SAP Signavio Process Insights is a cloud solution that runs on SAP BTP and delivers data-driven insights into business processes and their usage based on data from multiple SAP systems such as SAP ERP or SAP S/4HANA.
The solution helps you achieve process excellence by identifying processes that need improvement, enabling users to dig deeper to understand root causes, and providing recommendations for improvement. This enables you to navigate through your business process transformation journey—from insight to implementation—to maximize your process quality.
By specifying your industry, you enable the solution to provide industry-specific innovation recommendations and content to help you make tailored decisions to improve your company’s business processes. Industry-specific innovation recommendations are currently available for the industries listed in the table below. If you don’t specify an industry, you’ll be presented with standard general recommendations.
Focus on Industry Popularity: If you specify your industry, your users can also see the industry popularity of some innovation recommendations. Industry popularity helps your organization understand how well an improvement recommendation is being adopted based on the number of industry peers using it.
As a result, with SAP Signavio Process Insights, you make the shift from transformation based on intuition or gut feelings to data-driven process improvement. You create dynamic, real-time reports that assess the speed and efficiency of existing business processes. These reports can be used for rapid performance comparisons and KPI benchmarking with competitors in your industry.
The figure below shows the system landscape of SAP Signavio Process Insights and the SAP systems, applications, and components involved. SAP Signavio Process Insights uses the framework provided by SAP Cloud ALM to connect the managed SAP system to the cloud client. This means that the cloud connector isn’t used to connect your managed SAP system to your SAP Signavio Process Insights application.
Trigger Data Transmission Yourself: The SAP Cloud ALM framework requires you to set up an HTTP connection to an external service. Using this framework and the HTTP connection, you can trigger the data transfer from your managed SAP system.
Basically, the ST-PI and ST-A/PI plug-ins are installed in your SAP ERP or SAP S/4HANA system. The performance data of your business processes are loaded into the data sink in the backend of SAP Signavio Process Insights. Finally, the data is transferred to SAP Signavio Process Insights via an OData application programming interface (OData API).
SAP Signavio Process Insights offers you numerous possible functions based on your process data. The core potential activities are the following:
Consider Benchmark Values from the Industry: For example, if you identify a KPI with a higher-than-average days sales outstanding (DSO), you can view industry benchmarks and work toward better receivables management based on recommendations such as setting up automatic reconciliation of incoming payments and invoices, credit management, or dunning procedures.
Thanks to integration with SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation (SAP Intelligent RPA) and automated bot creation, the tool helps you identify bottlenecks and make recommended improvements with corrective actions. You can then further finetune your operations through automated monitoring capabilities. This supports rapid time and cost savings and provides sustainable benefits in terms of efficiency and process optimization.
Automated and intuitive visualization of process data provides a real-time picture of how your business is really performing. Combined with live monitoring of process performance, you can increase your operational visibility to break through silos and meet customer demands faster than ever.
SAP Signavio Process Insights instantly creates visibility into sources of value within the SAP ERP application or SAP S/4HANA system, maximizing revenue across the business. You can also drive continuous improvement initiatives with enhanced performance views and process drilldowns, resulting in a clearer understanding of your business processes.
SAP Signavio Process Insights as the Basis for Specific Process Mining Initiatives: With SAP Signavio Process Insights, you can define use cases based on your live process data, which you can then analyze with the process mining capabilities of SAP Signavio Process Intelligence. With SAP Signavio Process Intelligence, you can consequently analyze your process data in even more detail as well as tailored to your requirements across systems.
You can then leverage automated, advanced process data extraction and continuous updates to gain instant insights and a clearer understanding of your overall business. With the root cause analysis feature, you can narrow your focus and find out where your problems really lie. By leveraging data-driven process improvement recommendations, you can start improving immediately and focus on corrective actions and relevant SAP applications. SAP Signavio Process Insights also enables you to foster collaboration between decision-makers, subject matter experts, and IT professionals through an intuitive, easy-to-use application interface as you gain essential insights into diverse business areas at a glance.
SAP Signavio Process Insights helps you quickly understand, innovate, and transform your business. Within hours, you can load, validate, and analyze your process data; identify improvement opportunities; and suggest remediation actions. In no time, you’ll also quickly connect to your SAP application with automated advanced process data extraction and benefit from valuable process insights the same day. With daily updates, you gain a clearer understanding of the business processes in your SAP application, including finance, manufacturing, quality, maintenance, service, receivables, or capital expenditures. These rapid insights give you full visibility into what’s happening in your processes.
The next figure shows a detailed list of transaction data for the Sales billing documents created PPI, which is part of the lead-to-cash process. We can see that we’re below the median of our industry with an Automation Rate of 24%. We could now apply SAP Signavio Process Insights recommended fixes and innovation recommendations to improve performance.
With ready-to-use process flows and preconfigured performance metrics, you shorten your time-to-insight to easily monitor the performance of process steps across business units and end-to-end processes. You’ll benefit from built-in metrics that address more than 1,000 typical issues and inefficiencies, helping you quickly identify and prioritize what to improve first. Thus, on the one hand, you’re now able to identify problems regarding your business processes in a timely manner. On the other hand, SAP Signavio Process Insights provides you with numerous tools to protect the integrity of your business processes and to react quickly to changing business results by investigating the impact of process inefficiencies to uncover data-driven improvements. The figure below shows an example of a process flow in SAP Signavio Process Insights. In the Process Flow Performance area, you can see the documents created in this process. In the Most Frequent Blockers and Other Information area below that, you see blockers, which inform you about process inefficiencies and should be investigated further. In our example, SAP Signavio Process Insights found several blockers in the financial process Sales billing document creation to FI-AR clearing (e.g., Sales billing documents manually created or Open FI-AR items already dunned).
SAP Signavio Process Insights helps you focus your transformation initiative on what really matters by making it easy to quickly locate and isolate any process deficiencies. In this context, you can find out where your process weaknesses really are in a simplified way, navigating to each individual document, such as an invoice, to find possible causes of low PPIs. Slice-and-dice data allows you to compare your business performance across the enterprise, while measuring your operational business performance and utilization against your industry peers. By using SAP Signavio Process Insights, you turn insights into immediate results. You focus on mission-critical processes that are at the heart of your business, as well as the areas that require your attention and deployment the most. The next figure shows you how to drill down to individual document types within a given company code to find possible causes of low PPIs.
With SAP Signavio Process Insights, you can quickly implement all business process improvements. You can follow the entire process optimization flow—from uncovering refinement potentials to implementing tailored improvement recommendations. The tool allows you to identify next-practice business processes and results. You can use the process improvement recommendations to address the root cause of poor process performance, for example. Correction recommendations such as integrated configuration changes or master data corrections can subsequently be used to make quick adjustments in your SAP system with clearly outlined action plans. In addition, SAP Signavio Process Insights helps you get the most value out of your SAP software investments with suggested SAP applications for best-practice long-term upgrades. The figure below shows the Innovation Recommendations tab with various innovation recommendations for the lead-to-cash process using intelligent technologies such as machine learning or SAP Intelligent RPA. In addition, you can see which business units are involved in the Lines of Business column.
Data-driven insights help you identify process improvement and automation opportunities faster and at scale, while fostering collaboration between IT and business units.
In this context, SAP Signavio Process Insights also breaks down any barriers between decision-makers, businesspeople, and IT experts through its intuitive, user-friendly application. You can prioritize where to focus your attention to see the biggest gains. In addition, you can easily assess the health and profitability of your business processes, investigate potential problems, and get built-in recommendations to start improving processes right away. Furthermore, SAP Signavio Process Insights helps you build the case for your SAP S/4HANA transformation, get stakeholder buy-in more easily, and foster collaboration between business and IT throughout your transformation process.
The final figure shows the Correction Recommendation page with correction recommendations for the lead-to-cash process. SAP Signavio Process Insights identifies not only potential root causes and which value drivers are affected but also the impact level and effort required to implement the correction. In this example, the solution has identified that standard automation potentials aren’t fully exploited. With the correction recommendation to automate outbound deliveries, logistics costs could be reduced in the future.
Your business process transformation toolkit is here! Learn to manage, analyze, and optimize your SAP business processes with SAP Signavio. This upcoming course in November and December is live on the web and will teach you all you need to know about these topics. Click on the banner below to learn more and order your ticket.
Editor’s note: This post has been adapted from a section of the book SAP Signavio: Business Process Transformation by Johannes Strasser, Michael Sokollek, Manuel Sänger, Maike Spierling, and Marvin Schönwälder.