In previous blogs about Functional Scope of Business Process Monitoring in SAP Solution Manager and New functionality “Business Process Analytics” – how to improve your business processes in SAP Solution Manager my colleagues and I explained what these tools can do for you and what you can possibly achieve. Besides providing global transparency over your business processes, increasing process efficiency by reducing process costs and increasing process effectiveness (see also Systematic errors vs real exceptions or improving efficiency vs effectiveness), it was always the goal to provide the possibility to clean-up (transactional) data. All your business reporting and planning activities are based on transactional data. As a general rule of thumb you can say: “The better your transactional data quality/accuracy is (as input), the better or more accurate your reporting and plannings results are as an output.” The same still holds true when you will utilize SAP HANA. SAP HANA will provide reporting and planning results faster than ever before, but these results won’t be better, more accurate or more reliable if you do not provide accurate transactional data as input.

In my blog Protect your SAP ERP investment & improve your core business processes I provided one example of how old business documents (in that case purchase requisitions) can affect your current business (in that case it was the MRP run and ATP check in ERP). Similarly you could find examples on how other backlog documents (sales orders, deliveries, purchase orders, planned orders, stock transport orders, trasfer orders etc.) are also leading to similar problems. Some insights on the possible effects of overdue sales orders were given in the blog Systematic errors vs real exceptions or improving efficiency vs effectiveness.

Considering these examples (and there are many more out there if you work with different customers) I can only highly recommend investigating your SAP system (ERP, CRM, SRM) and cleaning-up transactional data if required. That is generally recommended but especially if you want to fully benefit from SAP HANA’s processing capabilities you should consider a system clean-up as a preceding step.

Further reading

You can find all necessary information about Business Process Analytics in this document.

Frequently Asked Questions about Business Process Monitoring and Business Process Analytics are answered under http://wiki.sdn.sap.com/wiki/display/SM/FAQ+Business+Process+Monitoring andhttp://wiki.sdn.sap.com/wiki/display/SM/FAQ+Business+Process+Analytics respectively.

The following blogs (in chronological order) provide further details about Business Process Monitoring functionalities within the SAP Solution Manager.

• New Business Process Monitoring functionalities in SAP Solution Manager – ALE / IDoc Monitoring
• New Business Process Monitoring functionalities in SAP Solution Manager – qRFC Monitoring
• New Business Process Monitoring Functionalities in SAP Solution Manager – functionalities For Inconsistencies in SAP Solution Manager
• SAP Business Process Monitoring within SAP Solution Manager
• New Business Process Monitoring functionalities in SAP Solution Manager – BPMon Trend Analysis Reporting
• Best Practice: Business Process Monitoring for Manufacturing
• Best Practice: Business Process Monitoring for Procure to Pay
• Best Practice: Business Process Monitoring for Order to Cash
• Functional Scope of Business Process Monitoring in SAP Solution Manager
• Business Process Monitoring – Template configuration available for download
• FAQs about Business Process Monitoring
• Typical Use Cases for Business Process Monitoring in SAP Solution Manager
• New Business Process Monitoring functionalities in SAP Solution Manager – Customer Exit
• New key figure catalog for Business Process Monitoring available
• Why SAP offers different tools for Business Process Monitoring & Business Process Optimization
• Create your own auto-reaction messages in Business Process Monitoring via BAdI exit
• Protect your SAP ERP investment & improve your core business processes
• Refresh Solution Landscape cache for Business Process Operation Work Center
• Create your own customer-specific key figure for Business Process Monitoring within 5 minutes
• Best Practice: BW Process Chain monitoring with SAP Solution Manager – Part 1
• Best Practice: BW Process Chain monitoring with SAP Solution Manager – Part 2: Setup Example
• New key figures for Business Process Monitoring in SAP Solution Manager, especially for CRM Marketing
• New functionality “Business Process Analytics” – how to improve your business processes
• New key figures for Business Process Monitoring in SAP Solution Manager, especially Lead Time measurements
• Traditional Business KPI approach vs Business Process Monitoring
• Systematic errors vs real exceptions or improving efficiency vs effectiveness
• Best Practice: Business Process Monitoring for Stock Transport Order replenishment process