Populating Solution Manager Content Through Automation

The business process repository within Solution Manager allows teams to re-use content throughout lifecycle events for things like testing, training and status tracking. The Competency Center (or Program Office) can use Solution Manager to record and track issues that have been raised either by end users or by a project team member. The implemented business processes can also be monitored to analyze system performance.

The key to making Solution Manager function for an organization is to first populate the Business Process Hierarchy with up-to-date business process content. Maintaining this hierarchy as the system goes through its lifecycle events is critical to the success of Solution Manager adoption.

The Challenge

It is difficult to find up-to-date, consistent business process documentation that matches the strict hierarchy of Solution Manager.

Usually, the only solution is a manual process of identifying current business scenarios through interviewing process owners and detailed examination of the IMG. The results of this research can then be used to populate Solution Manager. This is labor intensive both for the team assigned to the discovery and for those business end-users who are questioned to better understand the business processes supported by SAP software. Each in-scope business process scenario will be unique. However, many of the underlying processes and associated transactions will be used in more than one scenario.

For example there may be several different procurement scenarios:

- Purchasing for Stock - Purchasing of Services - Purchasing of Office Supplies

Each one of the above scenarios will contain a common process of purchase ordering. Documenting this in Solution Manager would mean creating that process three times. Any changes to that process will also need to be documented three times.

The Solution

Figure 2: SAP business content is captured in NetProcess and exported to Solution Manager

IntelliCorp can help overcome these challenges by identifying the business processes supported by SAP software. IntelliCorp?s SAP Certified products use up-to-date data from your production instances (with the capability of including all custom transactions) to build an accurate ?as-is? business process model. With the model discovered, the business process hierarchy can be published at the push of a button into Solution Manager.

Ongoing overview of the business process updates can be done in NetProcess, which provides a data repository allowing for quick impact analysis along with easy maintenance. And its graphical presentation of the documented business process flows aids business and IT communications.

Deliverables

At the end of the exercise the following deliverables will have been completed:

- Solution Manager Business Process Hierarchy populated with all in-use transactions o Significantly accelerates this task with automation

- A consolidated process model organized by core business processes showing all in scope business processes including:

- Each active business process

- Custom SAP transactions

- SAP scenarios can be detailed with business processes and associated with process steps (T-codes) - Tasks mapped to the relevant Solution Manager Logical Component o Logical Components include: CRM, SCM, etc.

- Inputs, interfaces and documents modeled in each sub-process