New application Progress Management Board

volker_vongloeden · ‎08-31-2016

The SAP Solution Manager already provides Business Process Analytics as a root cause analysis tool for application specific improvement activities. One year later the Business Process Operations dashboards were introduced as a management UI on top of this data. These dashboards easily allow to see where there is high, medium or low improvement potential in your organization. In 2015 another management application was introduced with the Dependency Diagrams, so that logical dependencies between different key figures, KPIs or process performance indicators could be visualized. But one thing was still missing for tracking Business Process Improvement projects. This gap is now closed with the Progress Management Board that has been shipped with SAP Solution Manager 7.2 support package stack 03 and addresses senior management needs up to CxO level.

On the one hand the Progress Management Boards allow the organizational progress tracking per key figure, i.e. you can easily see per key figure if

Only an initial analysis was performed,
Only IT is working on it so far,
Also the business department is already engaged,
A corresponding action plan is defined,
All involved parties did agree on some common target value that shall be achieved in the end,
First (one-time) clean-up activities are on its way,
A sustainable solution will be implemented so that the same problem shall no longer occur in the (near) future.

As you can see on the screenshot, you can also define some Business Priority for every key figure that you are tracking. The application was especially designed to track the improvement based on Business Process Analytics data, but the data source can be actually also Business Process Monitoring, Cross Database Comparison (CDC), or any defined BEx query from an external SAP BW system. As such you can also use the Progress Management Board to track the progress for any important business KPI that is reported in SAP BW. So like the Business Process Operations dashboards and the Dependency Diagrams application, also the Progress Management Board allows the mesh-up of SAP Solution Manager data and SAP BW data.

On the other hand the Progress Management Board allows a fact based tracking where you can see what the latest available measurement has been and how this measurement compares with

A defined baseline measurement - How did you progress compared to your starting point?
Last week/month - Did you (still) progress lately?
A defined target value - Did you already overachieve your ambitions or how far are you still away from the target?

Technical Prerequisites for Process Management Board

In order to setup and use the Progress Management Board, the following releases of software components are necessary as an absolute minimum:

Solution Manager 7.2 SP 03 (ST 720 SP3, ST-BCO 720 SP03, ST A/PI 01S SP01)
Each connected managed system must have at least ST A/PI release 01P* installed.
All SAP notes need to be implemented in Solution Manager and managed systems as listed in the always updated SAP note 2324106 “Business Process Improvement: requir.SAPnotes for ST7.2 SP03 or higher”.
In case you want to upgrade please also consider SAP note 2319290 “Business Process Improvement: upgrading / starting with ST7.2 SP03”

The Progress Management Board functionality is a SAPUI5 application, therefore the activation of the corresponding HTTP services needs to be checked in transaction SICF:

/sap/bc/bsp/sap/ags_progress
/sap/ui5_ui5/bsp/sap/ags_progress
/sap/opu/odata/sap/ags_bpa_gw_progress_srv

You also need to assign a SAP system alias to the OData Service AGS_BPA_GW_PROGRESS_SRV_0001. With this assignment, an OData request from an SAP Gateway consumer can be routed to the corresponding backend system. The system can correctly identify the SAP system that is responsible for processing (managing and storing) the data of an inbound request.To do so enter the SAP Solution Manager Implementation Guide (via transaction SPRO) and follow the path SAP Customizing Implementation Guide -> SAP NetWeaver -> SAP Gateway -> OData Channel -> Administration -> General Settings -> Assign SAP System Aliases to OData Service

Setup of Progress Management Board

Similar to the Business Process Operations dashboards and the Dependency Diagrams application, you need to define data sources and Analytical Key Figure Instances (AKFIs) that shall be used and displayed in the Progress Management Board. If you are already using the Business Process Operations dashboards or Dependency Diagrams, then you might just want to re-use some of the AKFIs.

You can then access the Progress Management Board application via the work center “Business Process Improvement”. To do so start transaction SOLMAN_WORKCENTER, then go to tab “Business Process Improvement”) and click on tile “Progress Management Board” to start the application.

Alternatively you can create your own favorite for BSP Application AGS_PROGRESS with the start page index.html, so you can then directly enter the Progress Management Boards using this SAP favorite.

A more detailed description on how exactly the setup and configuration is done, shall follow in a separate blog.