Enterprise automation with SAP

Automate end-to-end processes with leading integration platform as a service (iPaaS), process mining, and robotic process automation (RPA) solutions supported by generative AI.

Connect and automate end-to-end processes to optimise your business

In order to automate processes from end to end, organisations need to integrate across their IT landscapes, prioritise critical automations, utilise benchmarks to quantify success and measure progress, and orchestrate workflows across multiple applications.

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Accelerate enterprise automation with SAP

SAP offers a unique and comprehensive AI-powered solution to integrate applications, discover process inefficiencies, and automate processes across heterogeneous enterprise environments.

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Integrate everything 

Integrate SAP and third-party applications across complex on-premise and multi-cloud environments to optimise end-to-end processes.

Improve continuously 

Analyse and benchmark processes against 200,000 industry best practices to uncover inefficiencies and take action.

Automate completely 

Rapidly address process inefficiencies by building AI-powered automations and extending applications using low-code solutions and pre-built content.

Accelerate with Agent AI 

Leverage Joule’s agent builder to develop intelligent Agents to run powerful and autonomous automations throughout your process landscape.

Enable AI agents for enterprise automation

With the agent builder in Joule Studio, your teams can create and deploy custom agents  to automate mundane and repetitive tasks.

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Deploy your agents in a more impactful way

  • Identify the highest potential opportunities for automation by process mining

  • Complement intelligent agents with conventional automation tools like robotic process automation and workflow management

  • Secure and monitor the connections of your automations using API management

  • Initiate AI agents asynchronously by implementing event-driven architectures

Explore Joule Agents
Try enterprise automation with SAP

Get hands-on experience automating workflow processes and tasks using sample data with no setup required. This experience is included in the SAP Build Process Automation basic trial.

Start your free 30-day trial

How customers are succeeding with enterprise automation

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See what analysts are saying about SAP

SAP recognised as a Leader in Integration Platforms as a Service

Learn why SAP was recognised as a Leader in the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Integration Platform as a Service for the 5th consecutive time.

Read the Gartner report 

SAP Signavio recognised as a Leader in Process Mining Platforms

See why SAP Signavio has been recognised as a Leader in the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Process Mining Platforms for the 3rd consecutive time.

Read the Gartner report 

SAP named a Leader in the IDC MarketScape

See why SAP is named a leader in the first-ever IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Business Automation Platforms 2025 Vendor Assessment.

Read the excerpt 

Use generative AI to supercharge enterprise automation

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Learn how Artificial Intelligence empowers you to manage and automate End-to-End business processes. Enterprise automation with SAP uses embedded AI capabilities to improve the developer experience with:

  • Management and execution of AI Agents

  • Automated generation of artifacts

  • Process recommendation and summarization

  • AI-driven anomaly detection

  • Intelligent document processing

See all features

Frequently asked questions

Business processes work better when they’re automated. Enterprise automation refers to the use of software to automate and streamline business processes within an organisation. The goal is to optimise operational efficiency, reduce costs, minimise error, enhance productivity, and deliver outstanding experiences.

Enterprise automation software refers to business applications and specialised automation technologies that enable organisations to automate, monitor, analyse, and improve business processes. These vary in terms of functionality and features to meet different process automation requirements.

 

Some common types of enterprise automation software include:

  • Business applications, also known as business software or enterprise applications, to support and enhance various business functions and processes within an organisation.

  • Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to automate repetitive and manual tasks within a process.

  • Workflow management to create and manage structured digital processes that follow defined flows, variants, and rules.

  • Business AI, trained on industry-specific data and business process expertise, to enhance processes with intelligent automation, insights, and decision-making.

  • Application and data Integration to connect and automate business processes across applications, departments, and stakeholders and to leverage data from various sources.

  • Business process management (BPM) to monitor and analyse processes, to benchmark performance and identify improvement opportunities, and to make data driven decisions on transformation projects.

Spend management solutions, like SAP Ariba, are used to automate and actively manage spending processes. One typical example is the source-to-pay (S2P) process, which encompasses finding, negotiating with, and contracting the supplier of goods, and culminates in final payment for those goods.

 

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) with embedded AI capabilities, like SAP Build Process Automation, can be used to automate the processing of paper-based invoices within a S2P process. The bot extracts PDF invoices from supplier emails, classifies the extracted documents so only invoices are processed, extracts the relevant invoice information, and enters it into SAP Ariba for further processing.

 

Application integration and cross-system workflows can be leveraged to automatically trigger purchasing processes in SAP Ariba. For example, the shared service team creates a profile for a new hire in SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central. Based on defined business rules, this event automatically triggers a workflow to order the relevant equipment for that job profile in SAP Ariba and ship it to the new hire’s office. No further intervention from the shared service centre team required.

A comprehensive enterprise automation platform encompasses three tightly integrated components:

  • Business applications to standardise on proven best practice business processes

  • Automation technologies to increase automation rate, support specific requirements, and create differentiating innovations

  • Business process management solutions to monitor, analyse, and benchmark process performance to define process improvements

Standardising on proven best practices ensures reliable operations and cost control for your business-critical, high-volume processes. Increasing the automation rate drives efficiency and increases first-time right rates. Data-driven process monitoring and analytics, combined with the capabilities to benchmark performance and define improvement steps, enables continuous process improvement.

 

Combining these three components enables the automated enterprise with highly efficient core processes and differentiating processes that enable a competitive edge and deliver outstanding experiences.

Enterprise Automation is a central cornerstone of any digital transformation journey. And each journey has a different starting point and a different destination based on the specific requirements of an organisation.

 

These may include:

  • Digitalising departmental approval processes with a structured workflow that can be built using no-code automation solutions

  • Using an RPA bot to increase the automation rate for a specific process step in a business application to achieve rapid growth in transactions

  • Taking a strategic, data-based approach to identify automation opportunities and creating end-to-end automations across various applications and departments

  • Extending processes to include external partners or government systems

 

Wherever you are in that journey, you will want to:

  • Choose the best technologies to address the automation challenges at hand across multiple projects

  • Ensure that different types of automation technologies work well with one another

  • Reuse existing investments and expertise in automation technologies for other projects

 

Frequently, tactical procurement decisions lead to organisations ending up with two or three automation technologies of the same type driving up complexity and costs.

 

Choosing a vendor that offers the full spectrum of enterprise automation software enables you to future proof your journey to become an automated enterprise. SAP business applications and automation technologies are tightly integrated to work seamlessly together. This means SAP meets you wherever you are in your digital transformation journey. And as your requirements grow and change, you have the peace of mind to know that you can meet whatever challenges you face while leveraging your existing expertise and increasing your ROI from previous investments.

SAP business applications deliver ready-to-work processes built on proven best practices and continuous innovation. While each enterprise automation with SAP solution (SAP Signavio, SAP Integration Suite, and SAP Build) excel independently in automation projects, they are stronger together.

 

For example, SAP Signavio can help uncover process inefficiencies using industry best practices and benchmarks, then act on insights with recommendations for over 3700 pre-built SAP Build automations for SAP S/4HANA and SAP ECC. SAP Integration Suite can also assist in integrating and pulling data across SAP applications (and non-SAP) such as SAP SuccessFactors and feeding it into SAP Build Process Automation to trigger configured workflows. These can raise tickets in SAP Service Cloud or create automated purchase orders in SAP Ariba.

 

The possibilities are endless. Enterprise automation with SAP works best with both existing SAP and non-SAP solutions, delivering end to end automation tailored to customer needs.

We recognise that our customers will have multiple enterprise automation solutions from various vendors to accommodate for their specific requirements. That is why SAP partners with many key players in the area of enterprise automation. These partnerships are a testament to SAP's openness and commitment to supporting our customer's diverse landscapes and building a robust ecosystem of partners providing complementary offerings on top of SAP's business applications and SAP BTP capabilities. They offer customers additional automation capabilities, suited for scenarios where SAP enterprise automation solutions may not be the first choice.

SAP Build Process Automation is an integral component of the SAP Build portfolio and it enables business and IT users to automate workflows and tasks without writing code. By combing workflow management and RPA, SAP Build Process Automation serves as a complementary solution within the SAP ecosystem, seamlessly integrating with key tools like SAP Integration Suite and SAP Signavio.

 

Our customers can orchestrate workflows and implement RPA to automate mission-critical business processes using SAP Build Process Automation, and then extend the capabilities further using SAP Integration Suite to integrate SAP and third-party applications, optimising system integration. Additionally, SAP Signavio can be used for analysis and continuous monitoring. While the example provided is straightforward, there is a multitude of use cases (ranging from finance to HR line-of-businesses) and functionalities to enable enterprise automation for our customers.

Customers who are currently using SAP Signavio, SAP Integration Suite, or SAP Build are already on the path to an autonomous enterprise. By adopting enterprise automation, customers can:

  • Go beyond task-based automation or automate single processes to being end to end, ensuring seamless integration, comprehensive visibility, and improved predictability in terms of time, resources, and outcomes

  • Expect better ROI by prioritising what to automate, which can be easily identified and pinpointed using SAP Signavio to gain a holistic overview of all workflows and business processes

  • Easily measure the impact of automation and continuously monitor and improve by triggering automations in SAP Build based on business rules

  • Find value in all the regular benefits of automation, including faster and more efficient process time, ensuring a high level of accuracy, and reducing errors when dealing with routine and repetitive tasks

  • Enhance and gain more benefit from existing automation (RPA, integration) investments by utilising SAP’s third-party connectivity to SAP and third-party applications

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organisation and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner and Magic Quadrant is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

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