With SAP Business Process Intelligence to the Intelligent Enterprise of Tommorrow

Businesses today yield competitive advantage by embracing transparency, automation, agility and improved decision-making. Smart technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Blockchain, Cloud Computing, Internet of Things (IoT) and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) support organizations in pursuing this mission in order to sustainably drive real results in the era of Industry 4.0. SAP therefore created a bundle of products, services and tools to support organizations with their digital transformation: RISE with SAP. The principal idea of RISE with SAP is to provide business transformation as a service, covering various areas including infrastructure, technology, applications and business processes.

This blog post aims to emphasize the latter, providing an introduction and general overview of SAP Business Process Intelligence (BPI) and its use cases. BPI solutions enable strategic E2E process transformations and represent the base for the Intelligent Enterprise of tomorrow. They allow customers to chart their digital transformation at their own speed and terms, regardless of their starting point.

A successful business transformation requires a solid understanding of customers’ pain points, in-depth process analysis, industry benchmarking, process reimagination and a smooth collaboration of all involved parties, just to name a few. BPI from SAP is the first to bring all these components into a unified set of solutions, combining deep process analysis with the tools needed for process re-engineering or creating entirely new and innovative business processes. It covers business process design, benchmarking, gap analysis, improvement, and process change management.

The holistic suite of SAP BPI includes the following process transformation solutions:

• SAP Process Insights
• SAP Signavio Process Intelligence
• SAP Signavio Process Manager
• SAP Signavio Journey Modeler
• SAP Signavio Process Collaboration Hub
• SAP Signavio Process Governance

In a nutshell, organizations can secure instant value with SAP Process Insights: Quickly gain performance visibility, business process deep-dive with advanced analytics, as well as benefit from tailor-made improvement recommendations. For instance, a customer with an above-average “Days Sales Outstanding” may view benchmark values from the industry and start working towards better management of receivables based on recommendations like the setup of automatic matching of incoming payments and invoices, credit management or dunning procedures.

With SAP Signavio Process Intelligence, organizations have the possibility to visualize their process reality: From running detailed process analysis for business transformations (S/4HANA migrations included), investigating and interacting with business data to leveraging process mining for fact-based changes in order to uncover the hidden value in business processes and data.

Organizations may further refer to SAP Signavio Process Manager in order to completely reimagine their business processes. This tool helps to quickly respond to unforeseeable business and regulatory changes, to collaboratively scale the process repository of the enterprise as well as to simulate business processes in order to define alternative business scenarios.

SAP Signavio Journey Modeler is another helpful tool, supporting organizations to deliver customer excellence. Organizations may use the Journey Modeler to deliver customer excellence through the design of customer journey models for touchpoint improvements, alignment of business processes to customer experiences as well as sharing customer-centric journeys for feedback and potential experience improvements.

With SAP Signavio Process Collaboration Hub, organizations can collaborate and work together in their own way by building a single source of truth across all teams, breaking down business silos and shaping an improved understanding of KPIs, tasks and projects.

In order to secure the success of the rollout, enterprises may relate to SAP Signavio Process Governance. Process Governance supports in gaining complete visibility and governance over organizations’ workflows, developing prototypes for rapid deployment and scaling up workflows without coding as well as reducing business process variations and rework.

Following this introduction, BPI represents the next-generation process layer within the SAP portfolio, providing a comprehensive and holistic offer to transform business processes end to end. BPI provides a wide range of solutions to support a seamless and smooth business transformation – from business process design, benchmarking, gap analysis and improvement to process change management. But are there any other use cases to BPI than business transformation? Yes, there are. SAP BPI covers various scenarios to get companies towards the Intelligent Enterprise of tomorrow. Let’s dive right in.

BPI Use Case #1 – Business Transformation

BPI is fundamental for organizations to drive their business transformation to the Intelligent Enterprise. A holistic business transformation is about changing the whole culture and mindset of an enterprise. It’s about redesigning business processes, and it’s about adopting new technologies – to unlock new ways of running the business and stay ahead of competitors. BPI is seamlessly embedded in the Intelligent Enterprise to support value-driven transformation from end to end. RISE with SAP is a packaged offering that contains a comprehensive, on-your-terms and on-your-timeline transformation to the Intelligent Enterprise.

BPI pinpoints the best place to start by analyzing how business processes perform and benchmarking them against industry standards to get tailored recommendations of where to focus first and implementing those processes on demand. RISE with SAP includes the following SAP Signavio solutions in its package without additional costs:

• SAP Process Insights (50GB)
• SAP Signavio Process Manager (3 users)
• SAP Signavio Collaboration Hub (10 users)

Apart from RISE with SAP, BPI also supports process standardization and simplification scenarios as well as process consolidation including shared services. It equips organizations for mergers and acquisitions and represents the foundation for continuous improvement initiatives.

BPI Use Case #2 – IT Transformation

SAP S/4HANA is more than just another new release. SAP’s new business suite brings about so many changes and new functionalities that have the power to transform the entire organization. SAP S/4HANA can modify all critical enterprise functions ranging from finance and supply chain all the way to customer service and marketing. Through it, businesses are able to transact, analyze and predict in real time in a world that remains continuously unpredictable. BPI supports the conversion to SAP S/4HANA from an end-to-end perspective, covering all SAP Activate project phases as follows:

To get started with BPI for SAP S/4HANA Transformation, business leaders can consider the tool Process Discovery, which we will cover in the upcoming post in more detail. This solution helps executives to get a high-level overview of process performance including improvement recommendations as well as automation potentials in the most important areas of their business – completely free of charge.

Besides SAP S/4HANA, BPI helps in returning to standard code and supports ERP consolidation and digital foundation scenarios.

BPI Use Case #3 – Performance initiatives & process focus

BPI is the go-to solution when it comes to achieving true customer excellence in respect to customer experience, service, sales orders, distribution, sentiment and many more. For cost reduction initiatives, BPI comes into play as well. Moreover, BPI covers governance, risk, compliance, lean manufacturing, and service management as fundamental use case areas to further improve process performance. As the most holistic portfolio in process transformation solutions, BPI of course delivers best-in-class capabilities to bring key end-to-end processes such as order-to-cash (O2C) or purchase-to-pay (P2P) to their next level.

Wrap-up

BPI by SAP represents a true game changer in various facets. The solution provides company-wide transparency through a single source of process truth, combined with real-time and granular insights and embraces accelerated bottleneck identification and data-driven decision-making. With BPI, companies can yield customer excellence through leveraging customer experience and operational data with process mining to understand root causes of customer frustration or happiness to analyze, improve and transform operations for targeted KPIs. Moreover, BPI enables businesses to jump-start innovation by highlighting where traditional approaches can be upgraded and shape a better understanding of projects, tasks, and KPIs across teams through enhanced collaboration.

All these capabilities support organizations when it comes to business transformation, IT transformation, continuous process innovation and performance initiatives.

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