Setup of the SAP Signavio Process Insights connector within SAP Signavio Process Intelligence

[lukas_stier]

Great news!

With the new plug and gain connector the process of refreshing data is becoming smoother and more focused on customer needs: from now on, customers who have completed the initial set-up, up can individually take-over the “plug”-phase at any desired time, which strongly minimizes involvement of external efforts.

The SAP Signavio plug and gain is a comprehensive program designed to facilitate the rapid adoption and value realization of the SAP Signavio Process Transformation Suite for SAP ERP customers who want to move into the Cloud. The suite offers a set of tools aimed at improving business process management and optimization.

 While the initial  set-up of plug and gain is still delivered with support from SAP, the dependency on SAP support to actively use plug and gain on a regular basis is not required anymore. Instead, the customer has all means and abilities to conduct a data refresh whenever required, taking into account cost management with focus on available records. This drives the integration of plug and gain into our SAP Signavio suite, making it an integral part with streamlined release cycles. It is important to note that existing PnG customers cannot run the connector against their old plug and gain, it must set it up again.

Come again? What is plug and gain by SAP Signavio?

In summary, the plug and gain approach is an accelerated approach to process and ERP transformation. The plug and gain approach allows you to combine the capabilities of SAP Signavio Process Insights to measure process performance and SAP Signavio Process Intelligence to learn about actual process execution and define your to-be processes. On top of this, you are equipped with a variety of analyses to improve processes, your current ERP system and a possible target landscape.

As part of the plug and gain approach a connection between SAP ECC, SAP S/4HANA, or SAP Ariba to SAP Signavio Process Insights is established. Then, the data is loaded from SAP Signavio Process Insights to SAP Signavio Process Intelligence quickly and easily. Typical use cases for implementing plug and gain include the following:

• To help reduce the complexity and cost of SAP S/4HANA transformation projects
• To address challenges arising from mergers and acquisitions, resulting in distributed system landscapes and limited process harmonization
• To handle the challenge of ERP systems that have grown historically with custom development, and obsolete configuration settings and data
• To avoid costly process mining projects that require a lot of setup time before processes can be improved

In case you want to learn more about leveraging the plug and gain approach yet, don’t worry. You can easily catch up here. Make sure to contact your SAP counterpart to get started with plug and gain by SAP Signavio.

How to set up the connector?

• Navigate via “Process Data Management” to “Connections” and click “Create” to establish the Process Insights connection. Here, as seen in the screenshot, name the connection. Then select “SAP Signavio” as the connection type to create the connection.

Provide the requested details in the credentials inside the connection. The following hints will help you fill out the form correctly:

• OAuth Cliend ID: the Client ID of the service key from your Process Insights API instance is required here
• OAuth Client Secret: the Client Secret of the service key from your Process Insights API instance is required here
• Service Root: the service link including the ending to define which service should be called
• The service root always starts with “https://bpi-plug-and-gain.cfapps.eu11.hana.ondemand.com/api/”  and the selected service you want to connect to has to be appended to this URL.
• List of available Services:
  • Process Landscape Analysis: EventLogsService/v1 
  • Invoice to Cash: Finance_I2CService/v1
  • Invoice to Pay: Finance_I2PService/v1
  • Acquire to Decomission: AssetManagementService/v1
  • Source to Pay and Source to Pay incl. Ariba: SourcingAndProcurementService/v1
  • Lead to Cash: SalesService/v1
  • Plan to Fulfill: ManufacturingService/v1
  • Record to Report: RecordToReportService/v1
• You can specify in the Service Root which service to call, so which data to be extracted from Process Insights using the connector. E.g.: URL for Source to Pay data: https://bpi-plug-and-gain.cfapps.eu11.hana.ondemand.com/api/SourcingAndProcurementService/v1/
• OAuth Access Token URL: this URL is specific to your Process Insights Tenant URL. In general, it looks like this: https:// <YourProcessInsightsTenant>.authentication.<YourServerRegion>.hana.ondemand.com/oauth/token
• Target Currency: Please select the main currency that you want to use in the content.

 Setting up the Process Data Pipeline:

• You now have to access the following note and download the content that is attached. You can access the collective note over this link: https://me.sap.com/notes/3496399/E and within this note, you can select the underlying note that contains the content you want to set up
• From here, import the Process Data Pipeline by clicking on “Import” in the “Process Data Pipelines” menu, and drag-and-drop the .etl file into the pop-up to upload the Process Data Pipeline.
• Once the Process Data Pipeline is uploaded, the source data will be imported as well, containing all the relevant tables for the set up.

Adding the connector to the pipeline

• Add a process to store your dashboards once the pipeline is set up: Click on “New Process” or reuse an existing process, provide a name, and create the process.

Data Extraction

• Before you can trigger the first data extraction over the pipeline, please make some optional adjustments to the source data tables within the source data.
• By clicking on one of the tables on the arrow on the right side, you are provided with more options under “Configurations” to configure which data should be extracted.

• You also can adjust the SQL-Filter here, where you can put in “collectionNumbers = 5”, meaning that for this table, five data collections within Process Insights will be loaded. Per standard, this will be pre-configured to “1”, meaning that by default, one data collection gets loaded.
• You can also specify the systems within a Process Insights tenant. This is relevant for you, if you have multiple systems connected, but you only want to extract data from one certain system. This can be done by inserting system = “Name of system” into the SQL-Filter.

• Once you have made all the adjustments in the tables, you can start the initial data extraction. You can trigger this by going into the pipeline and trigger the “Run ETL” option on the top-right in the pipeline overview.

• Once you triggered the ETL, the extraction should begin.
• Once the data has been extracted, the ETL overview should look like the below screenshot and the status should be “completed”:
• At this point, we have extracted the data from Process Insights for the first time. Now we want to set up the content on top of the extracted data.

• Process Setup
  • To get started with your analysis, you now need to import the content that we provide with plug and gain. First, please import the BPMN Models and example diagrams for the Value Accelerators into your Signavio Process Manager. 
  • Please navigate into the Process Manager, and click “Import SAP Signavio archive (SGX)”:

Then, choose the file you want to import, in this case the BPMNs that are stored within an .sgx file. Use the options as selected in the below screenshot and import the files. These are the BPMN Models that we use in the dashboards, you will need them for the next step.

Now, please set up the dashboards: Navigate into the pipeline again, and click on the process on the right side that you have created and attached to the pipeline:

• Please import all the dashboards.
• You can find the dashboards in the note.
• Hint: Make sure that you are in the right tab. You want to be in the “Dashboards”-Tab within the process.
• Then click import on the top-right and drag-and-drop all dashboards within this specific note.

If you now look through the imported dashboards, you might see some spots coming up where there is a process model missing or where you have to link an example diagram. As soon as you encounter this message: Please map the process model (that we have imported earlier in Step 7 into Process Manager) to the current dashboard. You can do this by clicking on the top-right three dots, into the settings. Here, you select the name of the process (e.g. Source to Pay) and get the fitting process model as a recommendation. Select the process model and it will appear in a preview as below. Then, click “Map activities”.

Next, map the specific events from the data to the events in the process model. You can do that manually, but also automatically where matching names get assigned to each other automatically (recommended way). You can do this by selecting “Auto-map” in the top-right as seen below, and confirm the pop-up.

Now that your process is mapped to the events in the data, you can return to your dashboard and the process will be properly set up.

Another type of diagram that need to be added is example diagrams. These diagrams provide process examples for specific use cases within a dashboard. If you encounter something like this within your dashboard you have to insert this specific diagram into the dashboard. You can do that by clicking on “Create Widget” within the dashboard, and select “Give it a try” when asked if you want to switch to the new widget creation experience (only by switching, you will be able to add the example diagrams).

Then, click “Edit” by clicking on the three dots in the respective widget for the example diagram, and this side panel opens on the right. In here, type the name of the diagram (as seen in the title of the widget, here e.g.: Example: Overdelivery case charged correct), and select the diagram that is suggested. This only works after the diagram has been uploaded into the process manager via the .sgx import that was described previously.

Congratulations, you are all set!

• Now you might want to take a look into access rights for the processes and the dashboards that you have created. Bear in mind that at this point, only the person that set up everything has access. Check out our documentation on to manage access rights here

As you have extracted the data once while running the initial setup, you might want to schedule the data load automatically going forward. This way, the data in Process Insights is continuously refreshed. You can set the scheduled extraction by navigating into the source data, and click “Schedule” on the top-right. In the pop-up seen below, you can specify the schedule on which the data should be continuously extracted, provided that the data is available in SAP Signavio Process Insights and the connection to the ERP system is still up and running.

As mentioned earlier, with the new connector the process of refreshing data is becoming smoother and more focused on user needs: From now on, plug and gain users who have completed the initial set-up, can individually take-over the “plug”-phase at any desired time. In case you are already an active plug and gain user and want to leverage the new connector, make sure to reach out to your SAP contact to get started.

If you are not an active plug and gain user yet and want to learn more about it or request a demo, you can find out more here.