Low-code workflow has become all the rage among enterprise tech giants and SAP joined the group of companies offering simplified workflow creation today when it announced SAP Cloud Platform Workflow Management, but it didn’t stop there.
It also announced SAP Ruum, a new departmental workflow tool and SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation, its entry into the RPA space. The company made the announcements at SAP TechEd, its annual educational conference that has gone virtual this year due to the pandemic.
Let’s start with the Cloud Platform Workflow Management tool. It enables people with little or no coding skills to build operational workflows. It includes predefined workflows like employee onboarding and can be used in combination with Qualtrics, the company it bought for $8 billion 2018, to include experience data.
As SAP CTO Juergen Mueller told me, the company sees these types of activities in a much larger context. In the hiring example, that means it’s more than simply the act of being hired and getting started. “We like to think in end-to-end processes, and the one fitting into the employee onboarding would be recruit to retire. So it would start at talent acquisition,” he said.
Hiring and employee onboarding is the first part of the larger process, but there are other workflows that develop out of that throughout the employee’s time at the company. “Basically this is a collection of different workflow steps that are happening with some in parallel, some in sequence,” he said.
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If there are experience questions involved like which benefits you want, you could add Qualtrics questionnaires to that part of the workflow. It’s designed to be very flexible. As with all of these kinds of tools, you can drag and drop components and do some basic configuration and you’re good to go. In reality, the more complex these become, the more expertise would be required, but this type of tool is designed with non-technical end users in mind as a starting point.
SAP Ruum is a simplified version of Cloud Platform Workflow Management designed for building departmental processes, and if there is an automation element involved where you want to let the machine take care of some mundane, repeatable tasks, then the RPA solution comes into play. The latter tends to be more complex and require more IT involvement, but it enables companies to build automation into workflows where the machine pushes data along through the workflow and does at least some of the work for you.
The company joins Salesforce, which announced Einstein Workflow Automation last week at Dreamforce and Google Workflows, the tool the company introduced in August. There are many others out there from companies large and small including Okta, Slack and Airtable, which all have no-code workflow tools built in.
The SAP TechEd conference has been going on for 24 years, and usually takes place in three separate venues — Barcelona, Las Vegas and Bangalore — throughout the year. This year, the company is running a single-combined virtual conference for free to all comers. It runs for 48 hours straight starting today with a worldwide audience of over 60,000 sign-ups as of yesterday.
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