Product Information
Using SAP Best Practices Packages with SAP Signavio
When making the move to SAP S/4HANA, many organizations look to define their business processes using SAP Best Practices packages for SAP S/4HANA. These best-practice packages offer a range of process models based on SAP’s extensive experience in helping customers manage, improve, and execute business processes in a way that allows them to run their businesses successfully.
Whether used for large-scale business transformation initiatives or more focused process excellence programs, these solution packages offer best practices that serve as a reference for organizations evaluating current and future business processes. This in turn helps speed up process analysis and enables business process standardization across an organization.
What Are SAP Signavio Solutions?
SAP Signavio Process Transformation Suite offers a range of business process management solutions that provide rich capabilities for managing, modelling, testing, and collaborating on process development and optimization, as well as related artifacts such as business rules and customer journeys. The suite is especially valuable during process transformation initiatives when defining future organizational processes. Then, once these processes have been implemented, SAP Signavio solutions allow businesses to monitor process execution in order to drive continuous improvement.
Current (or “as-is”) processes can be analyzed and compared to best practice processes, allowing organizations to identify overlaps and gaps between the two. In the case of wide gaps, additional analysis can help understand whether the difference is based in the organization’s specific business requirements or if it is simply process customization grown out of control.
Then, when determining future (or “to-be”) processes, organizations can use the best-practice model as a reference to define processes that meet unique business needs. Or, in the case of standard or common business processes that tend to be the same for any organization or industry, they can simply adopt the best-practice process from end to end.
Process modeling, comparison, and simulation are main features of the SAP Signavio Process Transformation Suite. For example, using the “Compare” function, two processes can be displayed on the same screen with the differences automatically highlighted. A best practice process can so be easily compared to a process that exists in the organization.
With the “Simulation” function organizations can run test simulations on processes or process changes to see if the outcome has improved in terms of cycle time, costs, bottlenecks, or other factors – eliminating wasted time, effort, and resources on process changes that do not ultimately meet business objectives.
The end result for process owners, analysts, subject matter experts, and IT stakeholders is a thorough understanding of current and future processes that allows them to quickly drive business transformation at scale.
SAP Signavio Process Explorer
The SAP Signavio Process Explorer solution is your gateway to access and explore a myriad of value accelerators and resources that help you speed up the time to value of your projects. The value accelerators include business-capability and solution maps, process models, metrics, industry best practices, and SAP best-practice and product recommendations.
Through the SAP Signavio Process Explorer the following best practices are available for free:
- SAP S/4HANA on-premises version 2022 and SAP S/4HANA Cloud version 2202 for country version Germany & US.
- SAP S/4HANA Cloud (Release 2208) and SAP S/4HANA on-premise (Release 2022) German and US Version in US English language only.
Please read this note to obtain the content from the SAP Signavio Process Explorer.
Selecting Best Practices in SAP Process Navigator
In order to make use of additional SAP Best Practices packages, we first need to make them available in SAP Signavio Process Manager. Step one is to look at the Solution Scenarios in SAP Process Navigator, which lists extensive, cost-free content to support organizations with their implementation of SAP products.
Once on SAP Process Navigator, then work through the following steps:
- Determine which package is required. For example, is it related to a specific function in the SAP ERP application? Is it for an on-premise version of SAP S/4HANA or SAP S/4HANA Cloud? Which version is being used?
- Once the right package has been selected, decide on the scope. Should all business processes be reviewed or just a few that are specific to a business function, such as finance, sales, or asset management?
- When just using a few processes are required, individual process flows in the standard Business Process Model Notation (BPMN) format can be downloaded directly from the Process Navigator.
- If many or all process flows of a package are required, then the relevant zip-files containing all process models in multiple languages can be downloaded from one of these pages and by following the instructions:
Importing SAP Best Practices into SAP Signavio Process Manager
Depending on whether an individual process model is selected, or a full SAP Best Practices package is being used, follow the steps below.
Individual files
Individual process models all have the file extension .bpmn. These files can be imported one by one using the SAP Signavio Process Manager solution. Just follow these steps:
- In SAP Signavio Process Manager, create or select the folder where the process must be imported and select “Import” from the menu bar.
- From the list of menu items, select “Import BPMN 2.0 XML,” then choose the .bpmn file to import.
- When the operation is complete, the imported process model will be available in your SAP Signavio Process Manager.
Detailed instructions about importing process models can be found in the SAP Signavio solution documentation.
Full SAP Best Practices packages
When downloading a full SAP Best Practices package, you must download all the zip files from the above listed support pages. Then you will need to:
- Unzip the file(s), which will create a single file with the extension .sgx (the file extension format for SAP Signavio archives).
- In SAP Signavio Process Manager, create or select the folder where the process must be imported and select “Import” from the menu bar.
- From the list of menu items, select “Import SAP Signavio Archive,” then choose the .sgx file to import. At this stage you can also select whether or not to import additional elements, such as dictionary entries, custom attributes, or custom graphics.
- Once the operation is complete, all process models that are part of the imported archive will be available in your SAP Signavio Process Manager and can be published to the SAP Signavio Collaboration Hub. (see Figure 1)
Detailed instructions about importing Signavio archives can be found in the SAP Signavio solution documentation.
Figure 1: SAP Best Practices for SAP S/4HANA Cloud in SAP Signavio Collaboration Hub
Faster, More Cost-Effective Process Analysis
With process models from SAP Best Practices now available in SAP Signavio solutions, your organization can start increasing the speed of process analysis while also reducing the associated costs. Not only does this give you clearer insight or reference into your processes today, but it also provides a solid basis for enterprise-wide process management and continuous process improvement for the future.
To find out more about how SAP Signavio Process Transformation Suite and other business process intelligence solutions from SAP can help your business, visit SAP Signavio or SAP Business Process Intelligence online.
Find out how to use SAP Signavio within your daily business, set up your workspace, and learn some best practices by exploring SAP’s free learning content on SAP Signavio solutions. SAP Signavio is designed to empower you to actively engage in improving processes to drive efficiency and customer excellence. Check out even more role-based learning resources and opportunities to get certified in one place on SAP Learning site.
If you’d like to ask or answer questions about SAP Signavio Process Manager, please visit and follow the SAP Signavio Process Manager tag page.
Hi
We have established the Signavio/sOLMAN connector . can we use
Copy option in "Process"section to copy Best Practice which is present in SOLMAN? This was when I try to copy I am getting error "Failed to Fetch " issue .
With regards
Samikhya
Hello, you can use the 'Copy process' option in the SAP Signavio Solution Manager connector. It will import the processes that are part of the selected scope. An error like you mentioned might occur when the scope of items to be imported is very large, however the connector is still trying to complete the import although the error is shown. A solution is to create a smaller scope in Solution Manager and import that into SAP Signavio Process Manager.
Dear Paul
Thank you for your response . The error message is misleading as "It is creating folder" but giving message as "Failed to fetch ". When we have to bring the whole Best Practice , it is just one folder -> 1 scenario with all Processes . I have created that as "Scope" .
Connector is brining diagrams in half , and few cases just blank . Any clue , how to overcome this issue?
When I uploaded the .SGX file , I do not see the Executables appearing against Tasks.
P.S - We have created a custom attribute called "SAP Transaction code" in dictionary , mapped to SOLMAN Executables.
How can we link Transaction codes to SAP Best practice import done using "SGX " upload method?
With regards
Sami
Hello,
The product engineering team is aware of the issues. A way to overcome this is to decrease/split the scope, ie. less processes to be part of a single scope and then import it into SAP Signavio. You might have to change the scope a few times before all processes are imported.
The SGX-files only contain the diagrams, no links to Executables or Process Steps. You can link Executables to process steps after importing the processes; and you need to import Executables in a Dictionary in SAP Signavio. See: https://documentation.signavio.com/suite/en-us/Content/process-manager/userguide/sap-solman/import-to-dictionary.htm
Hi Paul,
The links for the bulk upload of Best Practise process documentation are still working, but now we are already having the version 2308 for S/4HANA Cloud. Have you thought of a way how to make this .sgx -file from some existing tool, i.e. Signavio Process Explorer or the process navigator in me.sap.com?
I think that the current .sgx -files are missing the verbal description / documentation of the processes, which would also be good to have.
Best regards,
Pekka
Nice Article