Overview
Business Process Monitoring (BPMon) is an out-of-the-box solution offered by SAP, using Solution Manager to monitor your entire landscape as well as business processes. In short this functionality helps in keeping Techno-Functional side business up and running efficiently with minimum time and efforts. SAP Solution Manager Tool led towards automation of the business operations and functions in a standardised way. Based on extensive research and client feedback, SAP has provided standard Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for the Business Processes which are Assets for the clients.
BPMon – as one essential aspect of Business Process Operations, means the proactive and process oriented monitoring of a company’s core business processes, i.e. the related documents and corresponding dialog transactions and background jobs as well as interfaces. BPMon is intended to create alerts for detected problem as early as possible, so that, the problems can be solved before they become critical for the business. With BPMon in SAP Solution Manager, you can also provide specific error handling procedures in case of alerts and to enable the Solution Support Organization to solve problems without any need to involve the experts. Additionally, BPMon can support the process owners to improve the processes by detecting backlog situations with the help of Business Process Analytics. Improvement means cleaning up old and open business data, close process design gaps, adjust customizing and/or configuration.
In general, BPMon includes the process oriented cross system observation of:
- Business process performance
- Background processing
- Business application logs
- Data transfer via interfaces between software components
- Data consistency
- Technical infrastructure and components required to run the business processes
- Backlog situations for application related key figures
SAP Business Process Monitoring is not only a tool for configuring the monitoring, but additionally comprises detailed procedures for error handling and problem resolution, the precise definition of contact person and escalation paths, and the tight integration into customer’s Solution Support Organization.
Phases involved
To simplify the operational model of BPMon, let’s see following four phases of this functionality:
It starts with Business Process Implementation phase where we design, configure/customize customer’s business specific processes as per requirement. This phase leads to initial plan and investment of customer where we design the KPI’s based on their business requirement.
(Note: We can use the standard business blueprint generation standard program provided by SAP. This will reduce the time and efforts in creating baseline blueprint. We can modify this blueprint at any point of time as per requirement.)
Business Process Stabilization phase where we focus on justifying the initial investment done by customer. By monitoring the landscape and business processes using SAP Solution Manager, BPMon focus is to minimize the manual efforts and stabilize the entire landscape in both Technical and Functional aspects. This phase also improves the system and service availability.
Business Process Improvement directs towards achieving optimum results according to the implementation plan. This can be achieved by cleaning old business data, providing sufficient end user training, closing process design gaps, adjusting customizing and/or configuration. This phase also showcases ROI done by the customer by improving the business process operations.
Business Process Optimization & Innovation phase helps in getting better outputs compared to the initial planning and implementation. Re-engineer business processes (BPE/BPR), Process Innovation Minimize process cycle time, Maximize process availability and efficiency are few of the areas where we can focus in this phase.
Governance Model
BPMon will have focused outcomes according to designation and work demand of the involved person in the process. I have tried to create a generalized governance model of this process. This may differ case to case and as per customer requirement.
In the following diagram, based on the person’s responsibility in the entire business process, he/she will get desired reports/outcomes from BPMon functionality.
- Customer’s Global process owner
- Business Stakeholders
- Business Services Teams will be getting an Alert notifications from system for issues in the landscape or business process. If the issue(s) are known and can be easily managed/resolved, these teams will resolve the same on their own and will make sure systems and business processes are up and running. In case more clarification on the issue is required, only then will these teams interact with the Customer’s front office.
You can clearly see that Solution Manager and BPMon can create a scenario where Customer is involved in the entire process only when more information or clarification is required, related to issue reported. Else the entire process is automated and respective service provider teams are taking care of operations for customer with minimum efforts. This is the big value gain from customer’s point of view as they are saving huge amount of time and efforts in these operations.
Interaction with other SAP Solman tools
This diagram will showcase how SAP Solman and BPMon helps entire business operation as a whole. BPMon will interact with other functionalities to keep the business operations up and running. Solution Manager will act as a Single source of truth in this case and will help in having E2E Integrated Business Services for customer.
Journey towards E2E Integrated Business Services
Following approach will help in achieving maximum gain from Solution Manager and BPMon. It again, is a generic approach that I chose and similar to the standard implementation approach SAP suggest to follow. This approach helps customer in decision making related to implementing the functionality as well as the related tasks and governance involved in the entire process.
Following are few pre-requisites for BPMon functionality:
- Setup of system landscape and logical components
- SAP Solution manager 7.0 Ehp1 or higher with the latest ST 400, ST – SER and ST-A/PI add-ons
- Business Process defined at the Blueprint phase
- SAP Managed Tags:
