During this years SAP TechEd conference one main focus will be on Application Lifecycle Management topics. One aspect of SAP ‘s Application Lifecycle Management is the Business Process Operations, an umbrella term for different topics which ensure that customer’s mission critical business processes are running stable, reliable and in a smooth manner. Business Process Operations requires a strong collaboration between IT and business department and comprises different areas as
- Business Process Monitoring, i.e. alert monitoring of business processes from a technical as well as application perspective in order to prevent process downtimes proactively
- Job Scheduling Management, i.e. requesting, documenting, scheduling and monitoring background jobs so that business process are as much automated as possible while considering hardware and time restrictions
- Data Consistency Management, i.e. preventing or identifying data inconsistencies between different applications or across system boundaries
- Data Volume Management, i.e. reducing data base sizes or slowing down the monthly growth of database sizes
All these topics aim at lowering the Total Cost of Operations (TCO) for core business processes. During TechEd 2009 there are some lectures and hands-on sessions providing insights especially on the topics of Business Process Monitoring and Job Management as can be seen in the abstracts below. Other than this you can also find more information and some good entry points in the following SDN blogs
Corresponding session abstracts for TechEd 2009 in Phoenix, Vienna and Bangalore:
ALM112 - Business Process Analysis & Monitoring
During this session you will learn how Business Process Analysis & Monitoring within Enterprise Support helps to optimize the return on your investment in the SAP ERP application, by identifying optimization potential for your core business processes. You will learn what kind of errors/problems could be identified by analyzing customer systems. The benefits of this service are the following and should all help lowering your total cost of ownership (TCO): Allows internal benchmarking of different organizational units, e.g. sales organizations or manufacturing plants; Learn in which organizational areas you could speed up and streamline your most critical business processes or improve service levels; Find out if you might need to train your end-users to better follow intended procedures; and Improve your daily operations. You will also learn how the Business Process Analysis can be a good starting point for setting up Business Process Monitoring in SAP Solution Manager.
ALM273 - Business Process Monitoring setup for a Typical Order to Cash Process
This hands-on workshop describes a use case for business process monitoring for a typical order to cash scenario. In this session you will use the SAP Solution Manager in order to set up the continuous alert & trend monitoring of important application specific key figures in SAP ERP. Typical examples are overdue sales orders, overdue deliveries, goods delivered not invoiced, incorrect billing print-outs. You will also learn about integrated reporting capabilities using the trend analysis SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse dashboard.
ALM274 - Job Management with SAP Central Process Scheduling and SAP Solution Manager
This session showcases the capabilities offered by SAP's Central Process Scheduler by Redwood, to automate the background job processing in your landscape . Also showcased is the integration with SAP's Solution Manager which provides end to end Lifecycle Management of your background jobs. The session will introduce submitting job requests through SAP Solution Manager and SAP CPS will be used by the administrator to intercept and schedule the jobs. Based on the job documentation created by SAP Solution Manager, the administrator can create Job Chains. SAP CPS allows administrators, to create and schedule Job Chains spanning across multiple systems using user defined jobs or jobs imported from the backend systems. Jobs can be monitored and the enhanced notification mechanism of SAP CPS allows administrators to be notified about failed jobs or job chains, in real time.
