Business Process Monitoring

The Business Process Monitoring (BPMon) app in SAP Cloud ALM for Operations supports the detect-to-correct lifecycle of your SAP solution landscape along the end-to-end processes of the SAP Intelligent Suite. Business Process Monitoring aims to provide transparency about the end-to-end process health based on predefined KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). It enables both, the Line of Business (LoB) users and IT users to directly identify business process disruptions across the entire system landscape, and to react to anomalies before critical situations arise.

Please watch this video to observe how Business Process Monitoring provides transparency to your business processes:

Business Process Monitoring aims to provide transparency regarding the overall health of the end-to-end process, using predefined KPIs as shown in the following image:

It enables both, LoB users and IT users to directly identify business process disruptions across the entire SAP solution landscape, and to react to anomalies before critical situations arise:

• Identify business disruptions and exceptions in process execution based on pre-defined KPIs.
• Identify technical issues which have direct impact on mission critical processes with technical monitoring.

After you have connected your managed components, auto discovery will analyze them, setup data collection and activate the respective KPIs in Business Process Monitoring on your SAP Cloud ALM tenant automatically:

Without any additional setup steps, you are able to explore these KPIs in the Business Process Monitoring:

• Offer transparency into end-to-end processes based on predefined business process KPIs.
• Provide out-of-the box real-time monitoring across the entire Intelligent Suite.
• Reduce implementation effort by auto-discovery of relevant business process KPIs.
• Receive automatic alerts and provide automated corrective actions.
• Enrich operational business process information with application monitoring information.
• Predict business process anomalies before business is impacted.
• Process information will be retrieved from SAP Cloud ALM for Implementation.
• Continuous development of further business process KPIs based on APIs provided by SAP Cloud Applications.

Further information can be found in the SAP Cloud ALM for Operations Expert Portal.

Business Process Monitoring is one of those apps, which should accelerate the communication between IT and Business users. With a simplified process view and card design, the app is also suitable for users who are not interested in all technical details of the SAP Solution Landscape.

The image below illustrates the key personas and use cases in Business Process Monitoring:

The typical key personas using Business Process Monitoring in SAP Cloud ALM for Operations with respect to the example of the Lead to Cash Process would be the Application Owner (IT), the Process Manager (Lead to Cash) and Order Processing agent.

The Application Owner (IT) needs to monitor the operations of his/her solutions and wants to:

• Have an overview of critical technical deviations and affected processes.
• Collaborate on assigned tasks for critical exceptions.

The Process Manager (Lead to Cash) needs to monitor the end-to-end process, because he/she wants to:

• Monitor the E2E process performance.
• Understand critical business process deviations.
• Receive automatic alerts in case performance thresholds are in danger or violated.
• Collaborate on created and assigned tasks for critical exceptions.
• Deep-dive into deviations to analyze root causes.
• Understand past, current, and predicted process performance along multiple dimensions.

The Order Processing Agent wants to monitor the operations with respect to:

• Operative process performance.
• Critical process deviations.
• Status check of a specific document type (for example open sales orders).
• Automatic alerts in case performance thresholds are in danger or violated.
• Collaboration on assigned tasks for critical exceptions.

To get the transparency on your process performance, the Business Process Monitoring application provides the dashboards out of the box:

The screenshots below show the different views available in the Business Process Monitoring application:

The following views are available:

1. Home view: For a big-picture an overview with end-to-end process cards is shown that display the most important information about your process health, such as the number of open alerts.
2. Monitoring view: On the first level drill-down, you see the sub-processes and their KPIs.
3. Monitoring view: The second level drill-down provides information on single KPIs including a graphical representation and several sorting and filter possibilities.

Here you can also find the document number, which you can use to look up the business document in the connected services/systems whose data is being collected. If the document number is a link, you can also jump directly to the document in the managed service or system.

Please note that you need a user with all necessary authorizations to access the documents.

Additionally, you can mark also single KPIs as a favorite, which has the consequence that they will appear also on the home screen for easier navigation.

If you would like to learn how to use the Business Process Monitoring application, including the Home Page, Favorites, and Monitoring details, please watch the demonstration video:

You can follow along with this demonstration either by using the SAP Cloud ALM Public Demo tenant or your own SAP Cloud ALM tenant, if this use case has already been set up. To do this, simply select the Operations group and then choose the Business Process Monitoring tile.

The different KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) in Business Process Monitoring in SAP Cloud ALM are defined along the end-to-end processes based of the SAP Intelligent Suite. Furthermore, they are divided in four different kinds.

The image below displays the predetermined content for the Substep of Managing Customer Orders and how it is utilized by customers.:

The following end-to-end processes based on the SAP Intelligent Suite are supported by Business Process Monitoring:

• Recruit to Retire
• Lead to Cash
• Source to Pay
• Design to Operate

For every end-to-end process a number of sub-end-to-end process with a number of processes is defined. The processes include predefined content with KPIs, which are made up of four different categories:

• Throughput figures measure the average number of business documents, line items or schedule lines processed within a certain time frame.
• Lead time figures measure processing time from a defined start point to a corresponding end point of a business process.
• Backlog figures measure the number of business documents, line items or schedule lines not completely processed until an expected date. In other words, they display the number of business transactions that are overdue for processing.
• Exception figures collect the number of error messages that occurred during a business transaction.

These KPIs are shown in the KPI cards and the icon next to the title of the KPI indicates the KPI category. The percentage next to the KPI value indicates the KPI trend, and the color of the card, and of the KPI value is determined by the trend rating of the current KPI value.

The lower section of the card displays the number of critical (red) and warning (orange) alerts for the KPI. You can navigate directly to the Alerting section by selecting it. If a KPI collects data from multiple services or systems, the icon color is based on the most critical event status.

A list of the available KPIs can be found under the following link in the SAP Cloud ALM for Operations Expert Portal.

Access control is a very important topic in Business Process Monitoring, therefore you should be aware of the concepts illustrated here.

When you choose the configuration button in the Business Process Monitoring app and activate the Access Control you can create Access Groups as shown in the following screenshot:

Access control in Business Process Monitoring is based on attributes and a process scope. The attributes allow you to restrict the access to business data for a certain access group. You can simply enhance existing groups by specifying attributes based on your specifications with respect to, for example Company Code, Profit Center, Legal Entity Code, etc. In the access groups, you can also restrict the access to authorized users for a particular business process scope. As a process monitoring administrator, you can create access groups and, once all users are assigned to a group, you can activate access control.

The following screenshots display Business Process Monitoring when Access Control is inactive.:

In the beginning, access control is inactive, which means all users of Business Process Monitoring can see all KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) in all the managed components and processes that are activated in SAP Cloud ALM.

This screenshots display Business Process Monitoring when Access Control is Active.:

Access control can now be used in context of restricting access: Securing information by which KPIs are visible for which user or which group of users. For example, the financial department should see only finance related KPIs - the human resources team should be the only area, which is using Hire To Retire KPIs, which are powered by SAP SuccessFactors and vice versa not see the finance content. These kind of access restrictions are based on the process scope.  In this example, access control is active and the user only sees the Attract to Hire subprocess within the Recruit to Retire process.

This screenshots show the usage of additional attributes:

Based on the business requirements, the access group can be enhanced by appropriate attributes, for example the Legal Entity Code.

In general, attributes can be used in the following way:

• No Attributes maintained: no restriction on business data is applied.
• Attributes maintained: business data is restricted for the users assigned to a certain group.
• Attributes are additive: if a user is assigned to multiple groups with Attributes, all business data is shown which is relevant for the assigned Attributes.
• Access Groups are only relevant for users not being considered as administrator.
• Available attributes depend on your scope selection. If an attribute isn't relevant for the selected scope, you can't select it.

As a result, you can see the details for the previously defined access groups. Maintained attribute values are restricted in business data including the respective value help. For more information, please also check the blog Tailoring Business Process Monitoring for your business users.