Today’s dig­i­tal tech­nolo­gies have giv­en enter­pris­es a way to move beyond luck and a lit­tle bit of hope when it comes to how well their busi­ness process­es are serv­ing their busi­ness goals. And these tech­nolo­gies are at the heart of SAP Sig­navio, an end-to-end solu­tion designed to help enter­pris­es man­age busi­ness process­es and enable con­tin­u­ous improve­ment programs.

In an ASUG web­cast, ​“Intro­duc­tion to SAP Sig­navio — Your Start­ing Point for Process Improve­ment,” Chet Har­ter, Vice Pres­i­dent of SAP Sig­navio Cen­ter of Excel­lence (CoE) at SAP, gave an overview of SAP Sig­navio and its core con­cepts and ben­e­fits, then detail­ing how the solu­tion aids in SAP S/4HANA effi­cien­cy andcon­tributes to con­tin­u­ous improve­ments.

Recall­ing his own expe­ri­ences work­ing on process improve­ment, Har­ter told atten­dees that there used to be very lit­tle data to sup­port process improve­ment or per­for­mance improve­ment. ​“Sure, we might have had some KPIs that indi­cat­ed we need­ed to make some improve­ments, but quite often we worked on things because we had a squeaky wheel in the orga­ni­za­tion, some­body who was scream­ing the loud­est,” he said.

SAP Sig­navio was cre­at­ed over 10 years ago and intend­ed to enable busi­ness process improve­ment in both SAP and non-SAP envi­ron­ments. Its key objectives: 

1. To reduce ERP imple­men­ta­tion costs and risk through improved process planning
2. To decrease process inef­fi­cien­cies across orga­ni­za­tions, and 
3. To improve process effi­ca­cy through col­lab­o­ra­tive process design.

Mea­sure­ment Matters

Busi­ness process­es define how work is to be exe­cut­ed in order to achieve per­for­mance objec­tives, and they include not only the tools of appli­ca­tions and tech­nol­o­gy, but also the peo­ple and process inputs of data. The bet­ter a com­pa­ny man­ages their busi­ness process­es, the less they have to rely on luck and hope for achiev­ing excel­lent performance.

Accord­ing to Har­ter, most enter­pris­es have some type of con­tin­u­ous improve­ment pro­gram already in place for their process­es, though some are much more for­mal­ized than oth­ers. For those not cer­tain if their orga­ni­za­tions have imple­ment­ed con­tin­u­ous improve­ment pro­grams, Har­ter advised explor­ing whether busi­ness­es prac­tice Lean Six Sig­ma, Kaizen, or process excel­lence, ​“all method­olo­gies for con­tin­u­ous improve­ment that SAP Sig­navio is equipped to facil­i­tate,” he said.

SAP Sig­navio pro­vides a for­mal approach to process improve­ment by deliv­er­ing mea­sure­ment: the first step in allow­ing for con­trol and even­tu­al­ly facil­i­tat­ing improve­ment. ​“If you can’t mea­sure some­thing, you can’t under­stand it,” said Har­ter. ​“And if you can’t under­stand it, you can’t con­trol it. And if you can’t con­trol it, you can’t improve it. This [phi­los­o­phy] real­ly lends itself to get­ting away from the art of busi­ness process man­age­ment, or the art of con­tin­u­ous improve­ment, and makes it a much more sci­en­tif­ic and for­mal approach.”

Specif­i­cal­ly, SAP Signavio:

• Assess­es process health with mon­i­tor­ing, analy­sis, bench­mark­ing, and improve­ment recommendations
• Pro­vides deep process analy­sis across SAP and non-SAP applications
• Ensures col­lab­o­ra­tive process design and governance

For­mal, Data-Driven

With­out the for­mal approach and dig­i­tal, data-dri­ven capa­bil­i­ties of SAP Sig­navio, it is dif­fi­cult to dis­cern, at a gran­u­lar lev­el, how well process­es are run­ning. Cer­tain KPIs might indi­cate that there is some­thing bro­ken in a process, but it will like­ly to take a lot of man­u­al work to fig­ure out exact­ly what is wrong. 

SAP Sig­navio approach­es analy­sis on ongo­ing mon­i­tor­ing basis, ana­lyz­ing all process­es and their per­for­mance by exam­in­ing trans­ac­tion logs, cal­cu­lat­ing process per­for­mance indi­ca­tors to help users iden­ti­fy the biggest oppor­tu­ni­ties for improve­ment, and even mak­ing rec­om­men­da­tions on how to improve processes. 

SAP Sig­navio might rec­om­mend some SAP S/4HANA native capa­bil­i­ties, or pre­built robot­ic process automa­tion (RPA) bots, for exam­ple, to make a very quick fix to a par­tic­u­lar process.

Past, Present, and Future States

It’s not just about quick fix­es in the present, either. SAP Sig­navio can help users deter­mine pos­si­bil­i­ties for how to run a process in the future. The cen­tral process repos­i­to­ry with­in SAP Sig­navio Process Man­ag­er allows for vis­i­bil­i­ty of all exist­ing, past, and future process­es with­in a user’s enter­prise. ​“I can see how we did things a year ago before we made some sig­nif­i­cant changes,” explained Har­ter. ​“And I can also put togeth­er my future state. I can also say, ​‘Here is how we intend to make this change when we move to SAP S/4HANA. Here is the process flow we’re going to put in place when that time comes.’”

Using Sig­navio gives users an oppor­tu­ni­ty to make nec­es­sary changes to pre­pare for a move to SAP S/4HANA by iden­ti­fy­ing future state process­es, help­ing users to cre­ate an imple­men­ta­tion sce­nario with a pos­i­tive out­come. In effect, it deter­mines improve­ment objec­tives and per­for­mance tar­gets based on com­pa­ny strat­e­gy and assess­es cur­rent process­es and avail­able capabilities.

“Maybe 90 – 95% of our process­es in the future will be exact­ly what we did in SAP ERP Cen­tral Com­po­nent (ECC), but here’s that oth­er five to 10%,” Har­ter said. ​“These are where we’re going to make changes. And this is where I’m going to bring togeth­er the right IT peo­ple and the right busi­ness users to say, ​‘How can we do this in the future?’ ”

SAP Sig­navio can also help green­field users estab­lish process flows using SAP best prac­tices and/​or pre­vi­ous sys­tem process­es (in a brown­field approach) along with Sig­navio accel­er­a­tors; the suite makes it pos­si­ble to col­lab­o­ra­tive­ly design, eval­u­ate, and final­ize process­es in accor­dance with objec­tives and improve­ment targets.

As SAP S/4HANA imple­men­ta­tion pro­gress­es, users will also be able to estab­lish a com­plete list of future state process mod­els, which can then guide sys­tem con­fig­u­ra­tion and oth­er activ­i­ties that involve land­scape cus­tomiza­tion. After that, SAP Signavio’s col­lab­o­ra­tive capa­bil­i­ties can help guide the nec­es­sary change man­age­ment, all the while mov­ing an orga­ni­za­tion toward SAP Signavio’s core strength: mon­i­tor­ing for con­tin­u­ous improvement.

“Well-run com­pa­nies man­age oper­a­tional per­for­mance by man­ag­ing their busi­ness process­es,” Har­ter told atten­dees. And Sig­navio can do the same for users’ orga­ni­za­tions, he said, by pro­vid­ing next-gen­er­a­tion, dig­i­tal appli­ca­tions for man­ag­ing effec­tive and effi­cient busi­ness process­es and a data-dri­ven foun­da­tion for a con­tin­u­ous improve­ment pro­gram. In addi­tion, Sig­navio can sig­nif­i­cant­ly improve the effec­tive­ness of users’ SAP S/4HANA imple­men­ta­tion and reduce some of the most com­mon chal­lenges asso­ci­at­ed with ERP imple­men­ta­tions, Har­ter concluded.

For more from Har­ter, ASUG mem­bers can watch the entire web­cast replay here.

Look­ing for con­ve­nient ways to learn? Check out our cal­en­dar of upcom­ing web­casts and find top­ics that inter­est you.