BPM benefits for Business Blueprinting versus SAP Solution Manager

Author: Logan Vadivelu © Copyright IBM Corp Smarter Process for SAP E-Mail: logan.vadivelu@in.ibm.com

What is Blueprinting in SAP Implementation Methodology?

Blueprinting is about identifying the way business carries out day-to-day business operations, such as

processing sales or purchase orders or customer or vendor invoices, and map the activities involved

into respective processes and organize them as business process hierarchy (BPH) in various areas of

business, such as Finance, Sales, Purchasing, etc. Ideally, Blueprinting should aim to incorporate

'best practices'.

SAP Solution Manager (SolMan) enables creating Blueprinting as a static hierarchy of activities and

identifies the corresponding SAP Transactions (TCodes'). The 'tree structure' approach to depicting a

process is very static, and the process steps simply identify SAP TCode, SAP SolMan doesn't allow

capturing metrics (cost, time, etc) to generate KPIs, track SLAs, or Roles performing the steps. SAP

SolMan is just a 'Repository' to store process hierarchy definitions, and not a process modeling tool.

IBM BPM and SAP SolMan - Difference in Blueprinting Methodology and IBM BPM Benefits No IBM BPM SAP Solution Manager 1 Blueprinting Approach /

Methodology - Iterative, dynamic, modeling driven - Visual Process flows (models)

- Water fall approach - Static Tree structure listing SAP Transactions (Names & TCodes)

2 Speed of Blueprinting - Reusable ‘process elements’ enable faster Blueprinting. Repeatable steps created as ‘sub-process’ for reusability.

- Zero Reusability. - Repeatable Steps (TCodes) need to be duplicated in other process ‘levels’

3 Business info (Role, Rule, Metrics, KPIs, SLAs)

- Blueprinting process models enriched with business info that can be used to analyze blueprinting processes

- No such business info. Only linking TCodes, Logical Component

4 Simulation, Analysis, Optimization

Yes, using the business info (Metrics, SLAs, KPIs)

- No, due to static definition (tree structure) and no business info

5 What-If Analysis Yes, apply different situations to determine outcome of ‘What-If’

No, as static Tree-structure doesn’t allow analysis

6 Reusability Yes No 7 Use as executable

processes in BPM Yes, the blueprinting processes can be linked to system and human services and executed

No

8 Versioning / Change Management

Yes, multiple versions can be maintained and managed

No

9 Sharable with business users for collaboration, verification

Yes, the blueprinting processes can be shared with business users. The process flows are easy to understand

No. The users need to be SAP Users. Need SAP knowledge to understand them, business users usually can not understand and use.

BPM benefits for Business Blueprinting versus SAP Solution Manager

Author: Logan Vadivelu © Copyright IBM Corp Smarter Process for SAP E-Mail: logan.vadivelu@in.ibm.com

Challenges with and Limitations of SAP SolMan based Blueprinting

Due to SAP SolMan’s inherent limitations and approach to 'blueprinting', the following will be a big

challenge or not even possible:

1) SolMan 'blueprinting' is stand-alone, static and doesnt manage run-time execution in SAP ERP.

Changes in SAP system is not directly linked to SolMan process hierarchy and can become out-of-

sync if not manually managed. No 'round tripping' is possible unless manually reconciled.

2) No 'Role' association or Organizational mapping is possible to process steps in the process

hierarchy, and thus not possible to know 'who does what'.

3) Not possible to identify steps done outside SAP - an external system or manual step (approval or e-

mail notification, etc),

4) No KPIs or metrics can be associated with the process steps. Only an SAP TCode can be linked.

5) No conditional logic (business rule) can be added to define what steps need to be done or skipped

or what path will be executed depending on business criteria or data. No 'time dependent' or 'event

based' processing can be defined to handle 'business exception' or 'escalation'

6) Simply stated, no simulation of a process is possible to determine how different customers orders

or invoices will be processed. Not possible to identify 'bottleneck' in the process execution and thus

not possible to define 'controls / logic' to handle them.

7) No 'what-if' analysis is possible to determine 'business outcome' based on changes to be

introduced (introducing an approval step or clip level for auto or manual approval).

8) No versioning of processes is possible. No comparison of different versions is possible based on

KPIs, metrics.

9) No process simplification or optimization is possible as the Blueprinting in SAP SolMan is just a

static hierarchy of transactions.

With SAP SolMan, it will be difficult or even not possible to analyze the business impact of changes in

resource deployment model or customer billing or contract supplier payment terms / credit level, etc.

Business will have to use 'Spreadsheet technique', which can only help with 'numbers', such as 'cost;

or 'time'. It will not help visualize 'critical path analysis'. It will not be possible to 'blueprint' processes

such as 'tender or RFP response preparation' as they are not standard SAP processes (no TCodes).