Business Process Management is a continuous task for progressive growth towards achieving digital transformation. The need to innovate, optimize, and expand has always been imperative when choosing SAP S/4HANA, which unifies your core business operations.
While transitioning to SAP S/4HANA from SAP ECC, SAP Signavio’s “Plug and Gain” offering reduces your preparation time for the exercise with data-driven insights, and enables you to identify improvement areas, automate processes, and better manage your master and configuration data.
What is SAP Signavio?
SAP Signavio is an integrated cloud-based suite for Business Process Management. It is a leader in process mining tools, according to Gartner’s Magic Quadrant-20231 analysis. SAP Signavio enables organizations to improve and transform their business processes faster. Within the Signavio Process Transformation suite, we have the below components for S/4HANA transformation.
Understand
The first step towards a transformation exercise requires understanding your existing business processes across your ERP system. SAP Signavio Process Insights and the Process Intelligence suite achieve this.
Improve
With an understanding of your processes and systems, there comes a need to improve processes and set the stage for journey modeling. Signavio Process Manager and the Signavio Journey Modeler enhance employee, customer, and supplier engagement.
Transform
With the stage set for innovative transformation from the above steps, the Signavio Process Governance gives a roadmap for efficient governance. Based on the insights from the Understand and Improve phases, the Signavio Process Automation enables the automation of manually driven and complex processes, setting the stage for a seamless transition to SAP S/4HANA.
The Signavio Plug and Gain Approach
The Signavio Plug and Gain approach is not a solution or component but a proven approach that reduces the time for the preparatory phase of the SAP from months to a few hours. It works by leveraging the existing data and processes with components of the SAP Signavio suite and creates a clear starting point for the SAP S/4HANA transformation exercise.
Benefits of the Signavio Plug and Gain Approach
- Get As-Is identification of Line of Business and end-to-end processes in the current ERP solution by deep process mining capabilities and data-driven insights.
- Quantify the insights by enabling drill-down, filtering, and value calculators.
- Identify potential and existing bottlenecks (Process Blockers and other pain points) and provide insights on correction recommendations.
- The approach enables fact-based decisions that align with KPIs, industry best practices, and benchmarks.
- You can leverage internal best practices for the global template improvements.
- Drive innovation and automation with SAP Signavio workflow automation and process transformation solutions.
Simply your S/4HANA Transformation with SAP Signavio
Data Cleansing
Data cleansing is an integral part of the S/4HANA Transformation activity. With Signavio’s Plug and Gain approach, you get to analyze and cleanse your master and configuration data with a recommendation for deletion or retention, per the insights.
Master data relates to your core identities and attributes across the core entities of your business, such as prospects, suppliers, and sites and hierarchies. Unused Master Data makes your ERP system challenging to use and increases the time to implement and test your S/4HANA landscape.
Configuration data relates to the data not directly processed by the application but has a definite impact on your operations, such as a data report generated from a database. Obsolete configuration data and business documents heavily impact the memory of your S/4HANA landscape. They create chokepoints in your planning algorithms and the system’s efficiency, which can generate inaccurate results.
The Plug and Gain approach with Signavio provides vast insights into your process reality with a transparent analysis. It provides insights into Process Performance Indicators (PPIs), such as backlog indicators, which determine the numeric count of documents or items not fully processed on time.
The Plug and Gain approach also provides insights on Master Data and configuration entries and their usage, which will be a good starting point to cleanse your data. You can refine your data by deleting unused Master Data entries that can be archived or deleted. As outlined below, the Plug and Gain approach gives a comprehensive set of correction recommendations to improve the identified inefficiencies.
- Findings and associated recommendations
- The post-implementation impact on the performance
- Impacted business objects and value drivers
- The root cause of the findings in the source system
With the above features and benefits of using the Signavio Plug and Gain approach, you can perform an efficient data cleansing exercise with tailored recommendations that help you quickly identify and remediate data inefficiencies in your system. With data in place, let’s move to another vital aspect of the Plug and Gain approach, which deals with process automation.
Process Automation with Signavio Plug and Gain approach
Enterprises have diverse ways of working with the SAP ERP system, which needs to be more streamlined. SAP S/4HANA will not support such variances in processes and systems. If you want to transition from your legacy SAP platform, now is the best time to explore potential automation opportunities with the Signavio Plug and Gain approach.
- The Plug and Gain approach provides insights into Process Performance Indicators within which the Automation Rate and Exceptions are vital parameters.
- While the Automation Rate conveys the number of processes running on an automation sequence, you get insights on how you can explore ways to automate and reduce manual processing.
- Exceptions are error messages that are displayed run-time. If your Exception score is higher, consider reworking them and exploring potential automation opportunities.
- Process Blockers are potential chokepoints needing remediation to bring system efficiency.
- Best-Run-Score is a measure of the efficiency of your processes. The Plug and Gain approach performs a process execution analysis. It determines the most suited way to enhance your strategies based on the Best-Run-Score and the frequency of adopting the specific process variant.
Custom Code and the Clean Core Concept
Businesses running on legacy SAP ERP platforms have a vast set of custom code that caters to various custom changes required. A transition to the SAP S/4HANA public code platform does not support custom transactions, and this is where you can leverage the Plug and Gain approach to identify and harmonize the custom code across your platform by leveraging the Transaction Code Analysis.
The Transactional code analysis measures the usage of transaction codes across individual processes and company codes.
SAP provides a standardized set of operational practices, with years of experience with its ERP customers and vendor-recommended processes. You must align to the standardization to achieve higher performance and efficient operations.
The Clean Core Concept
The Clean Core concept in SAP ERP is a way to achieve modern, flexible, and cloud-compliant processes with the required governance across Master Data and business processes. It makes the ERP system devoid of any custom code, with the advantage of having a standardized process. With the Plug and Gain approach, you can identify and remove custom codes within the system and create a harmonized ERP deployment.
Transformation Planning
Using the SAP Signavio Process Insights, the Plug and Gain approach gives insights on using the SAP recommended best practices inclusions, paving the way for streamlined operational processes in the Transformation Planning exercise.
Innovation Recommendations
The Plug and Gain approach also provides Innovation Recommendations derived from using each transaction or report within your ERP landscape. It measures their effectiveness and usage by other ERP deployments across your specific industry.
The above features of the SAP Signavio Plug and Gain approach will help you get the best roadmap for your S/4HANA transition, saving costs and time, enhancing current operations, and moving towards a harmonized model.
For any questions or to know more about process excellence with SAP Signavio, contact us, and we will be glad to help.
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