Report on SAP Signavio Process Governance data using the Analytics API and Microsoft Power BI

[ManuelTae]

Navigating the complex landscape of process-related governance can be a daunting task, often leading to a foggy understanding of its impact on business KPIs. Leveraging the capabilities of our Analytics API, we offer a clear, concise solution: seamlessly integrating SAP Signavio Process Governance with external BI tools, such as Microsoft Power BI. This post will guide you through this integration, offering instruction useful for other analytics tools too.

Use Case

Now, let's paint a picture of how this integration works in real-world scenarios. Using the SAP Signavio Process Governance Analytics API, you gain enhanced, rich visibility into governance cases within your SAP Signavio network. This level of deep insight means you relate these cases directly to key business KPIs, offering invaluable context and understanding. Moreover, it eliminates the hassle of switching between interfaces, saving you time and costs by streamlining process governance directly into your tool of choice, in this case, Microsoft Power BI. The integration process is as straightforward as it gets and can be summarized into these easy steps:

1. Generation of an API Key in SAP Signavio Process Governance.
2. Configuration of connectivity between SAP Signavio Process Governance and Microsoft Power BI.
3. Definition of data structures and columns in Microsoft Power BI
4. Loading of data into Microsoft Power BI using the SAP Signavio Process Governance API.
5. Create Dashboards in Microsoft Power Bi based on the data

 

Implementation

Generation of an API Key in SAP Signavio Process Governance

You need to create an API token to access the SAP Signavio Process Governance Analytics API. Login to SAP Signavio Process Governance and click on “Services & Connectors”:

Select “Token Management” and click on “Generate new token”:

Specify a token description and select a user to grant the permission for a one time token creation. This user will receive a mail to create the token:

Click on the link in the e-mail to create the token:

You are redirected to SAP Signavio and able to copy the token. Please make sure to keep it safe as it will be no longer accessible when you leave the page:

Please find more details in the API Documentation.

Configuration of connectivity between SAP Signavio Process Governance and Microsoft Power BI.

Create a new data connection in Microsoft Power BI via “Get Data” -> “Other” -> “Web”:

Switch to the Advanced settings and paste the URL according to your tenant region and entity you would like to pull into Microsoft Power BI. You can find more details about the different region URLs and entities in our API Guide.

Configure the HTTP header parameters to use the created API token for authentication. Add a new parameter “Authorization” and the value “Bearer” plus the token from the first step. This is how it looks for the EU region:

Definition of data structures and columns in Microsoft Power BI

The Query Editor opens directly after creating the data source. It is used to build, transform, and restructure data. The first step for retrieving the data via API (“Source”) is created automatically.

We now need to convert the data provided by the API into a table and transform the API response accordingly. This is not done by Microsoft Power BI automatically, however there is a workaround to make Power BI create the transformation steps by uploading a local JSON file containing example data what the SPG API will return.

Workaround to transform data into a table

Open the API Docs and navigate to the example response of the data you would like to retrieve, e.g. Cases

Copy the response payload into an empty file and save this file as JSON:

Create a JSON data source within the Query Editor via “New Source” à “JSON”. Select the created JSON file with the example data.

Microsoft Power BI creates a second Query, with all the steps needed to transform the local JSON file into a table:

The transformation steps will be the same for the data loaded via the API, hence we use the second Query and modify the “Source” step to load data via the API instead of a local JSON file:

Navigate to the “Source” step of our first Query and copy the content from the editor, which contains the connection details for the API:

Navigate to the “Source” step of the second Query and replace the “File.Contents()” function with the copied “Web.Contents()” function from the first Query:

Old Source:

New source: 

Make sue to delete the “=” before “Web.Contents()” after pasting, this will be inserted automatically.

Change the name of the second Query to something meaningful and delete the first Query. Save the Query file, run the Query and open the Table View in Microsoft Power BI. You can now see all the Case data from your workspace loaded via the API:

There might other options in Microsoft Power BI to transform JSON data into a table structure. Feel free to share your ideas in the comments!

 

Build reports

You can now start to build reports on top of this data. The following screenshot shows an example of the number of cases created per month and process id:

With the integration of SAP Signavio Process Governance and Microsoft Power BI, as shown in this tutorial, your organization's analytics capabilities are set to grow. The replication of governance cases from SAP Signavio into Power BI promises increased transparency and more detailed business insights.

We eagerly await hearing about how you've implemented these steps and the analytics scenarios they unlock for your organization. For further exploration, look over our previous blog about integrating SAP Signavio Process Governance with SAP Analytics tools.

Further Resources

• API Guide
• SAP Business Accelerator Hub