Creating Navigation Maps and Value Chains

Imagine you open your Collaboration Hub, and the first thing you see are highly complicated process models. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a more visually appealing entry point for your process viewer? With Navigation Maps, you can break away from the typical modeling approach and design a more creative alternative to traditional value chain diagrams.

Below, you can find a list of the main advantages that come with using navigation maps:

Display a clear overview of your process architecture in a user-friendly way, helping your colleagues to find relevant process content with ease.

Design user and customer journeys which accurately reflect your process landscape and simultaneously tell a meaningful story.

Create unique user flows that are aligned with your brand and organizational needs, enhancing your company’s identity.

Let’s look at some examples of navigation maps as high-level entry points and at how different these can look like. Their complexity will largely differ depending on how many other navigation maps, value chains, or process models you link to them. This enables you build a diagram hierarchy that's easier to consume than entering right into the respective process content.

In the section below, we'll take a look at some of the key steps of creating navigation maps in the Graphical Editor. Each will be explored in greater detail in the following video. You can find more information in the Help Portal.

Various shapes and text boxes can be used to build navigation maps. You can customize them by adjusting their standard attributes, such as size, description, color, gradient, stroke color, and flat design. Custom attributes may also be added by the administrator.

All modelers are authorized to upload images through Image Management. The graphics must be in the SVG format and may not exceed 50 KB. Each file is checked by the system for possible security vulnerabilities and may first need to be approved for the upload to succeed.

By default, you can add links to all elements and uploaded images in your navigation map. You can link them to another diagram, a folder in your workspace, or a URL.

After you save your navigation map, don't forget to see the final result via the SAP Signavio Process Collaboration Hub preview mode and check if all the links work as expected.

Watch the video below to now see these features in practice.

You can also link dictionary entries to the images, shapes, as well as text boxes in your navigation map. This applies to entries from all enabled standard categories.

With Live Insights, you can monitor important analytics and key performance indicators right from your navigation map. After you select a fitting shape, link it with a corresponding widget from SAP Signavio Process Intelligence. The video below will show you how this is done.

In addition to navigation maps, value chains are another option to create a high-level perspective of your processes. For example, each modeling element can represent a process or process group of a specific business unit. You can link the elements in chronological order and thus show the hierarchical relationships between them.

Creating value chains in the Editor works very similarly to that of navigation maps. Options such as customizing shapes or adding links functions the same way. Images, custom attributes, as well as Live Insights can all be added just as previously demonstrated. For more details, check out the Help Portal.

The video below will show you how these features work in case of value chains in greater detail. In our example, we'll create a traditional process landscape that will serve as an entry point.

After you've created your value chain, it's time to connect it to a navigation map and establish a process hierarchy. The video below will demonstrate how to do this. You'll also learn how to convert shapes to images. In our example, the subprocess modeling elements are converted into previously uploaded graphics via the attribute panel.