If your organization runs SAP, then there’s no doubt it sits at the core of your business operations. However, whenever we talk with SAP customers, it feels like this core is mostly cut off from the rest of their day-to-day business operations. Sure, there are plenty of A2A interfaces in place to keep core systems up-to-date. But when it comes to looping SAP into modern workflows, SaaS apps, or AI automation scenarios, there seems to be an assumption that this is all is out of reach due to complexity, high costs, or limited internal resources within the SAP CoE.
These concerns have only grown with SAP’s push toward S/4HANA and the emphasis on maintaining a clean core. As a result, a lot of SAP customers we talk to feel stuck, believing that meaningful integration or automation is off the table unless they’re ready for a full-scale overhaul with S/4 and so forth.
Meanwhile, the demand for cross-system orchestration is growing rapidly within the business. Complex business processes like vendor onboarding or maintenance coordination span multiple departments and technologies, and AI automation is only accelerating that trend. As companies begin deploying AI-powered agents that take action across systems, the pressure to unlock and automate SAP transactions will only increase.
While we often help customers tackle these challenges at an enterprise level through EiPaaS adoption and strategic integration planning, sometimes the fastest way forward is more tactical. Tools like Power Automate Desktop offer a low-code way to bridge SAP integration gaps and bring legacy transactions into modern workflows. In this post, we’ll explore how it all works, highlight some real-world use cases, and break down the cost and feasibility of getting started.
Promises, Promises: The State of SAP APIs
Since I got my start in the SAP space over 25 years ago, SAP has made a lot of promises when it comes to delivering APIs. Over the years, we’ve seen a steady stream of technologies promising to simplify how external systems talk to SAP including ETL-based load programs, SAP Batch Data Communication (or BDC, but not to be confused with SAP BDC), followed by RFCs, IDocs, BAPIs, and Enterprise Services (think SOAP web services). Most recently, SAP has shifted its focus to OData services as part of its push toward a more open, API-first future.
To be fair, SAP has made significant progress when it comes to providing APIs. The often-renamed SAP Business Accelerator Hub now offers more APIs than ever before, with detailed documentation and even sandbox capabilities for many scenarios. However, despite this progress, API coverage is still wildly inconsistent. For every well-documented OData service, there’s a critical transaction in SD, MM, or PM that remains locked behind proprietary protocols or simply doesn’t have an API at all.
Figure 1: Searching for APIs within the SAP Business Accelerator Hub
Even when APIs do exist, navigating the maze of versions, (proprietary) authentication methods, and integration prerequisites can be a challenge—especially for teams without dedicated SAP developers on hand. That’s why, despite the progress, there’s still a very real place for robotic process automation (RPA) in the SAP landscape.
RPA tools like Power Automate Desktop provide a practical workaround for these gaps while also making SAP integration more accessible to a broader audience of analysts and maker types. Instead of waiting for the perfect API or wading through layers of technical complexity, teams can use RPA to automate SAP transactions just as a human would, screen by screen, keystroke by keystroke. It’s not always glamorous, but it gets the job done, especially when you need quick wins or a lightweight way to bring SAP into a broader workflow.
Introducing Power Automate Desktop
Before we dive into any sort of RPA specifics, a brief introduction to Power Automate is in order. Power Automate is Microsoft’s low-code automation platform that helps users streamline repetitive tasks, connect systems, and build workflows across a wide range of applications and services.
As a comprehensive automation platform, Power Automate has key capabilities the following key areas:
Digital Process Automation (DPA): With DPA, we can design and deploy workflow processes onto Power Automate's cloud-based workflow engine. With over 1,400 connectors available, these cloud flows can orchestrate complex processes across a wide variety of systems.
Robotic Process Automation (RPA): Power Automate Desktop is the RPA service within Power Automate, supporting desktop and web-based automation at scale.
Process Mining: With Process Mining, we can deeply analyze business processes, pinpointing bottlenecks and identifying opportunities for automation and improvement.
While this article is focused on RPA with Power Automate Desktop, it's important to note that it's part of a much larger Power Platform ecosystem which we can use to extend the reach of our automation solutions. We'll circle back on this concept a little bit more later on.
Getting Started with Power Automate Desktop
Desktop flows (or bots) are developed using the Power Automate Desktop client tool which can be downloaded from here. As shown in Figure 2 below, this Windows-based app provides developers with a rich, graphical interface for building automation workflows. With a drag-and-drop palette of prebuilt actions, makers can incorporate a wide variety of elements into their desktop flow:
Actions: preconfigured steps for interacting with applications, files, systems, and services
Variables: used to store and manipulate data throughout the flow
Conditions: logic branching tools such as If/Else statements to control flow behavior
Loops: constructs like For Each or While loops to repeat sets of actions
UI Elements: screen elements captured for automating interactions with desktop applications
Subflows: reusable sets of actions that help modularize and organize logic
Figure 2: Working with the Power Automate Desktop Flow Designer Tool
Key Capabilities of Power Automate Desktop
As a general-purpose RPA tool, Power Automate for desktop supports a wide range of automation scenarios from simple task automation to complex, multi-step workflows that span both legacy desktop applications and modern cloud services. In the upcoming sections, we'll briefly touch on some of the more notable capabilities of the tool.
Windows & Office Automation
As you might expect, Power Automate Desktop plays very nicely with Windows and Microsoft Office products. From automating file operations in Windows Explorer to manipulating data in Excel or sending templated emails through Outlook, we can stitch together workflows that span across both user-facing and backend systems.
With built-in connectors and actions for Word, Excel, Outlook, SharePoint, and Teams, Power Automate Desktop enables us to automate routine business processes such as generating reports, managing email communications, updating shared documents, and coordinating work approval processes.
Figure 3: Working with Excel Actions in Power Automate Desktop
This tight integration helps break down some of the traditional barriers that tend to exist between the front office and back office, enabling a smoother flow of information across departments.
Desktop Automation
At its core, Power Automate Desktop is designed to automate interactions with virtually any desktop application, regardless of how modern it may be. Whether you're dealing with legacy line-of-business applications, homegrown tools, niche software packages used in QA or lab environments, or even specialized interfaces for controlling manufacturing equipment, Power Automate Desktop provides the tools we need to automate them reliably.
Figure 4: Automating Desktop Applications with Power Automate Desktop
Using techniques like UI automation, image recognition, keystroke simulation, and window control, the tool can mimic human interactions with applications that don’t offer modern APIs or integration options. This approach is especially useful for automating SAP GUI transactions, where traditional integration methods may fall short. It can also be applied to terminal emulation scenarios, such as automating tasks within legacy mainframe environments like AS400. This allows organizations to streamline processes and achieve modern automation outcomes without the need to rewrite or replace their existing systems.
Figure 5: Automating AS400 Tasks Using Power Automate Desktop
Web Automation
Power Automate Desktop also offers powerful tools for web automation and web scraping. With built-in support for modern browsers like Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome, we can automate virtually any interaction within a web application: whether it’s a SaaS platform, a partner portal, or a legacy internal web app.
These capabilities make it easy to simulate user actions such as logging in, filling out forms, navigating pages, extracting data, or submitting transactions. This is especially valuable for organizations that rely on web-based tools without APIs, where traditional integration methods fall short.
Figure 6: Web Automation with Power Automate Desktop
Cloud & AI Integration
As noted earlier, Power Automate Desktop seamlessly integrates with Power Automate cloud flows and a wide range of cloud-based services, extending our automation reach way beyond the desktop and into the cloud.
This means that desktop automations can be orchestrated alongside cloud-based processes using Microsoft’s library of over 1,400 standard connectors. These connectors provide instant access to popular systems like Salesforce, Workday, and hundreds of third-party platforms.
Figure 7: Leveraging Standard & Custom Connectors
In addition to Microsoft ecosystems, Power Automate Desktop can connect to cloud services from providers like Amazon and Google, enabling automation scenarios that bridge infrastructure, data, and workflows across multiple cloud environments. For example, a desktop flow can trigger a process in AWS or Google Cloud, or retrieve data from a Google Sheet and use it to populate fields in a Windows application.
Power Automate also makes it easy to bring AI services into the mix. With native support for AI Builder, flows can incorporate low-code AI models for tasks like prediction, classification, and form processing. For more advanced scenarios, developers can tap into cognitive services from their preferred provider to tap into AI-powered capabilities such as document intelligence, language translation, and speech recognition.
Figure 8: Bring Your Own AI Cognitive Services with Power Automate Desktop
Automation in Action: SAP Use Case Analysis
Whenever customers new to Power Automate ask us what it actually does, we sometimes struggle to come up with a simple, straightforward answer. This isn't because we don’t have an answer, but because the possibilities are nearly endless. It’s kind of like asking what a smartphone can do. With a little creativity and ingenuity, the answer is just about anything.
The same concept applies to these SAP + Power Automate mashup scenarios. Want to download data out of SAP and send it to a distribution list? Easy. Need to combine web automation with SAP GUI automation to copy transactions from one system to another? No problem. Trying to automate a complex business transaction that doesn’t have a standard API? We’ve got that covered, too.
To bring all this down to earth, in the next section we'll walk through a practical example where we use SAP GUI automation to streamline a tedious process: updating service notifications with geocoordinates pulled from Bing Maps.
Real-World Example
In order to understand how desktop automation plays out in an SAP environment near you, let's look at a real-world example. Imagine that service notification records are being uploaded into SAP from a customer portal experience. Although these incoming notifications do contain valid service addresses, you want to update them with accurate geocoordinates so that downstream scheduling systems can determine optimized service routes.
Using SAP GUI automation, we start by logging into the SAP system and navigating to the transaction that lists open service notifications (Transaction IW59). The bot fills in the selection screen and executes the list report as shown in Figure 9 below.
Figure 9: Compiling a List of Service Notifications Needing Updates
Next, it exports the contents of the list report to Excel, providing a structured view of all pending notification records.
Figure 10: Downloading the Notification List to Excel
Once we download the notification list, we can use the Excel connector to attach to the workbook that was just opened and begin scanning through the notification list.
Figure 11: Attaching to the Downloaded Excel Workbook
As we iterate through the notification list, we can open them up for editing using Transaction IW52. From here, we can open up the service address dialog box and use UI automation to extract the address details from the form into a variable that we can then feed into a mapping service like Bing Maps (see Figure 12 below). Of course, with Power Automate cloud flows, we also have the option of accessing 3rd-party mapping services like Google Maps or ArcGIS.
Figure 12: Adding the Bing Maps Connector to Our Desktop Flow
Once we have the Bing Maps connector in place, we can use the Get location by address action highlighted in Figure 13 below to lookup the geocoordinates for the address.
Figure 13: Adding in Address Lookup Details from Bing Maps
Finally, we can once again use UI automation to populate the geocoordinate data into the service address and save the changes back in SAP.
Figure 13: Populating Geocoordinates in the Notification Address
Other Automation Inspiration Ideas
Before we wrap up this section, here are a few additional inspiration ideas that highlight some of the things we can accomplish using Power Automate Desktop and SAP:
Form Uploads: With connectors to Excel, OneDrive, SharePoint, Microsoft Forms, and more, our desktop flows can take form data from disparate systems and then upload it to SAP. This also works going the other way where we pull data from SAP and copy it into a SharePoint list and external database, and so forth.
Emailing Reports: We can have desktop flows that log onto SAP, run reports, download the results, and then email them out to key stakeholders. Alternatively, we can drop the report files into Teams or OneDrive.
Attachment Wrangling: In this scenario, the term "wrangling" refers to any sort of complex attachment upload/download scenario where we need to process a large volume of files using SAP's various attachment frameworks (e.g., GoS, DMS, CMS, KPro, etc.). These processes can be incorporated into larger workflow scenarios where attachments are loaded into a SharePoint repository which is used as a knowledge source for conversational agents.
PDF & Image Data Extraction: Power Automate Desktop has built-in PDF and image recognition services that can be used to extract text from attachments or images and then upload it to SAP.
Text Processing & Sentiment Analysis: With access to a wide variety of cognitive services, we can use desktop automation to analyze long text from various SAP transactions. Some of the options here include language translation, summarization with generative AI, or sentiment analysis for customer or employee records.
How Much Does All This Cost?
Throughout the course of our analysis, we've looked at a lot of different capabilities and features with Power Automate Desktop. With that in mind, you're probably wondering how much all this is going to cost.
The good news here is that a little bit of Power Automate licensing can go a long way. If you look at the Power Automate pricing page online, you'll find that Microsoft basically offers three different licensing plans. Let's quickly review these one-by-one:
Power Automate Premium: This license plan is targeted at developers/makers that are building cloud flows and/or desktop flows. The list price for this plan is $15 USD per user/month, but we oftentimes see customers work out decent-sized discounts when buying in bulk from Microsoft. When it comes to building SAP automations with Power Automate Desktop, this license covers just about all you'd need with one notable caveat—it only enables you to run your desktop flows in attended mode. This means that licensed users can only deploy and run their desktop flows on their local workstations.
Power Automate Process: If you want to run your bots in unattended mode, then you'll need one of the Power Automate Process licenses—either this one or the Power Automate Hosted Process license we'll discuss next. The list price for this license is $150 per bot/month. With this license, you can essentially deploy/run your bots on the hardware of your choice. This could be a local server or VM or a Windows VM hosted in the cloud (Azure or elsewhere).
Power Automate Hosted Process: With this licensing plan, Microsoft fully manages the VM/infrastructure used to host your unattended bots. The list price for this plan is currently $215 per bot/month.
While these can be complex decisions if you're planning on deploying an army of bots, we find that customers can get a lot of traction/value to start just by acquiring a few Power Automate Premium licenses. One of the added benefits of this approach is that it allows your team to experiment with both desktop flows and cloud flows.
This is notable because cloud flows can really help stretch your SAP automation budget by allowing you to orchestrate a lot of your SAP integration requirements without the need for dedicated infrastructure or a large-scale RPA investment. If you're wondering how it all connects behind the scenes, check out our earlier blog post Microsoft Power Platform & SAP: Connectivity 101, where we break down the different integration options available and how to choose the right one for your use case.
The biggest wildcard when it comes to pricing is the use of AI-powered services, which operate on a consumption-based model. While the cost per transaction is often minimal—sometimes just fractions of a penny—it can add up quickly if you're processing high volumes or leveraging premium AI capabilities.
Fortunately, the good news is that you can accomplish quite a bit right off the bat with just a few Power Automate Premium licenses and then figure out what all you might want to stack on from there.
Closing Thoughts
Power Automate opens the door to a whole new level of flexibility and efficiency—especially when you pair it with SAP. Whether you're working around integration gaps with SAP GUI automation, enhancing workflows using data from third-party services, or simply looking to offload repetitive tasks, the platform offers a powerful toolkit that’s accessible to teams of all sizes.
While there are important considerations around licensing, architecture, and scalability the barrier to entry is actually quite low. Starting with just a few Power Automate Premium licenses, you can start to build up some momentum and validate automation opportunities before making larger investments. As the saying goes: start small, prove value, and scale smart. That mindset fits perfectly in this context.
