Top 14 Use Cases of SAP Intelligent RPA in 2024
SAP Intelligent RPA allows organizations to automate repetitive, manual processes across departments by integrating RPA bots with SAP workflows. With intelligent capabilities like OCR, NLP, and machine learning added, these bots can mimic human actions while operating faster and with fewer errors.
In this comprehensive guide, we will explore the top 14 intelligent process automation use cases SAP customers are implementing to reduce costs and boost productivity:
Table of Contents
- Finance and Accounting Use Cases
- Retail Industry Use Cases
- Human Resources Use Cases
- Key Takeaways
- Related Resources
Finance and Accounting Use Cases
Finance and accounting involves many manual, high-volume activities that are prime automation candidates. SAP RPA delivers major efficiency gains:
Data source: SAP
Let‘s examine some key finance automation use cases:
1. Financial Closing
The financial closing process of finalizing account reporting for the fiscal period can involve over 150 manual, repetitive steps. This leaves it prone to errors and delays.
According to a study by The Hackett Group, companies can reduce financial close cycle times by 45-60% using automation. SAP Intelligent RPA helps optimize the following closing activities:
1.1 General Ledger Entries
With modern businesses having many sales channels, incoming invoices can pour in unstructured formats. Manually validating and entering them into sub-ledgers and the general ledger is time-consuming.
SAP bots can simplify the process by:
- Monitoring emails and folders for e-invoices in PDFs, EDI, etc.
- Leveraging OCR and AI to extract key details like invoice numbers, dates, amounts
- Validating data accuracy by cross-checking against POs
- Automatically posting validated invoices to sub-ledger and general ledger
This reduces invoice processing costs by 25-50% while minimizing errors.
1.2 Intercompany Reconciliation
Manually identifying and eliminating transactions between group entities is complex. It‘s crucial to avoid double-counting for accurate financial reporting.
With SAP Intelligent RPA, bots can instantly:
- Scan for unreconciled intercompany transactions
- Check if they are causing reporting mismatches
- Zero out matching entries from the parent company books
- Inform relevant entity finance teams of changes
This simplifies a traditionally cumbersome area of financial closes.
1.3 Payment Reconciliation
When performed manually, matching invoices and bank payments tends to be inefficient and risk missing discrepancies.
SAP bots enable touchless reconciliation by:
- Downloading latest bank statements
- Matching line items with internal invoices
- Flagging unmatched transactions
- Comparing expected payments with actuals
- Posting validated transactions to ledgers
- Alerting accountants of exceptions
Processing times can be reduced by 80% versus manual payment reconciliation.
2. Financial Planning & Analysis
With data spread across disconnected systems, FP&A can be difficult and prone to inconsistencies. SAP Intelligent RPA facilitates:
Consolidated views – Bots can pull data from various source systems, normalize formats, and consolidate into unified reports.
Automated variance analysis – Periodic differences across actuals vs plans can be automatically flagged for investigation.
Driver-based forecasting – Bots can leverage ML to analyze historical performance drivers and trends to build data-driven forecasts.
These capabilities provide real-time visibility into financial performance and projections for better decision making.
3. Procure-to-Pay
Procure-to-pay (P2P) has many manual steps vulnerable to delays and errors, including:
Image source: CIPS
By incorporating RPA and OCR, SAP automates much of this workflow:
3.1 Invoice Processing
Instead of teams manually validating supplier invoices, SAP bots can:
- Capture invoices from multiple sources
- Extract key details via OCR
- Confirm invoice accuracy by matching to POs
- Create audit trails
This cuts invoice processing costs by 60-80% versus manual processing.
3.2 Accounts Payable
SAP RPA relieves tedious, manual AP tasks by enabling bots to:
- Update supplier master data
- Schedule payments
- Resolve queries
- Post to ledgers
- Manage approvals
AP process costs can be reduced up to 75% through increased efficiency and lower error rates.
4. Accounts Receivable
With customers and sales channels proliferating, manual AR management struggles with efficiency and cash flow visibility.
SAP Intelligent RPA facilitates:
- Auto-reconciliation of receipts to invoices
- Cash application for timely matching of payments to open invoices
- Collections via programmed email reminders and follow-ups
- Credit checking of new customers against internal and external data
- Reporting for real-time AR status
These capabilities can yield 60-80% cost reductions in order-to-cash cycles.
Retail Industry Use Cases
Retailers have several high-impact process automation opportunities through SAP:
5. Dynamic Pricing
In competitive markets, slight pricing edges can sway buyers. Manually monitoring competitors and adjusting is inefficient.
SAP RPA pricing bots enable features like:
- Web scraping competitors to track pricing changes
- Price optimization algorithms to calculate ideal margins
- Auto-pricing within defined thresholds to stay competitive
A retailer using SAP dynamic pricing slashed manual work by 92% while boosting margins by 4-8% through algorithmic price optimization.
6. Product Information
Fielding customer product questions like materials, dimensions, care instructions can be time-consuming for agents.
SAP RPA bots can scrape your product pages to instantly return accurate item details to customer inquiries without agent involvement. Some examples:
- Customer: What are the dimensions for the ACME bike model X7?
- Bot: The dimensions for model X7 are 68 x 24 x 40 inches.
This automates providing accurate technical and specification details on-demand.
7. Customer Service
Customer service involves many repetitive inquiries for order status, shipping details, returns, payments, etc. SAP powers RPA chatbots to address these and scale support.
For example, a bot for an airline could instantly check reservations to:
- Report current flight/booking status
- Change seat assignments
- Upgrade class of service
Meanwhile, a retail bot could provide real-time sales data from ERP systems. This automates responding to common customer inquiries quickly and consistently.
Human Resources Use Cases
HR teams conduct many high-volume, repetitive tasks that can be automated through SAP Intelligent RPA:
8. Resume Screening
Manually screening stacks of applicants for job requirements is tedious.
SAP RPA bots can filter candidates for qualifications like:
- Education level
- Years of experience
- Skills/keywords
- Background checks
This accelerates screening up to 5x so the strongest applicants can proceed to further review.
9. Salary CAP Management
Aggregating employee salary info across locations and generating compliance reports is time consuming.
SAP RPA streamlines compiling salary cap declarations by:
- Pulling verified compensation data
- Auto-completing declaration templates
- Confirming accuracy of submissions
- Electronically filing to authorities
One organization reduced this 480-hour manual process to 7 hours automated – a 98% efficiency gain.
Key Takeaways
In summary, leading benefits of SAP Intelligent RPA include:
- Accelerated processes – Automating manual steps speeds up workflows across departments
- Improved accuracy – Bots minimize human errors in data entry and processing
- Cost savings – Reduced manual labor and effort cuts costs substantially
- Better visibility – Consolidated data and reporting provides real-time visibility
- Scalability – Bots easily manage growing volumes without added staff
While every organization‘s needs are unique, the use cases here represent prime automation opportunities available through SAP.
Related Resources
To continue exploring SAP Intelligent RPA:
