Business Situation
The client wanted to evaluate the potential productivity gains and cost savings of automating the execution and validation of updates to its core SAP model. Once complete, these central SAP updates are pushed to 49 other plants and sites around the world, effectively driving global operations and production of the company’s medication, vaccinations and pharmaceutical products.Solution
Avanade helped design a proof of concept (PoC) with a sample set of test cases from a library of 120. The client's ultimate goal is to automate about 100 test cases used by the SAP core model to power global SAP updates.Results
The six-week PoC demonstrated RPA can replace manual processes by taking a screen shot of each step of the test case to illustrate each expected result for auditing purposes. At the end of the test, the robot opens the test case in a Microsoft Word document and pastes it in the screen shot with an appropriate description. A human is then able to review each step of the test to see if it has passed or failed.
While additional intelligent automation in the future may remove the need for human approval, the PoC has already delivered measurable benefits:
- Cost savings – an expense equivalency of one to two offshore full-time employees
- Increased productivity – 50 percent reduction in the time needed to execute the test cases, resulting in a faster deployment of SAP updates to production site
Find out more about Avanade’s Intelligent Automation Solutions.
