SAP Signavio in migration to S/4

Companies often face the problem of incomplete system documentation, and are not fully aware of how their processes actually flow and whether their flow is optimal. This lack of transparency about how the current system is being used often gets in the way of making the right decision about the direction of migration to S/4HANA.

What if we could see whether our current processes, our current system is optimal? If there are no bottlenecks in it, if we have the right level of process automation, if our indicators are not significantly different from the industry average – a brownfield migration seems reasonable. But how can we check this?

This is where SAP Signavio Process Insights comes to the rescue – an application for the Business Technology Platform (BTP) that analyzes current processes in the ECC system in terms of more than two hundred standard indicators developed by SAP, compares them with industry averages of these indicators, and recommends opportunities for improvement.

After installing and subscribing to the application on BTP, it is necessary to set up a connection to the ECC system or S/4HANA. Process Insights will load the data directly from the system, analyze it and present it in the form of an easy-to-read dashboard accessible in a browser. The data is loaded periodically at weekly intervals, allowing for changes to be monitored in processes on an ongoing basis. It is worth mentioning here that Process Insights supports Google Chrome, Apple Safari and Mozilla Firefox. Microsoft Edge is not supported.

The installation process itself is not complicated and can be completed within a single day (SAP even states that it can be done in minutes – especially if we have an experienced BTP administrator and a well-configured network and ERP system).

After loading data from the system, we get analysis by end-to-end processes and business lines. The system contains more than 90 predefined processes and more than 200 performance indicators. Additionally, the indicators are related to recommendations for improvements and innovations available in S/4HANA.

Depending on our needs, we can start analyzing the data either from a selected business line (e.g., Sales) or a specific process (e.g., from sales opportunity to transaction completion). We start the analysis with the indicators. At first glance, we can easily identify whether our system requires improvements as this is indicated by indicators highlighted in red, which represent the most frequently encountered blockers. Going deeper into the analysis, we can filter the presented data to analyze it, for example, in the context of a specific business unit, to compare the results of individual units against industry averages or against one another (perhaps in another unit a certain process is performed better and is worth replicating). Here we also find recommendations for improvements and innovations.

For some processes, a so-called guided analysis is available. It guides the user by the hand through individual SAP objects and tables, indicating what actions need to be performed to find the cause of bottlenecks or other limitations identified by Process Insights.

In summary – with Process Insights, we can not only make an informed decision about whether we want to move our system to S/4HANA without changes or what we can optimize using the new S/4 features, but we can also implement optimizations and enhancements in our current system.

SAP currently offers access to Process Insights Discovery Edition, which is free for current customers and the analysis of one process selected out of three, and 56 performance indicators.

If after analyzing the system, whether using Process Insights or another approach, the conclusion is a decision to re-implement, another question arises – do we implement “our processes” or SAP Best Practices (SAP BP)? How compatible or divergent with SAP Best Practices processes are our current runs? Do we have up-to-date process documentation in BPMN notation that we could use to compare with SAP BP? Are we sure that users are executing the processes in the system according to the documentation?

Practice shows that very often we do not have up-to-date documentation (we have documentation from the time of implementation, but a lot has changed since then, and the documentation has remained unchanged). And even if we do have up-to-date documentation, there are still situations when the actual executed process deviates from the original assumptions (e.g. cancellation of a sales order after receiving an advance payment, which was not intended to happen, may occur because customers demand it).

Here, two additional SAP Signavio tools come into play:

• SAP Signavio Process Intelligence,
• SAP Signavio Process Manager.

SAP Signavio Process Intelligence allows for data loading from the ERP system and graphically presents the actual process flow on its basis, including variants and the number of runs executed in each variant.

The tool allows for data analysis using standard widgets, such as total, average or distribution over time. These widgets enable data aggregation and analysis based on time or location (e.g., how many sales orders were processed in specific regions).

In addition to standard widgets, the system also has its own query language (SIGNAL) similar to SQL, which allows us to create our own analysis as needed (e.g., what is the total amount of orders that are delayed).

Source data can be loaded from a prepared Excel file; however, SAP Signavio is equipped with several predefined connectors, including those for SAP ECC and SAP S/4HANA systems, which greatly streamline the process of data loading into Process Intelligence. Based on defined runs, the system can also create BPMN diagrams that can further document our business processes.

We know that we want to reimplement our system, and we have a clear view of our current processes and what needs optimization. Can we assess how close or far we are from SAP Best Practices?

By utilizing the Process Design and Standardization for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition accelerator, we can load the standard SAP Best Practices processes into SAP Signavio. If we connect the process diagram to the analysis in SAP Signavio Process Intelligence, the system will be able to show us the differences between the actual process flow in the ERP system and the model flow offered by SAP Best Practices. This will allow us to assess whether an implementation based on SAP Best Practices is a viable path for organizing and standardizing our operations while transitioning to the modern and continuously developed S/4HANA platform.