Process Observer Discussion

[JChristophNolte]

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.

[kevin_wilson2]

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:

1. 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
2. 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?
3. 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

[kevin_wilson2]

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

[JChristophNolte]

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.

1. 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.
2. 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 .
3. 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

[JChristophNolte]

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

[kevin_wilson2]

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

[bernd_schmitt]

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

[kevin_wilson2]

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

[JChristophNolte]

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