SAP Business Process Intelligence is one of the main components of the Rise with SAP offering so this week IgniteSAP is sharing an overview of SAP BPI.
It is almost a year since the release of SAP’s flagship enterprise transformation service Rise with SAP was announced, and the platform is steadily gaining traction among companies and system integrators. It is no coincidence that SAP announced the acquisition of their long-term business process management collaborator Signavio almost simultaneously with the announcement of Rise with SAP.
IT consultants should now be asking themselves “What SAP solutions should I be familiar with to ensure I am best placed to help my customers take advantage of Rise with SAP?”. In order to answer this question IgniteSAP is going to look first at SAP Business Process Intelligence, and how we can train and gain qualifications to confidently implement instances of SAP BPI. To begin we should first take a quick look at Signavio.
Signavio started as a business process management research project by four students from the Hasso Plattner Institute, co-founded by Hasso Plattner, who is one of the founders of SAP: so the link between the companies was very strong from Signavio’s inception.
So because Signavio’s input into SAP BPI is key to this collection of business process management solutions, it is useful to give Signavio’s description of their philosophy of business solution design as an introduction to SAP BPI.
“Today, many companies are facing the challenge of constant change or even reinvention, dictated by the requirements of the market. Whether it’s because of new technology, changing regulations, or even changes in institutional knowledge, many companies are considering what direction they need to go for long-term success. It’s the responsibility of business leaders who understand their company’s processes to find the right path forward.”
Signavio was created as a means to model and make clear workflows, processes and decisions in business process management. SAP acquired Signavio because this technology made a valuable contribution to the aspirations of the Rise with SAP platform: to simplify the experience of transforming a business into a cloud-based digital enterprise.
In order to successfully transform a business into an intelligent enterprise it is necessary to analyse the existing structure of the business and its processes, and then to model an idealised virtual representation of those processes so that a path for transformation can be designed and brought to life.
SAP BPI is a set of six solutions designed to facilitate business process transformations. The solutions are designed to work in conjunction and the functionality of each overlaps to some extent. They are: SAP Process Insights, SAP Signavio Process Intelligence, SAP Signavio Process Manager, SAP Signavio Journey Modeller, SAP Signavio Process Collaboration Hub, and SAP Signavio Process Governance.
SAP Process Insights gives companies the power to get real-time reports on the efficiency of the existing process. This can then be evaluated by over 300 key performance indicators derived from the anonymised aggregated data of thousands of SAP customers so that an objective comparison can be made with real world examples to establish the performance of the existing business processes.
If the process can be improved then SAP Process Insights can be used to identify bottlenecks and weak links. Then the integrated SAP Intelligent RPA can be used to recommend process improvements and corrections, as well as contribute to monitoring of operations.
This live monitoring and data visualisation provides transparency, allowing companies to maximise the efficiency of the existing system, or to derive insights that enable transformation through the other Business Process Intelligence solutions.
Wassilios Lolas, SAP’s Global Vice President, Center of Excellence and Solution Management, Business Process Intelligence has described the solution in this way:
“[It] provides business professionals with out-of-the-box capabilities to very quickly analyse business processes that run through SAP ECC and SAP S/4HANA systems and get tailored recommendation on how to fix or improve them. However, for non-SAP systems, organisations are able to benefit from our recent acquisition of Signavio that is able to provide analysis and modelling.”
This Process Intelligence solution compliments and augments the process insights with further and more detailed analysis so that organisations can create simulations and diagnostic tests for bottlenecks.
Alternatives for process changes can be made according to best practices and the processes can be optimised to take advantage of robotic process automation, machine learning and AI. Customer behaviour can be analysed to ensure interactions are satisfactory, and accelerated performance analysis can be achieved with the installation of widgets for ongoing assessments.
Root cause analysis allows companies to understand the reason behind delays and address those directly, and the overview of the entire enterprise from end to end can be achieved and visualised in one place.
SAP Signavio Process Manager can be used by businesses and organisations to model, analyse, simulate and optimise business processes. Processes can also be built based on findings from analysis and simulations of potential improvements of those processes. Business processes can be mapped from finance and human resources to manufacturing, sales and distribution. Data from all areas of the organisation can be fed into optimisation of customer interactions in order to achieve enhance customer experiences.
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By connecting all areas of the business to a central strategy it is possible to implement a business plan effectively, and also react with agility to changes in the economic environment. The interconnection of all areas of this business also facilitates conversations between departments and sites, ensuring that all employees and managers are working in synch towards the same clear goals.
SAP Signavio Journey Modeller allows companies to create a real-time view of customer experience and operational data. By understanding the customer base, and aligning customer and employee interactions it is possible to drive better business outcomes.
This data can be used to create environments for employees to understand customer experiences, and in conjunction with process analysis it can contribute to transformations of processes so that customer experiences are enhanced: leading to more engagement.
SAP Signavio Process Collaboration Hub allows an organisation to ensure that all employees and managers are on the same page when it comes to understanding the business processes. Other aspects of SAP Business Process Intelligence are designed to connect data and analyses on processes and customer experiences: the process collaboration hub ensures that employees and management efforts are all aligned toward the same goal.
Changes to the process models are made visible to all members of the organisation and joint projects can be tracked and managed, so that company initiatives are easily understood by all parties. The process landscape can be shared with all stakeholders and step by step walkthroughs of process transformations can be illustrated.
With a centralised, single source of truth employees can access all information relevant to their own role, while also understanding how the work of their colleagues integrates with their own.
Along with the Collaboration Hub, SAP Signavio Process Governance keeps changes to business processes across an organisation coherent by the creation of standardised business process workflows. Tasks can be coordinated and tracked across the organisation.
No coding is required to create prototypes and trigger workflow deployments, and a drag and drop Form Builder provides a standardised way to define work loads and track progress.
By maintaining this structured way of working on business processes it is easy to coordinate fundamental changes to business operations.
The SAP Training Shop lists two courses that provide an introduction to working with SAP Signavio solutions, they are: SIG121- Introduction into BPMN 2.0 and SAP Signavio Process Manager, and SIG211- Introduction into SAP Signavio Process Intelligence for Analysts.
The intended audience for these courses are primarily Business Analysts and Business Process Architects, though Enterprise Architects and users of the software will also find the content useful.
By participating in courses in the SAP Training Shop that cover SAP Business Process Intelligence, as well as SAP Business Technology Platform, and SAP S/4HANA Cloud, IT consultants will be able to take onboard foundational knowledge that will prepare them to offer services supporting implementations of Rise with SAP.
This professional understanding is going to become increasingly important in the SAP ecosystem as Rise with SAP uptake gathers momentum through 2022. IgniteSAP made a brief assessment of Rise with SAP uptake in December 2021 and it was apparent that though more product education for potential customers was necessary for the platform to gain more traction, it was clear there is steady acceleration in the adoption of Rise.
Through 2022 we can expect an acceleration of uptake as real world examples of implementations and success stories begin to filter through back to those who companies need confirmation before they jump in, and SI’s encourage their customers with more Rise with SAP services.
As this complex section of the SAP market grows, those IT consultants who have done the preparatory up-skilling by training in SAP BPI, SAP BTP and S/4HANA Cloud will be best placed to Rise with SAP.
If you would like more advice as an IT consultant about how to approach SAP retraining and finding a new position in the SAP market please contact the IgniteSAP team
