Introduction

Business Processes create transparency, enable repeatability and are comprehensible.
Processes create competitive advantages. Processes are elementary.

No matter in which industry or business area you work in, “it’s always about business processes”.

And another reason why in my opinion the knowledge about processes is very valuable: Process knowledge lasts longer than subject or technology knowledge.

In this blog post i describe how the new solution SAP Cloud ALM can be used to document, manage and monitor business processes.

How to build up a Business Process Structure

Various frameworks and standards can be used to set up and structure business processes. Some of these frameworks are:

• SAP Best Practice Processes: The business and system processes collected by SAP over years. You can use them immediately in SAP Cloud ALM and the content will be updated real time from SAP. No more up/download is needed.
• APQC / PPM / PCF Process Classification Framework: Cross industry and industry specific versions.
• Supply-Chain-Operations-Reference-Modell (SCOR): Designed to describe all in-house and cross-enterprise business processes. Created by the Supply-Chain Council, an independent US non-profit organization.
• Promet BPR: Process model for introducing new business solutions in a company.
• ITIL: Information Technology Infrastructure Library.
• Cobit: Control Objectives for Information and Related Technology.
• Build it yourself: Collect information, condense it, determine granularity and build it up by  yourself.

Starting point

The starting point for processes in SAP Cloud ALM for Implementation is the Fiori Launchpad. There you can find the two tiles “Processes” and “Process Authoring”.

Processes (SAP Best Practice Content)

Very well and extensively documented processes delivered by SAP.

You can choose from a large library of business processes and for different country versions such as for example Germany.

Each process have a description and it is possible to create Requirements, “User Stories, Tasks or Notes direct out of the process. These are then automatically linked to the process. This in turn helps to enable a clear traceability.

One of the great advantages of the processes delivered by SAP is that also a graphical BPMN diagram is delivered.I myself like to work on a graphical basis, because it creates transparency and brings the processes in a way to life.

Process Authoring – Custom Solution Processes

You can also model your customer processes or add to the SAP best practice content.

Solution Value Flow

• An overview for the business activities by the current process
• I use it as a kind of process map of the corresponding area

Solution Process Flow

• Detailed flow of activities for a business process.
• Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) diagrams are used, which is a common standard notation language in in many industries.

Business Process Monitoring

SAP Cloud ALM also offers the possibility of monitoring business processes and detecting anomalies or errors down to the level of the individual documents.

Below an insight into the area of business process monitoring. You can drill down from the business processes down to the relevat level.

First you get an overview with different KPI’s. These are shown based on the process areas, which I think is very nice.

On the lowest level you can see the individual documents with the associated status.

Summary

With SAP Cloud ALM you can document, manage and monitor business processes.

By using the SAP Best Practice content, you can start very quickly and move on to the fit/gap or fit to standard workshops.

I recommend a step-by-step approach. A clean process structure always serves as the basis, because other functions build on it.

Define at the beginning which functions you want to use in a project and which functions you want to use in operation.

There is a lot that can be done on the subject of business process management. As with everything, it needs a person who is responsible for the topic, have time do develop it and dedicates a lot of love to it 🙂

In this sense, have fun with the topic of business process management.