Question Re: Process Observer Discussion in Technology Q&A

Process Observer Discussion

JChristophNolte — Fri, 19 Jul 2013 13:57:55 GMT

This thread is dedicated to questions and discussions around the Process Observer component that is part of Business Suite.

Process Observer is used in different scenarios, including and prominently with Operational Process Intelligence.

For details on what Process observer is see here.

Re: Process Observer Discussion

keohanster — Wed, 31 Jul 2013 18:28:18 GMT

Hi Christoph,

For someone coming from an SAP Workflow environment, I am very familiar with the power of events - and raising BOR events is easy. So this looks like it will be a great project.

Question: In the Workflow World, we know that certain changes do not get reflected immediately, and so we sometimes have to 'refresh the org buffers' (swu_obuf). This comes in very handy in Dev, where you are often clicking on this, saving, clicking on that, saving, etc. Just resync the buffers and all your changes are enabled.

Are changes made to, say, a Process Definition immediately taken into consideration - or only acted upon the next time you run Process Monitor?

Thanks,
Sue

Re: Process Observer Discussion

JChristophNolte — Thu, 01 Aug 2013 13:12:36 GMT

Hi Sue,

thanks for your question. A SAP Business Workflow background surely provides a good starting point for working with Process Observer - we're using some Workflow technology, terminology and thinking. And while this is quite helpful, "deep Workflow knowledge" is certainly no pre-requisite for working on Process Observer.

To answer your question: Process Monitor is purely a tool for visualization and while some data is cached almost all changes of process definitions should be reflected immediately (with the exception of some texts). For good measure you can re-start the process monitor (POC_MONITOR); there are no additional buffers to be reset.

There is some buffering going on with the process definitions, though. When saving the process definition the active BOR events of all process definitions are determined and put into a separate database table that holds the list of "active" events, i.e. events that are relevant for Process Observer; table BOR Events Relevant for Process Monitoring (POC_V_BOR_EVT) can be viewed in IMG activity Check Process Monitoring Events for Bus. Object Repository. If you change your facade layer content, an update of this table may be necessary - so go into the process definition, change something, save and change back to trigger an update of this buffer. This triggers report POCR_UPDATE_BOR_EVENT, which actually carries out the update - and you could just run this report.

Finally, you should look into version handling when changing process definitions - significant changes to process definitions may cause unexpected results in your process logs. But I guess this should be discussed separately... I may need to think about a new blog post.

Best regards,
Christoph

Re: Process Observer Discussion

Former Member — Thu, 06 Feb 2014 17:21:21 GMT

Hi Experts,

I have the following questions about Process Observer :

1. I modelled a new proces , but when checking the process definition i get multiple errors :

No BOR event of class assigned to any tak

I m sure that i assign for every activity a task with bor :

2. The second question : i m looking for step by step tutorial for pushing the Process Observer log to SAP ESP or/and HANA.

Thanks in Advance,

Kind Regards

Re: Process Observer Discussion

JChristophNolte — Fri, 07 Feb 2014 11:28:28 GMT

Hi Moo,

thanks for you interest in Process Observer. I hope I can help you a bit here.

With regards to your first question, you are right, you probably have assigned a task to every activity - if not there would be a different message, which you have probably seen before. "No BOR event of class assigned to any task" indicates a different situation, that is likely to be a problem (but doesn't have to be). The problem here is in view cluster POC_BOR, where you assign a BOR event to the task. The tasks are modeling artefacts that have to be mapped to something "real". This mapping should be against a BOR event (or something else). If no task assigned to an activity (in your case task 114-21) is assigned a BOR event, the activity will never be logged. Except if the task is raised against the direct API or the generic BOR event or something else that you would be aware of (you have to do that). So the message indicates that something must been set up for this to work; if so, you can disregard the message (it won't go away, may it would be a good idea to give the user the option to mark this as "not really a problem"). - I don't know which system you are doing this in, but in an ERP system 114-21 should be mapped against a BOR event, i.e. you should find something like

in view cluster POC_BOR -> Map BOR Event to Task (provided you have the right SP, but this was delivered pretty early on). If not, let me know... it really should be there.

Your second question is certainly more difficult to answer. Let me try, though. Process Observer data is stored in simple tables, so replicating to HANA follows standard procedures, e.g. through SAP LT replication server (formerly often called "SLT") and general information can be found at http://scn.sap.com/community/replication-server. For the list of relevant tables, see note 1852213. For ESP, it is probably easy to find a generic link, I have no specific experience with that; but I do not understand what you would want to do here, I would need to understand the use case better. The same is true for the information given with regards to SAP LT: The tables you need depend on your use case, the set given above is what you would "commonly" want (even if you don't use them in a HANA Live context). You will also want to repliate application tables (e.g. VBAP, if you want to play with sales order related processes). If you are using Process Observer with SAP HANA Live, you may want to look at the views provided in the Virtual Data Model. But the set of tables given in the note should provide a good starting point if you just want to play with this.

Let me know if you have further questions and/or want to discuss your specific use case.

Best regards,

Christoph

Re: Process Observer Discussion

Former Member — Sun, 09 Feb 2014 09:35:18 GMT

Hi Christoph,

Thanks for the info , very interesting

I dont have a use case right now i just try to play with process observer in combination with SAP hana/Opint.

I searched for the note 1852213 i get the error

: Document not released. could you help?

Thanks & Regards

Re: Process Observer Discussion

JChristophNolte — Wed, 12 Feb 2014 09:44:42 GMT

Hi Moo,

right, note 1852213 is not released, I'm sorry about that.

Anyway, the required tables have been added as attachment "Tables_SAP_HBA_ECCFND701.txt" of note 1849168 (as pointed out on the overview page). The list of tables mentioned there is:

POC_C_KPI_COUNT

POC_C_KPI_CTG

POC_C_KPI_CTGD_T

POC_C_KPI_DURA

POC_C_PRC_KPI

POC_C_PRC_KPI_T

POC_C_PRC_STAT_T

POC_C_PROCESS

POC_C_PROCESS_T

POC_C_PS_BND

POC_C_PS_T

POC_D_BA_LOG

POC_D_BA_SRCSYS

POC_D_KPI_ACT

POC_D_KPI_LOG

POC_D_PRC_BIND

POC_D_PRC_IN

POC_D_PRC_STP_IN

POC_D_PRE_BA

POC_D_TRACK_THR

POC_I_BA

POC_I_BA_T

POC_I_BA_TYPE_T

POC_I_BO_TYPE_T

POC_I_BUS_AREA_T

POC_I_CBE_T

The note is more likely to hold the correct and full list of tables since that may (or may not) change over time. For now the list is fine, if you look at this much later, you may want to check the note.

I'm interested to hear back from you what you did with Process Observer and HANA.

Best regards,

Christoph

Re: Process Observer Discussion

kevin_wilson2 — Wed, 28 May 2014 01:27:53 GMT

Christoph,

I have enabled POB on our ECC instance and the simulation events work great. Only took me about 2 hours to run through the end-to-end installation so that was not a problem. Now that I have data in the POB tables showing up in the monitor I have a few questions for clarification:

Where does the correlation between 1 object and another related object take place?
1. E.g. Sales order = 10001 - BOR object = BUS2032 and BOR Event = CREATED
2. Delivery = 80001 and relates to 10001 - BOR object = LIKP and BOR Event = CREATED
3. When POB receives LIKP for 80001 it does not receive any data telling you that it is related to BUS2032 10001
What standard functionality / content is delivered in order to tap in to the POB data to display analytics. All the demos / documents show nice graphics but the standard software delivered with ECC is the raw data with no nice functionality around it. What, in addition to POB, do I need to install in order to leverage the data stored in POB for the purposes of analytical processing?
Does POB store the BOR Event Parameter values anywhere for processing?
1. E.g. In BUS2032 - I could create a new custom BOR event called DELIVERY_BLOCK_ON and I could pass the value A1 in parameter BLOCK. If the value A1 stored anywhere?
2. Ultimately we would also have a DELIVERY_BLOCK_OFF event with A1 as a parameter once again which should allow me to close off the duration between BLOCK_ON and BLOCK_OFF for that specific delivery block.
3. Is this type of functionality possible?

Thank you

Kevin

Re: Process Observer Discussion

kevin_wilson2 — Wed, 28 May 2014 05:10:34 GMT

Also Christoph,

I noticed in the one presentation that in POC_MONITOR you can click on a button to view the "Instance Diagram" for the process. My view does not have that button and I'm viewing the POC Simulation model 3 definition. Is this something that needs to be enabled with a user parameter?

Thank you

Kevin

Re: Process Observer Discussion

JChristophNolte — Wed, 28 May 2014 08:29:33 GMT

Hi Kevin,

a lot of questions. But I see that you are asking the right questions... I will give some quick answers hoping to point you in the right direction.

That's our magic! Well, we're relying on some functionality called Document Relationship Browser (DRB), which is originally implemented to help in the area of archiving. Some business objects, particularly in SD, "know" their neighbors. We have delivered a little tool, report POC_DRB_BOR_RELSHIP that will show you which neighbors Process Observer (POB) will recognize. DRB is limited, but it is very convenient (as you have seen). Note that DRB is not the fastest way to find these relationships... so if you find you have a performance issue, you may wish to reconsider implementing the appropriate BAdI.
Mind the format of your IDs when using our tool, there is no (alpha-)conversion in place. And some of the IDs coming out of DRB may be post-fixed with some additional "crap". POB will generally take care of that, though.
Right: POB does not deliver analytics in the ERP stack. For an extended discussion of analytical use cases and how to do it see. The short version: You can't do analytics with only POB, you either need to build your own thing or use BW (using our delivered BW content, including extraction) or - as a prefered option - you want to use .
No. The data is lost. Gone. For the obvious reason to save some space on your probably already hard-working database. You can, in theory, extend the POB tables and use some BAdI to store the data - this is an option that we we have considered (the additional parameters can be moved through all of process observer at runtime) and you should be able to get this to work, a full explanation of pretty much everything you can do on a detailed technical level can be found in our technical workshop.
But from your additional questions I can see that you probably want to do something else: If you want to see the (e.g. delivery) block in your process log, you should have two activities like set delivery block and remove delivery block. Your process definition should reflect your business requirement. Do not add this information "somewhere" since it will be difficult to access and use in further analytics. To get separate events, there are different approaches. You can do it in one of the BAdIs, of course, but for the sales order you have change documents. You can get change documents to create separate BOR events (see our technical workshop, hint: transaction SWEC) or you can use our more-or-less brand-new (a year old, so if you have a recent SP...) functionality to directly generate POB-events based on change documents (IMG: Process Observer -> General Settings -> Facade Layer Content -> Set Up Change Document); this latter function absolutely deserves a blog entry featuring it a bit more since we see this quite often.

All of the above links can also be found from on our home page.

I hope this helps a bit. You may want to come back asking for more detail, my answers can only be a starting point.

Best regards,

Christoph

Re: Process Observer Discussion

JChristophNolte — Wed, 28 May 2014 08:38:02 GMT

Hi Kevin,

with regards to the Instance Diagram: no, it is not a user parameter. It is a more recent support package, I'm afraid. If you don't see the button, it is not there. And I'm afraid we have no note for that, since it involves a lot of UI stuff (above and beyond the button) that would make it quite complex to apply this.

The button is there for process instances and for process definitions, so in POC_MONITOR and POC_VIEWER. We also have a side panel that can be used in Business Client with any object - so if you have a sales order that is in some process log, the log is shown next to the sales order (e.g. VA02, VA03). There are also side panels showing KPIs for the related process.

And while I cannot promise anything, we are thinking very hard about improving this visualization since we have had some feedback on this. There are currently limitations on visualizing federated processes and generally what data you are shown that I would like to overcome. When we release something, I will blog about it.

Best regards,

Christoph

Re: Process Observer Discussion

kevin_wilson2 — Wed, 28 May 2014 16:44:55 GMT

Thanks Christoph,

The report POC_DRB_BOR_RELSHIP is a little confusing. If I put in BUS2032 as the BO type I would expect to see relationships with Quatations and Deliveries as an example. Instead it comes out with Sales Order! Am I missing something here?

Thanks

Kevin

Re: Process Observer Discussion

bernd_schmitt — Fri, 30 May 2014 06:01:55 GMT

Hi Kevin,

please enter BUS2032 as BO type and a BO ID that exists in your system incl. leading 0s, like 0000001000. In our test system the result then comes up with IDs for related BUS2031, LIKP and IDOC.

Regards,

Bernd

Re: Process Observer Discussion

kevin_wilson2 — Mon, 02 Jun 2014 20:55:00 GMT

Thanks Bernd, that did the trick. I see that it is pretty much like document flow. Where can I find documentation around just which object are related to each other.

I noticed that none were at the item level - e.g. VBAP as an object itself, is related to LIPS the delivery line. Does this imply that process observer cannot monitor an order to cash scenario at the item level? E.g.

SO 123 item 10 relates to Delivery 234 item 10
SO 123 item 20 relates to Delivery 235 item 10 (Separate delivery for different line)
SO 123 item 20 relates to Delivery 236 item 10 (2 deliveries for same line - schedule line)
Each of the lines and each of the deliveries could have individually different statuses
Can POB monitor such complex scenarios? If so what would be the technique to adopt to achieve this visibility?

Thanks

Kevin

Re: Process Observer Discussion

JChristophNolte — Tue, 03 Jun 2014 13:42:42 GMT

Hi Kevin,

seems we're taking turns on you... I'll try this time.

Process Observer can support these scenarios. In short, the challenge with these scenarios is instrumentation, i.e. you won't have the right events on item basis. And the aforementioned document relationship browser (DRB) won't work on item level (since you'll archive on object level rather than item level). To handle these scenarios, you first need to decide whether you want to monitor on item level or on header level; generally this will be governed by how the system is used - do you work on item or on header level? If you find that you are working on item level, you will model and monitor the item level events - but you have to rely on either change documents or put your own events in the code. Process Observer will then store not only object IDs, but also item IDs if you provide the information (also for the successor). You will find that the relevant tables and interfaces have an "item" field to support that (essentially the ID is not object ID, but object ID + item no.). A third level is (out of the box) not supported (e.g. schedule lines), though.

A more extended explanation and example can be found in the blog entry Instrumentation for Procure-to-pay process on item level in Process Observer, which is about procurement, but it works in a very similar manner for the order-to-cash process.

Best regards,

Christoph

Re: Process Observer Discussion

Former Member — Wed, 06 Aug 2014 15:53:04 GMT

Hi Christoph,

I have a problem with Process Observer. It does not recognize the relationship between a sales order and a related delivery although the relationship between these objects is present in the report POC_DRB_BOR_RELSHIP. I can see the delivery in POC_TASK_ORPHAN. There are no problems mentioned in POC_MODEL_CHECK. Have you got an idea where could be the problem?

SAP ECC 6.0 EHP5

SAP_BS_FND 7.02 SP09

Thanks,
Jens

Re: Process Observer Discussion

JChristophNolte — Thu, 07 Aug 2014 13:16:45 GMT

Hi Jens,

this should really, really work: It's pretty much the most used demo case... so this does work. If we are talking about the SD sales order in ERP (VA01 etc.) and the related oubound delivery (BOR object LIKP, transaction VL01N)...

Since you can see the task in the orphan report, the event was raised and mapped to the correct task. And it links okay to the sales order if POC_DRB_BOR_RELSHIP shows it.

Potential problems I can think of:

You are somehow creating sales order and delivery at the same point in time, so when the data is processed it's not really on the database... (so you are not manually using VA01 & VL01N to create the data) - generally that should work anyway, but that could cause issues... maybe.
Check the outbound delivery activity and its associated task - are you sure you're seeing the task you have in the definition as an orphan? Or are you using a "similar" task?
Do you have some BAdI active? You can overrule the default predecessor determination using DRB... maybe you have done so (but obviously not very well - maybe you have done something for other objects and that's kicking in now with the delivery doing strange stuff).
Something else I can't think of... and I'd need more information.

It's probably a good idea to raise an OSS, we're happy to help.

Best regards,

Christoph

Re: Process Observer Discussion

Former Member — Fri, 08 Aug 2014 18:30:46 GMT

Hi Christoph,

even if a create the delivery hours or days later, it doesn`t work.

Yes, I am sure; if I change the process definition and mark the delivery as a start activity, Process Observer creates a new process instance after using transaction VL01N.

I have no idea about BAdl; never used it before. No one except me uses Process Observer on the System I am working.

Is it possible to use „Map Previous BOR Objects from BOR Payload“ to overrule DRB in this case?

If is it possible, may you tell me how to fill this view? There are no sample entries in my system.

Best regards,

Jens

Re: Process Observer Discussion

JChristophNolte — Mon, 11 Aug 2014 09:02:00 GMT

Hi Jens,

something is wrong is going on. This really should work. - The idea to mark the outbound delivery as a start object is quite good, but it really supports my statement that it should really work.

The view to map previous BOR object from the BOR payload (it's POC_V_MAPPREVBOR.) won't help here, I think. You can find more on that in the Process Observer In-Depth Workshop on page 57. In this case - besides the fact that DRB should really work - the event LIKP-CREATED (thrown when the outbound delivery is created in transaction VL01N) has nothing (helpful) in its BOR container. When you look at the parameters of event "OutboundDelivery.created" in the Business Object Builder (SWO1) for object LIKP, you see: nothing. This event has nothing in the its payload, so there is nothing to map (well, maybe there is something in the container - the information here is not always complete - but it is not helpful in this case).

Going back to what really should work: DRB. You have stated that POC_DRB_BOR_RELSHIP does show the sales order. Please really check that!

One more thing that you should check is table POC_D_PRE_BA. In POC_MONITOR check the process ID (you need to add that to the list of visible columns in the ALV on the search page of POC_MONITOR) of the process that has the outbound delivery created when you made the creation of the outbound delivery a start activity. In SE16 for table POC_D_PRE_BA check if for that process_id you there is an entry. The entry of the predecessor should be there, even if the predecessor does not exist on the database (this is used for local federation). - Alternatively you can use the task ID of the outbound delivery task using POC_DISPLAY_BA. I am not sure what to expect, but it would be helpful to know if there is an entry.

Other than that... I'm pretty lost. My next step would be to put a break-point in CL_POC_BOR_EVENT=>GET_PREVIOUS_BOS_DRB where CALL FUNCTION 'DRB_NEIGHBOURS_GET' is called and see if lt_previous_bor_objects is filled as expected. I suspect that this method is never called because of something strange (BAdI-implementation) is going on.

If this is all fine, I would check in BOR_EVENT_HANDLER at the end, right when CALL METHOD lo_poc_ba_observer->raise_event is executed and inspect lt_ba-PRE_BO_DATA if that is filled as expected.

If this is all well, then things get a bit more complicated.

To execute the break-points, you will need to un-schedule the report in SM37 (POCR_MAIN_QUEUE) and execute rswfevtpoqueue in dialog. This should be done only in a test enviroment, since it may lead to issues with direct events that should be processed in proper order - events may thus be ignored or added to the log in the wrong order.

I think we're at a point where you should raise an OSS - or at least talk more directly since finding this issue may become a tedious and lengthy issue if we have talk solve the problem by you checking the data etc.

Best regards,

Christoph

Re: Process Observer Discussion

markus_greutter — Wed, 13 Aug 2014 13:12:24 GMT

Hi Experts,

is there a known issue with the version of the process definition?

From the proof of concept phase in the project the process observer was already configured for one small straight forward process. Now I created the complete setup and implemented the final process definition in a new version.

The 'Current Version' of the Process Definition Header is set to '2'. The Active flag is set for version '2'. For version '1' the flag is removed.

When I now execute the process nothing is recorded. Starting transaction 'POC_MONITOR' for the relvant process definition I receive the message "No data found for the entered criteria".

Transaction POC_TASK finally shows that a process was started but for the task which belongs to version '1' and not for the current version '2'.

Are there any further settings to be considered?

Best regards,

Markus