Robot­ics and Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence at the core of ERP

Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence (AI), robot­ics, machine learn­ing and blockchain have gained a lot of spot­light in the past years. Nev­er­the­less, the imple­men­ta­tion and uti­liza­tion of those tech­nolo­gies on a larg­er scale have been so far lim­it­ed in the Enter­prise Resource Plan­ning (ERP) sys­tems which oper­ate enter­pris­es’ core process­es. The lead­ing ERP tech­nol­o­gy ven­dors have done major invest­ments for years towards these dis­rup­tive, new tech­nolo­gies by part­ner­ing, acquir­ing com­pa­nies from the field and invest­ing for their own new tech­nol­o­gy devel­op­ment resources.

SAP pub­lished their strat­e­gy to become the first hands-free ERP solu­tion enabling 50% of busi­ness process­es to be auto­mat­ed. To speed up with their goal SAP has acquired com­pa­nies in the past years. For exam­ple, in the begin­ning of 2018, SAP acquired Recast​.AI, which con­cen­trates on devel­op­ing nat­ur­al lan­guage pro­cess­ing capa­bil­i­ties and three months ago they acquired Con­tex­tor, which is one of the Euro­pean lead­ers in the design and inte­gra­tion of robot­ic process automa­tion (RPA) solu­tions. SAP aims also to ease SAP and non-SAP sys­tems inte­gra­tion. To meet this goal SAP will merge Con­tex­tor inno­va­tions to the already exist­ing SAP Leonar­do machine learn­ing frame­work. With the help of Con­tex­tor inno­va­tions, SAP is plan­ning to auto­mate half of its busi­ness process­es dur­ing the next three years.

The direc­tion is inter­est­ing as there has been already for some years an ongo­ing dis­cus­sion of expo­nen­tial accel­er­a­tion of speed. The increased automa­tion will accel­er­ate the busi­ness func­tions and bring sev­er­al oth­er ben­e­fits. Yet it feels like prac­ti­cal deploy­ments and their ben­e­fits have been drag­ging behind the actu­al needs. There are sev­er­al prac­ti­cal imple­men­ta­tions that have been deployed but typ­i­cal­ly those have been put into prac­tice for quite sim­ple or lim­it­ed areas as point-to-point deploy­ments. The nature of these imple­men­ta­tions has also been more exper­i­men­tal-like for many if we look at the more con­ser­v­a­tive end of IT-field – the enter­prise resource plan­ning. From the imple­men­ta­tion point of view the chal­lenge is often to con­nect var­i­ous old­er tech­nol­o­gy envi­ron­ments to new inno­va­tions. Dif­fer­ent tech­nol­o­gy ver­sions are not sup­port­ed by one anoth­er and there­fore all the ben­e­fits from new tech­nolo­gies are not eas­i­ly to be reused by larg­er audiences.

The time is ready from the enter­prise resource plan­ning stand­point. The ERP tech­nol­o­gy ven­dors togeth­er with their imple­men­ta­tion part­ner ecosys­tems are invest­ing heav­i­ly on new grow­ing tech­nolo­gies. ISLET has also grown its know-how and deliv­ery capa­bil­i­ties on data sci­ence, AI, robot­ics and machine learn­ing. Our mis­sion is to offer ser­vices and solu­tions enabled by new grow­ing tech­nolo­gies for our cus­tomers’ com­plex busi­ness chal­lenges on a short­er cycle and with rapid val­ue creation.

Our team mem­bers have cre­at­ed solu­tions for dif­fer­ent busi­ness sec­tors which sup­port trans­paren­cy, fore­cast­ing and busi­ness devel­op­ment as well as auto­mate process­es and enhance struc­tured and non-struc­tured data usage col­lect­ed from dif­fer­ent sources. Intel­li­gent solu­tions for data mod­el­ing, data inte­gra­tion, data ware­hous­ing and cloud-based dat­apipes help to auto­mate process­es, fore­cast and sim­u­late dif­fer­ent sce­nar­ios and out­comes among oth­er things. We will make announce­ments on these areas in the com­ing months, so stay tuned!

Author Jan­i­na Luo­to is ISLET’s respect­ed leader. She has been made of reli­a­bil­i­ty, vision, inter­ac­tion skills, pro­fes­sion­al­i­ty and great heart.

If you got inter­est­ed and want to dis­cuss fur­ther, please contact:

Jan­i­na Luoto
CEO, Isletter
janina.​luoto@​isletgroup.​fi
+358 40 574 1266

#enter­pris­ere­sour­ce­plan­ning #ERP #robot­ics #arti­fi­cial­in­tel­li­gence #AI #machine­learn­ing #future #SAP #blockchain