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:
  • SAP Best Practices bulk upload in SAP Signavio Process Manager (part 1/3) – S4H on premises
  • SAP Best Practices bulk upload in SAP Signavio Process Manager (part 2/3) – S4H Cloud 2111
  • SAP Best Practices bulk upload in SAP Signavio Process Manager (part 3/3) – S4H Cloud 2202

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:

1. In SAP Signavio Process Manager, create or select the folder where the process must be imported and select “Import” from the menu bar.
2. From the list of menu items, select “Import BPMN 2.0 XML,” then choose the .bpmn file to import.
3. 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:

1. Unzip the file(s), which will create a single file with the extension .sgx (the file extension format for SAP Signavio archives).
2. In SAP Signavio Process Manager, create or select the folder where the process must be imported and select “Import” from the menu bar.
3. 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.
4. 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.

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.