In this blog post, you will learn about the key architecture elements of the SAP Signavio suite, including integrations, data flow, and BPMN notations.
Let’s first discuss the key applications included within SAP Signavio. SAP Signavio Suite consists of key applications, including process intelligence, process insights, process manager, collaboration hub, journey modeler, process governance, and one process layer. These applications leverage the same platform and can interact with each other to provide a seamless user experience.
As shown in the figure below, the SAP Signavio Process Insights is a cloud-based application that runs on SAP Business Technology Platform. The key characteristic of SAP Signavio Process Insights is to bring in real-time insights from the process performance of the ERP system. Therefore, it becomes essential to orchestrate a live connection with the productive ERP system, which is enabled with the ST-PI plug-in, as demonstrated in the figure. Once the connection is established, raw data can be consumed by the process insights backend, which runs on SAP HANA Cloud. Relevant performance metrics can be visualized by the SAP Signavio Process Insights frontend.
There are several use cases in which data needs to be moved around to extract the key insights from the existing processes and applications.
SAP Signavio Process Insights can be integrated with SAP ERP and SAP S/4HANA systems. Once a connection has been established, real-time PPIs can be viewed within the process insights application. Refer to the previous figure for more details on the connection settings.
SAP Signavio Process Intelligence orchestrates the mining of the key processes executed by software applications such as ERP or line of business applications. To perform the process analysis, process intelligence needs process data, which can be provided by the various methods described next.
First, you need to create a process within SAP Signavio Process Intelligence so that relevant data points can be uploaded. Once the process has been created, the following options are available to upload process data:
SAP Signavio Process Manager can be integrated with the following:
Your ERP system’s integration is leveraged to ensure that the process definition remains in sync. Integration of SAP Signavio Process Manager with SAP Solution Manager can ensure that business users are engaged in the SAP implementation and operations. The figure below shows the key integration scenarios. At a high level, executable transactions and the process step library from SAP Solution Manager can be imported into the process manager as dictionary entities. In addition, BPMN diagrams can be imported into SAP Solution Manager as processes and process steps from the process manager to keep process definitions in sync with the business reality.
The next figure shows the technical details behind the integration of SAP Solution Manager and SAP Signavio Process Manager.
Business process model and notation can be described as the modeling standard to map business processes by representing them in a graphical format. The key characteristic of BPMN is that it makes it easy for the key stakeholders to talk and communicate in the same fashion regarding business processes. The latest version, BPMN 2.0, leverages swim lanes for modeling, which are enabled by events, gateways, and business activities.
SAP Signavio Process Manager supports BPMN 2.0 modeling, which makes it easier to define activities, control flow, organizational elements, and data flow. SAP Signavio Process Manager makes it simpler to model via BPMN thanks to capabilities such as drag and drop, automatic adjustments, and addition of key performance metrics.
The below figure depicts these and other SAP Signavio Process Manager components.
SAP Signavio is committed to adhering to BPMN 2.0 standards and promotes BPMN actively to simplify management of the business processes repository. Now let’s discuss key building blocks of BPMN:
Subprocesses of BPMN include:
Editor’s note: This post has been adapted from a section of the E-Bite Introducing Business Process Transformation with SAP Signavio by Gerry McCool and Nitin Singh.