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Deeper Process Insights Continued(part 1😞

In the previous article we spoke about the new features which highlighted the growing need for sophisticated process insights in your business operations. In this article we would continue to highlight the other features which have further enhanced this functional area.


Support for Customisation of space.me

While SAP Operational Process Intelligence so far supported the line of business users like process operators in their day to day operations, we found a growing need to customise the information delivered to this user group.

Enabling relevant attributes for a phase or KPI


Customisation was largely based on the information content the process operators needed on the dimension of the operation they analysed e.g. as a procurement operator when I dive into details of the Purchase Request or Shopping Cart Lead Time I would like to analyse the KPI based on attributes such as budget and request type while when I view the operations from a different KPI stand point for e.g. Purchase Requisition Distribution Lead time I would like to analyse this by the Procurement Specialist assigned and request type.


The above challenge was largely resolved by introducing a capability to choose the context attributes for a KPI or Phase from a larger pool of attributes available from the scenario context.

Consider a measure like Returned Orders, with SP12 you can configure a restricted set of attributes that a process operator can use to slice and dice this KPI in his work-space.

The above configuration enabled the space.me to restrict the relevant attributes for the KPI

The same principles are also applied for the imported BO measures from external calculation views enabling you to provide human friendly labels and expose a restricted set of attributes for these external measures.


Role based access and ordering of KPI Tiles in space.me

Another frequently requested customisation was the need to view a set of relevant KPI based on the role a user performed in the operations e.g. as a procurement operator focusing on Contract Creation and Awarding there is little to no interest for this user on keeping track of the Purchase Request Lead Time. So within a single purchasing organisation, there are different types of operators who focus on the different aspects of the operations and the need of the hour was a way to avoid information overload of 40 plus KPIs where in most cases the most important KPI for this user was available as the last in the list.

You were previously able to add a custom role for restricting operational data to users based on attributes. This has been enhanced with a capability to restrict the required KPI tiles to respective process operators.

With this configuration when a process operator with the “Germany_CRM” HANA role logs into space.me he would get a work-space which is more focused on his job function.

You would observe that there are only 3 KPI tiles available for this operator namely

  • Orders Placed through Direct Sales
  • Orders placed through Web
  • Blocked Orders

The Orders placed through Direct Sales and Web are zero while the Blocked Order are 15. This is because of the attribute based restriction i.e. SALES_ORG = Germany Frankfurt being applied in addition to the KPI restriction and this case there seems to be no Orders for this sales organization.

  Our default Operator role remains largely unchanged as you can see below, the 15 KPI tiles are available unrestricted for this user who has been assigned the default operator role.

In addition to this, you can organise the order of the KPI tiles to be available for your business users. This can be configured by ordering the Measures and Indicators in the Business Scenario (tree pane).

The order you configure here would be the order displayed in space.me. This would no longer be based on the ascending order of the translated KPI text.


Enhanced support for system centred integration process

An interesting dimension of SAP Operational Process Intelligence is its capability to support any type process running in different back-end enterprise IT systems. One such crucial class of processes are system centred integration processes. While the support for SAP Process Orchestration, especially Process Integration is already available in SAP Operational Process Intelligence since SP 3 the difficulty in consumption of the integration flows in a Business Scenario remained a challenge. With SP12 this challenge has been resolved by the support of integration flow as a message data store(new from SP12) enabling the configuration of business scenario start and end from one of the life cycle events of the integration flow directly.

Discover the Integration Flow from SAP PI or SAP PO systems

Assemble them as a Message data store in the Business Scenario and define Correlation Conditions across different message data stores to create an end to end operational view of your system centred process.

With SP12, you can directly use the life cycle events of an integration flow to configure business scenario start, end and other milestones. This largely enables a developer to set up a business scenario consisting only of integration flows and derive the different operational metrics from the events and context of the integration flow.

To learn about the support of system centred integration process, check out this article(coming soon).

This brings us to the end of the deeper process insights functional area of SP12, SAP Operational Process Intelligence. In the next part 3, we would highlight the enhancements made to the insight to action area of the product along with the other nonfunctional improvements made in this release.

Thanks and Stay tuned…

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