SAP Automation Tools

SAP Automation Tools are set of tools, components and class libraries for developers to integrate non-SAP systems with SAP systems.
There are two tool sets available for SAP Automation.

SAP GUI interfaces
RFC & BAPI interfaces

SAP GUI interface toolset can be used for developing applications that can interact with SAP transactions interactively, so that the end-users can access SAP Screens directly from other applications (like showing SAP screen from a VisualBasic screen scraper program). These toolsets use the SAPGUI application server component to connect to SAP R/3. Using the second set of tools, SAP lets you access RFCs and BAPIs directly from non-SAP systems. Using these tools you can

Connect to R/3 from outside of the SAP GUI interface environment

Access SAP business objects and Business APIs (BAPIs)
Access R/3 RFC function modules
Trigger R/3 transactions in batch mode from outside of R/3
Provide an alternative GUI interface to R/3 applications and transactions (Screen scrapers)
Send or receive inbound or outbound IDoc documents to or from R/3

The SAP Assistant toolset contains following components.

C, C++, Java, VB APIs & Class files
Active X controls
COM / DCOM connectors & server
Standalone EXE files, etcâ€¦

SAP Automation tools are very powerful developer toolkit, which is ideal for developing both inbound and outbound real-time interfaces to or from SAP R/3 system.