales orders could free up the equivalent of a full-time person to perform much higher value activities. Such as evaluating customer lifetime value or exploring ways to improve customer satisfaction. Wow, that's definitely a huge difference. So, can you show us how this looks like in action? The Process Management Center of Excellence (CoE) of a large international company is looking to improve the performance of their sales order process which has been experiencing order delays due to submission errors. We start in SAP Signavio Process Insights which provides extensive out of the box process analytics. We’ve drilled down to performance indicators in the Lead to Cash process to check the automation rate of Sales documents created. Here we can see that only 8% of sales documents were automatically created, which is far below the industry average. Note that we ran this on Dec 8, 2022, before any of our process changes were made. Selecting Innovation Recommendations, we see a number of recommendations, to improve the process. Including the prebuilt automations such as Automatic Creation of Sales Orders From Excel. This will certainly have a positive impact on our order processing. So, let's move to SAP Build Process Automation to learn more. Here is the prebuilt content in the SAP Build Content Catalog. It contains a wealth of information including a list of documents, and artifacts in the project. Even an Excel template that we can share with our business partners to give them a quick start. To use this content, we simply need to define and configure our Environment Variables, which are defined here, and deploy the project. Let’s fast forward to see how this has impacted our process. We’ll move back to our benchmark and select the date about six months later after our automation has been running and we can see that our automation rate has jumped significantly to around 91%. This is a significant improvement and will certainly have a positive impact on our order process. Thanks for sharing, looks like a straightforward process. So, I understand that this “automatic creation of sales orders from Excel” bot is ready-to-use, but is there any possibility for expansion? Yeah absolutely! For starters, customers can download the bot from the SAP Build Store and they can then modify it per their scenario using tools in SAP Build. Specifically, customers can use SAP Build Process Automation which combines workflow management, RPA functionality, decision management, process visibility, and embedded AI capabilities into one intuitive low-code experience. Great! So, to summarize, we discussed that we can automate large volumes of sales orders from Excel spreadsheets to save hundreds of hours on manual, repetitive tasks. Thank you, Dwayne and Shantanu, for sharing this with us. Curious to learn more about SAP and how it can transform your business processes? Then head over to sap.com/enterprise-automation. Thanks, and see you next time!