SAP Intelligent RPA – Cloud Studio

Cloud Studio is one of the two iRPA tools provided by SAP to develop our automation flows.

In recent times, SAP has strongly backed Cloud tools and this is one of the cases in which the Cloud tool highly improves the OnPremise tool. Undoubtedly, Cloud Studio offers many advantages over its OnPremise (Desktop Studio) equivalent.

Cloud Studio is much more advanced and allows automations to be done in a more agile and structured way.

Graphical Interface – SAP Intelligent RDA Cloud Studio

The usability of Cloud Studio’s graphical interface makes the development of automations much easier and more comfortable than with Desktop Studio. In fact, from our point of view and leaving Desktop Studio aside, we consider that the Cloud Studio interface has a very good level of usability, being one of the simplest and most usable interfaces that SAP has recently developed. If you have a very basic knowledge of programming, the learning curve of the tool will be very short.

We will be able to nest automations by encapsulating small fragments of the applications to simplify and reduce the complexity of our main automation.

We have a debugger that allows us to identify and locate possible errors in the development of our application, enabling the use of breakpoints.

Benefits SAP iRPA Cloud Studio

The most important benefits of Cloud Studio are the following:

Recorder

It is a tool that automatically captures the applications and the user’s interactions with them, while at the same time designing the automations of the process that we need to simulate.

Recorder registers all the steps performed along the screens of an application. Everything is captured: fields, elements, screens, metadata, every interaction is automatically captured and declared.

It supports SAP GUI, SAP GUI for HTML, SAP UI5.

Recorder States:

When we start recording and we change screen, the tool will warn us and we will have to capture the new screen.

Collaborative Work

Unlike the difficulty we had with Desktop Studio when working in a team on the same project and having to use external tools to do so, with Cloud Studio, the development of an application/automation can be shared with several users.

Custom Scripts

Although RPA is based on the motto “low-code-no-code,” Cloud Studio gives us the possibility of introducing a “Custom Script” activity within the automation workflow that allows us to define Javascript code for more complex tasks which are not included in the predefined RPA activities. We will delve into this in the next article.

Third Party SDKs

Cloud Studio has integration with applications such as Excel, Word, Outlook, PowerPoint, etc. which provides us with predefined activities to perform automated flows on these applications.

Available SDKs

Example of some Excel activities included in the SDK:

Error Management

Cloud Studio enables global and localised error flow management using the Try/Catch activity.

This way, we will be able to perform the activities we require in case of an error, for example, a pop-up with a message informing the user or the closing of the applications that our application was using.

Conclusions about SAP iRPA Cloud Studio

The SDK integration with Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook tools is on OnPremise applications, therefore, an important future improvement would be the integration with the OnCloud package of Office 365, which SAP plans to integrate in Q1 2022.

To summarise, we would like to highlight Cloud Studio as a very good and powerful tool for the development of our SAP iRPA automations, outperforming Desktop Studio. The integration with SAPGui, SAPWebGui, SAP Fiori, SAP Ariba, the predefined content of S/4HANA, and its level of usability, simplicity and strength make the road to our final RPA solution much more comfortable.

In the next blog entry, we will focus on the pure part of Scripting of Cloud Studio.

I hope this post has helped you get to know the Cloud Studio environment at a general level.

You can read here our first article about architecture: SAP iRPA

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