Understanding BPM from Business angle

[rayapudi_praveen]

     Recently I was in discussion with prospective customer, they are having a very vast landscape and have many interfaces across systems, they are looking for sustainable application  support, I was explain the components of SolMan and how Business Process operations  will helps them in their day to day business. They have asked me below questions during the discussion and I felt that they are very important from a business angel and this should be known to everyone hence I have decided to write this blog.

Do we need to implement Business process Monitoring is it value the investment?

Implementing BPM will help in protecting your initial investment by stabilizing your system faster.

If your systems are not stable and you see disturbance in your regular process because of failures in interfaces and / or background processes indicates that BPM has to be setup.

This is more relevant for solutions which are just live or which are still evolving.

Can we setup Business Process Improvement along with Monitoring ?

When the business process are stable you can look for business process improvement, these are basically long processed documents based on the planned date but are still open e.g. open sales orders of last year.

These deviations are caused by :

1. Wrong configuration

2. Poor master data maintenance

3. User training gap

In general most of the SAP customers will have it difficult to activate the application specific part of business process monitoring  directly with sensible threshold values because of above deviations. So its suggested to first set up Business Process Paralytics for these and clear the backlog’s, later on move to regular monitoring for these to have a control on backlogs.

These can be monitored using application specific monitors which are part of BPM.

When to implement BPA ?

BPA is an enhancement to BPM. When your business processes are stable and you want most of initial investment & achieve optimum.

BPA is used to improve the business process efficiency, we can set up a business KPI and measure it using BPA.

If your are not able to meet business KPI’s or want to improve lead time of your process e.g. complete OTC cycle in 4 hours. All these KPI’s can be set and monitored in BPA.

BPA will collect application specific data and stores in info cubes of SolMan for analysis.

When do we need to setup cross database comparison ?

If your solution is spread across multiple systems be it SAP or non-SAP and the data exchange takes place across systems, then we need a check to ensure data consistency.

Interface monitoring is already checking for failures so again why i need one more level of check ?

Interface monitoring will also do the same activity but only for the given time frame. Data consistency management should be setup as an additional safety net to discover inconsistencies that have occurred due to other causes like update termination, ABAP dump during update etc.

Hope this will be useful and will add some knowledge to readers.