Business Situations in SAP HANA Operational Process Intelligence. Overview.

[vasil_tsimashchuk]

Business Situations in SAP Operational Process Intelligence powered by SAP HANA is a new amazingly flexible feature, which enables the Solution Expert to foresee a set of risks or opportunities that may arise in the system and to define how a Scenario Operator is expected to react on them. The Scenario Operator gets notified about the occurrence of the Business Situations in real time and can immediately react accordingly. Business situations are available in SAP HANA Operational Process Intelligence 1.0 SP03 or higher.

In this blog series, I am going to introduce the concept of Business Situations within a Business Scenario in SAP HANA Operational Process Intelligence. Starting with the general description of this feature, the blogs will help you identify the use cases when business situations occur in your systems, will guide you through the process of designing them according to your needs, and show how an enterprise could take advantage of their occurrence in real time.

In this blog, I give an introductory overview of the Business Situations and provide several examples. The blog concludes a video which shows the Business Situations at run time and design time.

A Business Situation is a potential threat or opportunity that might occur in the system and can be foreseen by the Solution Expert.

In order to define a Business Situation within a scenario, firstly, the Solution Expert defines the mechanism for identification of its occurrence. After that, he defines the texts which will be exposed to the Scenario Operator when the Business Situation occurs. And finally, he defines a quick-win action that is offered to the Scenario Operator to prevent or utilize the corresponding threat or opportunity.

During runtime, a Business Situation is created as soon as the conditions specified by the Solution Expert are met. The Scenario Operator is immediately notified about the occurrence of the Business Situation. The corresponding notification gets visible for the Scenario Operator in space.me as soon as it occurs. After opening the notification, the Scenario Operator can execute the action suggested by the Solution Expert right away.

Examples of Business Situations

To get a feeling of Business Situations, please, consider the following example. Imagine there is a business scenario defined in SAP HANA Operational Process Intelligence which gives an overview of the supermarket supply chains. The underlying process consists of all the steps that have to be taken in order to bring a product from suppliers to the customers of the supermarket. The scenario is then simplified to four phases:

• Order Approval: an order request for a product is created and approved either manually or automatically depending on the underlying business rules.
• Product Delivery: the product supplier receives the request and prepares the shipment. After that the product is delivered to the warehouse of the supermarket.
• Product Storage: the shipment is accepted by the warehouse manager and the product is sorted and stored in the warehouse.
• Product Arrangement: the merchandisers arrange the product on the shelves of the supermarket.

We would like to assist the supermarket manager (Scenario Operator) in the following situations:

• It is important for the manager to order a product well in advance before the supermarket runs out of its sources.
• The manager would like to arrange the products on the shelves according to the following rule. Firstly, he wants to identify the goods, which showed a 50% increase in sales during current week in comparison to the previous one. If there are such goods, they must be put to the best shelves of the supermarket during the next week.

These cases clearly consist of two Business Situations in terms of SAP HANA Operational Process Intelligence. The structure of the Business Situations is shown in the table below:

Name	Type	Detection Condition	Action
Lack of Product	Threat	The supply of a product is at 20% of its average daily consumption.	Order the corresponding product.
Best Seller	Opportunity	Sales of a product showed a 50% increase during current week in comparison to the previous one.	Add the product to the list of the best sellers for the next week which will then be arranged to the best shelves of the supermarket.

In these examples, we assume the following:

• The amount of the products currently available in the stock as well as information about how well the sales go can be obtained by querying the database.
• The opportunities to order products as well as to put them into the list of the best sellers are available as web services.

It is possible to configure the business scenario in a way that the Scenario Operator gets notified about occurrence of the above mentioned situations and gets assistance for each particular case. To see the Business Situations in action, please, see the following demo:

In the following blog, you can have a deeper look into the Detection Mechanism of the Business Situations in SAP HANA Operational Process Intelligence.

Please, stay tuned for the upcoming blogs of the series dedicated to the process of designing Business Situations in the SAP HANA Studio with SAP Operational Process Intelligence plugin, and the interactions of the Scenario Operator with Business Situations in space.me.

Special thanks to Waldemar Geppart, Birgit Heilig, Harshavardhan Jegadeesan, and Alan Rickayzen for your help and support!