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The Functional Scope of Business Process Monitoring in SAP Solution Manager and New functionality "Business Process Analytics" - how to improve your business processes applications in SAP Solution Manager are designed for operational use where IT and/or business people can interactively work with data, identify root causes and solve problems in order to make business processes more stable, more efficient and/or more effective. But you might also have interested parties within your organization that only want to be informed and gain transparency without working with the respective data, e.g. in most cases we are talking about managers here. For this purpose the Business Process Operations dashboards were introduced with SAP Solution Manager 7.0 SP26 and SAP Solution Manager 7.1 respectively, or I should rather say we shipped some Business Process Operations dashboard framework where you can configure the dashboards you like to see. These dashboards represent a different UI on top of Business Process Monitoring and Business Process Analytics.

Dashboard examples

Before you can configure dashboards and get to see some data you require some data sources of course. These data sources can be the alert information from Functional Scope of Business Process Monitoring in SAP Solution Manager, New functionality "Business Process Analytics" - how to improve your business processes data or the New Business Process Monitoring functionalities in SAP Solution Manager - BPMon Trend Analysis Repor... data. In order to see actual data in your dashboard you need to set up at least one of the data sources. The figure below illustrates how the information flows from a high-level perspective.

You access the different data sources via so-called Connector Instances that you need to create. More information on these technical details will be given in a second blog. But you can already keep in mind that Connector Instances can access data from local SAP Solution Manager systems as well as remote SAP Solution Manager systems.

When you want to get to your own dashboard you have to perform 4 steps initially:

  1. Maintain Connector Instances
  2. Setup Analytical Keyfigure Instances (AKFIs)
  3. Setup Panels
  4. Setup Dashboards

Again more details on this will be provided in a 2nd blog. One dashboard consists of 1-6 panel instances which are arranged in a matrix like fashion. The data within every panel instance can be displayed in various manners, i.e.

  • Bar Charts,
  • Stacked Bar Charts,
  • Column Charts,
  • Stacked Column Charts,
  • Trend Charts,
  • Pie Charts
  • Static Rating Tables,
  • Dynamic Rating Tables

Two dashboard examples are shown below, which utilize different chart types as mentioned above. The first example is purely based on Business Process Analytics data and shows key figures which are all related to Outbound Deliveries and limited to three Shipping Points (Hamburg, Berlin, Dresden) in Germany. Hence this dashboard could be interesting for some manager who is responsible for shipping processes or distribution centers in Germany

The second dashboard example uses similar key figures but this time the upper panel instances display alert data from Business Process Monitoring. The respective rating is actually not taken over from the monitoring but you can define different threshold values specific for the dashboard view.

If you want to get started with setting up dashboards in your own SAP Solution Manager, then you can find a complete Setup Guide on the SAP Service Marketplace at (login required) http://service.sap.com/bpm > Media Library > Technical Information > Setup Guide - Business Process Operations Dashboards or directly here.

Depending on your current support package level you should refer to the following SAP notes which provide overviews about corrective notes

More technical information on these Business Process Operations dashboards is given in the 2nd part of this blog - Behind the scenes.

SAP Teched 2011

Visit us also on SAP TechEd 2011 at ALM263 - Business Process Analysis & Monitoring

During this hands-on session you will learn how to configure business process analytics in SAP Solution Manager and how to work with this tool in order to gain insights where you can possibly improve your existing business processes. You will also learn how you can set up business process monitoring as an alert monitoring with reference to the business process analytics data. At the end of the session you will then configure your own business process operations dashboard which will display different key figures on one browser page.

Further Information

Frequently Asked Questions about Business Process Monitoring are answered under http://wiki.sdn.sap.com/wiki/display/SM/FAQ+Business+Process+Monitoring.

The following blogs (in chronological order) provide further details about Business Process Monitoring functionalities within the SAP Solution Manager.