Achieving Business and IT Transparency

Use SAP Signavio to document and analyze your business processes, creating a central source of truth that enables data-driven insights.

• Process Manager – to model and structure your process landscape.
• Process Insights – to analyze process performance, inefficiencies, and benchmarking data.
• Plug and Gain (if applicable) – to accelerate initial setup with out-of-the-box content.

• Focus on importing relevant and prioritized processes—avoid overloading the workspace with too many best practice diagrams.
• Establish a clear and consistent process hierarchy to support synchronization with SAP Cloud ALM and enable structured navigation and reporting.

High-quality, transparent application data is essential for IT transformation. SAP LeanIX provides the structure and tools to document, assess, and manage your enterprise architecture.

Getting started: If new to SAP LeanIX, begin by exploring available options to import data into your workspace. Leverage the Getting Data into Your Workspace documentation for detailed guidance.

• A complete business capability model
• A well-documented application landscape
• A completed application portfolio assessment

• Use the SAP Reference Architecture to import a pre-defined, continuously updated business capability model, mapped to the respective solutions, that SAP recommends.
• Leverage SAP Landscape Discovery (integrated via SAP Cloud ALM) to automatically populate your application inventory.
• Enrich application data with meaningful attributes such as:
  • Lifecycle status
  • Technical and functional fit
  • Assessment scores (e.g., 6R, TIME)

As minimum, you should have a complete business capability model and application landscaped with a completed Application Portfolio Assessment.

You will gain a holistic understanding of your business capabilities, how your applications support your business capabilities and the state of your application portfolio.

The following image shows an example of a business capability map.

The following figure shows an example of an application landscape report including attributes.

With both the process and application repositories now established in SAP Signavio and SAP LeanIX, the next step is to connect the two. This integration is key to aligning business and IT, enabling a clear understanding of how changes affect your landscape and supporting well-informed transformation decisions.

To achieve this, integrate your SAP Signavio and SAP LeanIX workspaces and establish meaningful relationships between processes, applications, and other relevant objects.

Best practice: Use SAP Signavio as the system of record for processes and SAP LeanIX as the system of record for IT-related data, including applications, interfaces, and data objects. This ensures consistency and clarity in ownership and data governance across your transformation initiatives.

This means, that SAP Signavio processes are synchronized to SAP LeanIX as Business context fact sheet and SAP LeanIX fact sheets are synchronized to SAP Signavio dictionary items.

Check the chapter Setup SAP Signavio & SAP LeanIX Integration for high-level guidance, and the documentation on how to set up the SAP Signavio Integration for a detailed step-by-step guide.

Connect the relations of processes with business capabilities: To establish relationships between processes and business capabilities, open the respective process diagram in SAP Signavio and assign the appropriate business capability as an attribute. This linkage will then be synchronized and reflected as a relationship in SAP LeanIX, ensuring both tools remain aligned in representing business context and dependencies.

Further details on modelling business context fact sheet in SAP LeanIX: There are four fact sheet subtypes for business context available (plus one optional subtype) that you can choose from, which gives you the flexibility to align with the most common ways your organization typically structures its business and tasks. Learn more in the Business Context Modeling Guidelines.

With the integration between SAP Signavio and SAP LeanIX in place, you can now begin the detailed assessment and scoping of your ERP transformation. The following best practices and use cases will help you effectively identify transformation scope:

• Identify business processes based on SAP Signavio’s Best-Run Score and process performance indicators
  • Spot underperforming processes by identifying low Best-Run Scores.
  • Drill down into process steps to pinpoint where performance issues occur.
  • Use the process discovery report and spaghetti diagrams to visualize complexity and inefficiencies.
  • Perform a variant analysis to understand where processes frequently deviate from the standard, signaling a need for harmonization or redesign.
• Link process insights with application context: Once target processes are identified from a top-down perspective, you can analyze the application dependencies of each process directly within SAP Signavio:
  • Open the process diagrams to view which applications support each process step.
  • Identify risks or transformation needs by evaluating whether these applications are phasing out, lack fit (technical or functional), or require consolidation.
  • Use this insight to inform application rationalization, interface redesign, or migration planning.

This combined view enables well-informed decisions on what to transform, where to start, and how process and IT dependencies affect each other during your ERP transformation.

See the following figure for an example.

By clicking the respective application fact sheet link within SAP Signavio, users are directed to the corresponding SAP LeanIX fact sheet, which provides detailed information about the current state of the application and any planned initiatives. This is a valuable input for process owners, helping them assess whether a process may be impacted by application modernization—or, conversely, whether a process change should trigger a discussion with the application owner to evaluate necessary updates.

To understand which processes may be affected from an application perspective, use SAP LeanIX’s landscape reports:

• Leverage the application landscape report, clustered by processes, to gain a clear overview of which business processes are supported by which applications.
• Identify potential risks or opportunities for consolidation based on application lifecycle status, fit assessments, or modernization plans.

If you have identified application candidates for transformation or change, you can use the Relation Explorer on the application fact sheet to understand which dependent processes may be affected.

As a result of this step, you should identify the processes and corresponding applications that are in scope for your ERP transformation and form an initial assessment about the most important and impactful changes needed in your business and IT architecture.

To summarize and communicate your insights from Discover, consider creating a dashboard or presentation in SAP LeanIX that targets the stakeholder groups, e.g., management or process owners.

Here are some examples of reports that you can collect on a dashboard:

• Process landscape report to see which applications supporting which processes. Detailed view:
• Stacked view to get numerical values in case there are many applications:

More best practices on dashboards can be found in our documentation on dashboards.