Understanding the Automation of SAP using RPA
Transcript
[Music] alright thanks for joining us for another sponsored podcast by uipath and f8p Safire 2019 beautiful Orlando actually if you can tell by the hair I'm having into the hair day because it's not to you human that's not to human it's a little windy out there a little windy but not to do it but I was able to keep my hair straight believe it so we have Peter Villeroy hand of SAT practice and uipath and Peter right before the we hit record we're having a great
conversation about you know trading war stories on setting up new SAT landscapes right you know I I can tell you how many times I've had conversations with executives that were painful because they had some business initiatives that need to be done as soon as possible to meet the financial demands or kpi demands of their business and I have to give him the bad news you know what it's going to take you it's gonna take me six months to give you another listing and a lot of
that is some others procurement and we can solve that by virtualization but some of it is just repetitive processes that we have to do to just set up the landscape if you know if you're in a pharmaceutical environment you have to go do validation testing etc of the environment before you turn it over so that you can prove to auditors that the environment when you build the application on is the same as your QA environment same as your test and same as production it would seem
that our behavior would robotic process automation help with that challenge given there's not a there's a lack of some api's for these the testing part of that process absolutely that's the places where our ph science right is those those processes that are heavily manual and yet repetitive right none of them being standing up an essay p landscape you can easily program a robot to do that because these are not only this is like classic RPA these are not only very well-defined processes right but highly repeatable
and reusable and so the ROI comes it comes out very quickly there but I like how you mentioned that there's there's a need to to test and validate something right because what one of the exciting mature applications of RTA right now is in the test automation from a regression step test standpoint or uit standpoint I just find out about a system that's undergone a change or or may have experienced a migration how does that system stand up to help once beforehand and the application of RPA
together with process mining and the use of reusable components across the bottom allows you to automate that kind of regression test and end in ways that are unthinkable from traditional test automation frameworks so a lot of the challenge in cents banging up somebody's environment is kind of that process whether the process document undocumented my experience having a documented process helps but for robotics you know the process is never documented well enough for me to automatically just implement that process talking a little bit about how you
iPad helps with that process discovery sure so we have we have things that work today may have things on the on the roadmap right but what certain is interesting that we have a part of our AI fabric is the process understanding features of our robots right so we can use recorders to understand what humans are doing on their machines and and build process definitions out of that intelligently by applying what what is already commonly referred to as a process mining applying that not only to the
logs of the database undermined an ERP system but applying it to logs that we can create by monitoring human interaction in any UI I have to interact with all of the you is that your IT organization is using whether it's command line or the SOP interface of SAP GUI Fiore but but also like mainframes and an email clients and all across the board right of course we can automate that and then when it comes to fuzzy processes where they think well I do this differently every
time I do it right that's a question of observation recording and then intelligent pattern recognition and and then they're just very surprised I mean the bottom line is how do you know what you are going to do well that besa means we're creating an essence virtual api's for systems that don't have API like there's no API to a green screen I can do you know I've done in the past screen scrapes and try to automate the process of configuring let's say a Cisco switch and sometimes
it works sometimes it doesn't you know it'll throw an error that my script can't handle with robot API RP a with the RP a I would assume that it can handle error exception scratch so we have a very powerful multi-layered exception handling methodology and uipath so there are exceptions that you know are going to be a possibility and there are ones that you don't expect and our global exception handler that became mainstream middle of last year I believe really helps to address those unknowns and to
collect information that can be used later for machine learning processes and improvement all right so this again is sapphire s AP sapphire and we could not have a conversation and sav sapphire unless we talked about SAT naam that's a little bit 20:25 is coming up how does uipath what's the story around Hana for uipath like every SAT partner has they have a honda story you know it's really I need the SAT practice part of my part of my mandate is to discover what the pain points
are of the SI p community given my background in this space and and my background in our PA and and relieve those pain points and there is undeniably one huge elephant in the room and sapphire that is all of these customers are being shown what they can do on s4 ha and they want to go there but it's hard to get that heart and so that was one thing that we put a strategic emphasis on that new hypothesis we wanted to address and remove that pain
and so we've partnered together with some very impressive s eyes to bring s AP customers on to s4 HANA in a way that exploits digital labor at every step of the way and and then perhaps the most impressive and most unique application of our GAE in that space is again the test automation at the end of the migration where customers are spending so much time to define their processes find data that's applicable to that either either scripted with a classic test automation scripting or handed to
a large number of low-cost individuals to execute the test and we're coming in we can find the process definitions we can extract the data and we can build test cases and execute them with robots in a fully automated fashion and that kind of thing was unheard of in just the near past yeah I managed dr test i've managed migrations that even zahana just migrations from one storage array to another and validated environments and pharmaceuticals and tests is by far B well there's a lot of pains
but as painful and but test is a big problem you know you're getting people up and undeterminable point either in the night or in the morning to perform the testing and then the text in itself is inconsistent we're arguing about what's a successful test it was not a successful test so you know this kind of takes the guesswork out of test for any migration whether it's going from R 3 to s 4 or just 1 from R 3 to R 3 on a different platform it's
true and you think about part of the reason why that's so painful is who is building those process definitions and who's deciding about the data sets to be testing it's the SMEs and the process owners these are expensive individuals and and pulling them from their daily work to do this for weeks on end in preparation to test yes is highly disruptive to the business and that causes a lot of the pain that the onset to validating an estimate on the system before you go live right
so we're able to address a major pain point in that regard migrating to Hana just one of the examples that have been the validation step so Peter I really appreciate you taking out the time you're busy together I know there's tons of customers one of your time is s AP our PA is 8-bit whether it's the UI path they are not all or some other competitive solution our PA is a big topic here at the conference we really appreciate you taking out the time thanks so
much Keith if you want to learn more about new iPad you can visit them on with uipath comm if you want to learn more about the CTO advisor you can visit our website the CTO advisor comm subscribe to the videos whether you're there's only thing for you to talk to next CTO DOS
