SAP Bill Of Materials Reporting

Integration Service Trigger
Process Architecture
Execution Screenshot

Inspiration

Working with business users we have faced many problems that could be solved using RPA. One of there involved the Inventory reporting, an activity that is done in different departments and it's very frequent, with an occurrence that can be up to many times everyday. Learning this, we tried to create a general process that can research the Bill of materials for every product in input and returning the result to the users.

What it does

The process retrieves a Spreadsheet from Google Drive, that is previously been uploaded by the user, and contains many products. For every product, it goes on SAP BusinessOne Client and perform checks on the Inventory status, in particular the current amount of every material and the availability in stock in every warehouse. Finally it generates a report with details for every product and return it to the user attached to a mail.

How we built it

The process is triggered with Google Drive Integrations Service, and starts when a new file is created. The Sheet is downloaded from Drive as an Excel. We used RE-Framework template to retrieve data from the Excel, one element for every row. For the automation of SAP Client we used UiAutomation, since at the moment there's no prebuild packages for SAP BusinessOne. Finally, the process uses GSuite to provide the output to the user attached to a mail.

Challenges we ran into

We tried to make the process more general possible, so that every user can use it. For this reason we used the connection with the GSuite, both for Input (Drive) and Output (Gmail). The most complex part of the process has been the automation of the client, since we used UiAutomation and most of the time the "Scrape Text" functionality, since the client doesn't have any spiable selector.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The process is robust, can be used generally by all users that are authorized to Drive Connector and can potentially save a lot of time for that users. Also, it can be expanded, for example by adding a field for the client that requested the product and letting him know if there are any availability.

What we learned

By doing this process and studing the solution, it's always better to keep it more general-use possible, so that users can feel owner of the process and use it when needed. Also we used for the first time the Trigger capability, which is really powerful and easy to implement.