This document discusses business process management and monitoring. It defines business process management as ensuring the smooth operation of core business processes through roles, responsibilities, process documentation, monitoring procedures, and escalation management. Business process monitoring is defined as the proactive monitoring of a company's key business processes, including all technical and application functions required. The SAP Solution Manager provides tools for business process monitoring, including monitoring of background jobs, transactions, interfaces, and more. It allows configuration of monitoring objects, alerts, and error handling procedures.
In the last few years the IT world of SAP customers has grown much more complex. Instead of one single R/3 system there are now extensive system landscapes distributed over the entire globe and involving different mySAP.com-solutions. Thus it has become much more complicated to keep track of the whole system landscape.
Business process management and interface management combine the functional view of the Business Departments and the technical view of the IT Departments to focus on the flow of the business process as a whole.
Customer’s business process: Internet Sales
The graphic shows how the a business process is typically analyzed during an SMA Service Delivery and entered into the SAP Solution Manager The sample business process “Internet Sales”shows a typical sales order management cycle:
Sales order is created in a call center using a CRM system.
Sales order is sent to SAP R/3 system via IDOC to create a respective sales order in the SAP R/3 system, using transaction VA01 or program RBDAPP01.
Delivery data is created using either program SAPMV50S or transaction VL04.
Delivery data is sent to the customer warehouse management system (WMS) to pick the goods.
A pick confirmation is sent from WMS to SAP R/3 system.
Goods issue is posted on SAP R/3 using transaction VL02N.
The invoice is created and printed using program RV60SBT1 or transaction VF04.
The implementation of new software follows an implementation roadmap. In this roadmap the definition and creation of a Business Process Monitoring concept is part of the implementation section “Technical Integration and Design ” and consists of five steps. During these steps the core business process is identified and specified. The monitoring objects are determined, and the error handling procedures and monitoring activities are defined.