5 Ways a Process Automation Platform Can Add Value to SAP

Blog: Bizagi Blog

There’s no denying SAP’s excellence as a central system of record. But it’s well known that delivering change on your SAP platform is both extremely slow and prohibitively expensive. It’s also not a system that can manage your processes end-to-end throughout your enterprise. You need something more flexible and all-encompassing.

But don’t worry, there’s no need to throw out your ERP and start again. Thankfully you can add a layer of agility on top of your existing SAP implementation. One way to do that is to integrate SAP with Bizagi, using our SAP connector, available on the Bizagi Xchange, and automate new processes to feed data in and out of SAP. This way you can introduce the flexibility, visibility, and collaborative abilities you need to allow your organization to be more effective and add value to your legacy system.

“The integration of Bizagi with our ERP system, SAP, was an emotional breakthrough for our organization. We’re going to continue to scale.”

– Kyohei Shimada, Senior Manager, Technology Center

1 – Saving time and money

It’s expensive to extend, integrate, and upgrade your customized SAP. In fact, SAP customers tell us that it is probably easier, and less expensive, to change their processes to adapt to SAP, rather than the other way around.

Whether updating a process or creating a new one, SAP users will often require information from external systems to be processed further in the ERP. The problem is, involving several systems puts the onus on users to update each one separately. This is very inefficient and error-prone and can have detrimental knock-on effects.

Using a single platform that acts as a process orchestrator, means you can point the modified process towards all its different data points without replicating the data itself. This results in seamless, fast integration without the need to rekey information. The business can then adapt quickly, efficiently, and cost-effectively.

Global sportswear brand adidas connected its SAP to Bizagi to save time and improve efficiencies across its organization. In the finance department, the accounts payable process has been transformed so staff can execute multiple real-time transactions with speed and accuracy. The Purchase Order (PO) system has also been optimized: Bizagi automates the approval process after employees register a PO in SAP. This has eliminated around 1 million emails per year for the PO team.

2 – Gaining visibility over your data

Lack of visibility into SAP’s data structures and
sequences make it hard to make productive changes. This can lead to
duplications and silos with undesirable bottom-line impacts.

As your business grows, your systems will expand. From legacy systems to SAP, SharePoint to apps, there are more systems to connect than ever before. Use a single platform to act as an orchestrator to connect people, applications, devices, and information across your organization.

Bizagi can connect SAP business transactions with other applications in a matter of weeks. There’s no need to replace your previous ERP investments, you can leverage them instead.

3 – Enabling collaboration between business and IT

Is your IT department overburdened with SAP
modification requests? If so, it’s likely leading to delays in
business-critical projects and bottlenecking a load of other IT requests. What
if business users could make changes themselves?

Using a single, low-code platform like Bizagi, business
users are empowered to take the lead on process changes. An easy-to-use
interface that allows business users to visualize all their processes and
implement the process change with minimal coding.

This frees up time and resources for the IT team and
encourages effective teamwork between departments. Using the common language of
process also means that business and IT teams can collaborate effectively
through a single platform, uniting the two departments to solve problems
collaboratively.

“We connect a lot of systems together with Bizagi… it’s important to model the process first and then the online platform makes it more user friendly for our customers.”

Senior Process Automation Manager, adidas

4 – Ensuring compliance and best practice

Constant regulatory changes, and even just keeping up with customer expectations means businesses, and their ERPs, need to be agile to keep your systems up to date. The ability to edit processes in Bizagi means you can quickly respond to any regulatory changes and keep your system secure and compliant.

With an agile process layer wrapped around your SAP application, you can gain connectivity and deliver real-time access to information directly from the process, or vice versa, meaning you’re always working with the most up to date information. This, in turn, helps you to deliver an exceptional customer experience, reduce costs, and optimizes business performance.

Additionally, by automating decisions within processes
you can rest assured that your policies are compliant and support risk
management and due diligence.

5 – Optimizing mobile views

Today’s users want to be able to work on the go. So, mobile and cloud apps need to be connected as part of your infrastructure. ERP systems need to be compatible with mobile use for tasks such as accessing expenses information, updating customer records or viewing reports. Typically, SAP screens are very complex, slow and cumbersome, displaying information that is not relevant to the task.

A process automation platform like Bizagi improves the
user journey with optimal display on whichever device the user chooses, and
only displays the necessary information to complete the task – an essential
feature for time-pressed business users.

Bizagi: Your Enterprise Orchestrator

Combining your SAP investment with Bizagi can help improve the visibility, flexibility, agility, and control of your SAP processes. This ultimately helps you deliver exceptional customer experience, reduce costs, and optimize business performance.

Through Bizagi’s SAP Connector, business users can query, create or update SAP records directly from any part of their DPA system, and interact with any SAP module, including Financial Accounting, Sales and Distribution, Material Management and Human Resources to name a few. These can be integrated with any part of your process, either from a button’s click in the user interface or through a service task.

Download our SAP Connector for free from the Bizagi Xchange, or find out more about using Bizagi and SAP together in our quick guide.