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Highlights:

The theme for this release of SAP Operational Process Intelligence powered by SAP HANA has been to innovate further on top of process intelligence and enable more situational awareness for the process operators. To support this theme we have worked largely on two major functional areas namely:

  • Deeper process insights
  • Enhanced support for insight to action

  In this article we would cover the key highlights in the above two mentioned functional areas of SAP Operational Process Intelligence.


Deeper Process Insights


Insight is the understanding of a specific cause and effect in a specific context. The term insight can have several related meanings (Wikipedia)

We use the term process insights largely to indicate the key observations and deductions made in business operations that can be followed up by making a sustainable action or decision. On this note we shall explain how SP12 has enabled deeper (i.e. more focused) process insights for a Process Operator.

Support for Hierarchy Navigation and Tracking:

One of the main pain points addressed by SAP Operational Process Intelligence is to visualise your end to end business operations at a granularity preferred by your business. For example in your company, the line of business users (namely process operators) from a procurement organisation would prefer to track and trace the operations at purchase requisition level. Since a purchasing request can consists of multiple line items it typically leads to multiple RFX (request for proposal, request for quote, request for bid etc.). There was a very common request from most of our customers to seamlessly track the status of the different business documents from a leading entity, navigating smoothly into the details of these business documents at any hierarchy.

With SP12, we have introduced the concept of hierarchy navigation and hierarchy tracking by configuring Association from the business scenario context to the target business document or context.

The above configuration configuration enables the business user to navigate to different hierarchical context from the leading business document/context e.g. from Purchase Requisition to RFX in the work-space.

The RFXs tab lists the different RFX documents relevant for the purchase request and tracks the status of the RFX based on the status attribute exposed in the association target.

This pattern is supported for multilevel hierarchy navigation and tracking.


Enhanced Situational Awareness:

Viewing the business operations through simple status classification like At Risk and Critical enabled process operators to deep dive into the most crucial aspects of their day to day operations. While this enabled a basic awareness of their current state of operations it was missing the complex and tricky situations arising in their daily work. For example in a logistics warehouse it was crucial to determine the shipments which are picked but not packed and similarly in a logistics hub operations there a set of shipments that transit the hub and are getting sorted. Sometimes they get damaged in the process are returned to the repackaging station. For the Hub operators it is essential to identify the shipments which are damaged and entered the hospital (repackaging station) but have not left this station.

With SP12 we enable the process operators to be aware of these crucial situations through simple event patterns like

  • latest event occurred (default)
  • event A has occurred and not event B
  • current phase overdue

The Business Scenario Goal configuration which captures the status and sub status are enhanced to choose the above mentioned simple event patterns or situations.

An interesting pattern above is the bubbling up of the phase status to the scenario status. This creates a sense of urgency and importance for the process operators to work on those shipments overdue in the current phase. Process Operators focusing on the overall operations get an early warning of the

shipments which are overdue in their current phase in spite of their overall cycle time across different phases doing well.

  We have extended this concept of simple event pattern based awareness to Count Measures as it easily enables to create an aggregated reporting of the crucial situations occurring in your operations. For example we have found many customer cases where process operators and process owners need to report the total number of cases where shipments are getting queued up in a repackaging station during their operational shift. So besides status enhancements, an aggregated KPI helps in situational reporting.

 

To configure this, the count measures can be enhanced with the below three simple event patterns

  • Event A has occurred and not Event B (e.g. how many shipments are damaged but not left the repackaging station)
  • Event has occurred (e.g. How many shipments ever get damaged during the hub transit today)
  • Last occurred event ( e.g. How many shipments are currently damaged at this moment)

This completes the enhancements made to the situational awareness function in SP 12, SAP Operational Process Intelligence.


We would continue highlighting the new increments of SP12 in other functional areas as part of our part 2What’s new with SP 12, SAP Operational Process Intelligence powered by SAP HANA: Part 2 and part 3(coming soon) series.


Thanks and Stay tuned…

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