Executive summary Executive summary
Client background
Our client is a large bank with over 260 branches that serves more than 2 million customers, 170,000 SMEs, and 600 large corporate companies.
Business challenge
The company wanted to streamline and automate the manual process of testing software and system changes associated with SAP ERP.
Value delivered
N-iX has helped the client develop a robotic process automation (RPA) solution powered by Automation Anywhere - one of the leading and most widely-used RPA technologies on the market. The RPA bots can be launched by any business user and do not require assistance from AQA engineers. As a result, the client was able to reduce the maintenance overhead and the total cost of ownership for SAP testing automation.
Success story in detail
Our client uses the SAP ERP system and its various components to handle specific business processes associated with their banking activities, for example, managing invoices. However, the process of introducing software changes into the system or adjusting the system’s settings involved long and resource-hungry manual testing activities. Therefore, the client wanted to significantly accelerate the testing process by automating manual processes.
As an official partner of Automation Anywhere and SAP, N-iX has significant experience in implementing various enterprise platforms for businesses worldwide. We used our expertise to integrate Automation Anywhere with SAP ERP and introduce RPA bots into various processes associated with the client’s SAP system. While the client mainly needed to automate their various SAP software testing activities (unit testing, integration testing, etc.), these bots are also capable of automating almost any other business process, for example, creating and blocking invoices, or executing business scenarios in SAP GUI and web-based SAP applications.
Since our client works in the financial industry with strict data protection requirements, we have used on-premises SAP ERP and on-premises Automation Anywhere 360. In the scope of this solution, N-iX team has developed a connector to SAP ERP Central Component (ECC), and enabled bots to do various operations on SAP documents if the acceptance criteria are met, such as managing invoices. This can substantially reduce the amount of manual work that includes routine tasks where no decision-making is required.
The primary purpose of the solution was to enable the client’s software developers and users of the SAP ERP system to launch bots powered by automated scripts on the Automation Anywhere platform using a low-code and no-code approach. These bots are used for testing software development changes and changes to the system’s settings. In particular, the bots connect to the client’s environment, launch automatic scripts, and repeat script execution. This determines the performance of SAP transactions and enables users to monitor average transaction executions, issue types, etc.
The results of automation testing allow users to determine areas of improvement. The information about the results of automated testing is gathered in the Bot Insight analytics platform, which is a part of Automation Anywhere. Testing results can also be provided in the custom software solution per client’s request.
The N-iX team has developed a solution that integrates Automation Anywhere with SAP ERP, which can be used for SAP automation testing. Additionally, these bots can be used for automating almost any other manual business process associated with SAP. The solution is capable of bringing a wide range of benefits to our client, including:
- Accelerate the software testing lifecycle by substituting manual testing with automated tests performed by RPA bots;
- Lower total cost of ownership for automation with a low-code/no-code solution that allows any user to create and run bots without requiring support from AQA engineers;
- Reduce maintenance overhead by automating business processes and tasks that were previously done manually by the SAP users.