Published on February 15, 2022 – Johannes Strasser, Solutions Consultant SAP S/4HANA Finance & Business Process Intelligence at Westernacher
In our previous post, we realized how powerful SAP Process Discovery can be when it comes to understanding the value of moving to SAP S/4HANA. It helps you to achieve your business goals, providing a deep dive into process performance and efficiency, identification of areas for improvement and automation potential as well as standardization opportunities based on best practice recommendations. When using this tool, you will no doubt stumble upon one or more aha moments about how your business can sustainably benefit from an SAP S/4HANA migration. We have already checked out the tool, so we are happy to share our top 10 aha moments with you.
“Aha” 1 – Top Opportunities to Improve
SAP Process Discovery enables you to get a quick overview of your performance to identify where and how you can improve. Relevant key performance indicators (KPIs) can be selected to view metrics and a related benchmark comparison.
For example, we can select the KPI “Purchase Order Items Created After Invoice”. The tool immediately tells you if your performance is below or above industry average. Also, you receive insights regarding possible causes, such as speeding up of purchasing by by-passing the SAP purchasing process or buyers lacking knowledge of SAP purchasing process. SAP Process Discovery also lists the potential business impacts of that KPI, for example unnecessary high manual workload, higher finance process operations costs, lost cash discount or process incompliance (maverick-buying).
The aha moment here: After highlighting these insights, SAP Process Discovery takes you straight to the SAP KPI Catalog where you can learn more about improving your opportunities. The KPI catalog itself is a cloud service offered by SAP. It contains the definitions, technical documentation and comprehensive descriptions of KPIs, and associated metrics that are available to you in SAP applications.
“Aha” 2 – Top Performance
Similar to the aha moment above, SAP Process Discovery also provides an intuitive overview of where your company is performing well.
The aha moment here: “Great, let’s stress this performance also in SAP S/4HANA and eventually optimize at a later stage.”
“Aha” 3 – Top Recommendations
SAP Process Discovery delivers various recommendations about how you can bring your company to its next level with SAP S/4HANA. Based on your production data from your SAP ECC system, the tool derives top recommendations that can benefit you the most.
Each recommendation includes its relevancy based on your usage data as well as its industry popularity, indicating adoption among industry peers. Recommendations take you straight to the SAP Solution Portfolio, where you have further insights regarding the solution capability, value drivers as well as best practices and innovations.
The aha moment here: You learn which E2E process and which lines of business (LOBs) are involved, respecting both usage-based relevance and industry popularity for each recommendation.
“Aha” 4 – Get Insights into End-to-End Processes
SAP Process Discovery allows you to view business information for specific end-to-end processes, including details on KPIs, benchmark comparison data as well as recommendations on how to improve.
Process information is derived from transaction-to-process mappings based on best practices. Usage information for your E2E process is summarized on a 3-dot scale, showing the manual user effort involved as well as the number of users involved in the last month of data collected. All E2E processes are divided into process parts. KPIs indicate your performance compared to industry peers.
The aha moment here: You can also view the related processes and recommendations for each process part.
“Aha” 5 – Emphasize on Value Drivers
You can filter certain value drivers within your E2E process based on what you want to enhance. We filtered “Reduce Days Sales Outstanding” in context of the Order-to-Cash process.
The aha moment here: We learn about the performance, manual effort, user popularity for each subprocess and most importantly, how to improve it.
“Aha” 6 – Explore Performance by Line of Business
You can view business information for a specific LOB, including details on KPIs, benchmark comparison data, processes with potential for automation as well as recommendations on how to improve.
The aha moment here: Each LOB manager can deep dive into his or her area, emphasizing the pain points and opportunities for improvement.
“Aha” 7 – Focus on Business Performance Goals
SAP Process Discovery gives you the possibility to select your performance goals so you can focus on those KPIs with opportunities to improve.
The aha moment here: You get a quick overview of your performance to identify where you can improve and where you are performing well. Selecting a KPI enables you to view metrics and a benchmark comparison for that KPI.
“Aha” 8 – Industry Specific Benchmarks
SAP Process Discovery allows you to show a benchmark comparison to see how you perform compared to industry peers.
The aha moment here: With the interactive PDF version of SAP Process Discovery, the Executive Summary Report introduced during our previous post, you receive links to industry whitepapers, industry value papers as well as industry solutions portfolios that provide you with even more information regarding your industry-specific trends and accelerators.
“Aha” 9 – Processes with Automation Potential
You can explore your process automation potential based on transaction data from your SAP ECC system. Furthermore, you can understand which business processes involve the most manual effort and highest number of users.
An intricate scoring mechanism is mapped to a 3-dot scale so you can identify opportunities with automation potential. 3 dots = high potential. 2 dots = moderate potential. 1 dot = low potential.
The aha moment here: By simply looking at this graph, we realize: “Aha, Finance is highly manual – let’s investigate closer and see how we can automate certain steps.”
“Aha” 10 – Current ERP System Usage
SAP Process Discovery supports you to understand which transactions in your SAP ECC system involve the most users and the most dialog steps – indicating that high manual effort is involved.
You learn which transaction types as well as technical components of your ERP system involve the most manual effort. Transaction types include standard transactions from SAP, transactions provided by partners and custom transactions implemented. Technical components are derived based on transaction-to-process mappings. You receive metrics that give you a quick overview of the transactions and transaction types used in your system.
The aha moment here: Based on the scatter chart above, we instantly see the top 50 transactions, by transaction type, with the highest potential for improvement.
Wrap-up
SAP Process Discovery is the starting point for building your case for SAP S/4HANA, providing in-depth analysis and insights regarding your business process performance – for free. It is organized in intuitive reports for various roles, considering seven end-to-end business processes and six LOBs. SAP Process Discovery supports you to transform and automate your processes across your business areas. The ultimate goal of this tool is to help you understand the value of moving to SAP S/4HANA as well as how to achieve your business goals in the long term. And we at Westernacher Consulting (link-to) assist you to get the maximum out of this solution.
In our next post, we will focus on what your future SAP S/4HANA system could look like. Spoiler: Wave goodbye to the old school user interface you are used to deal with every day. Stay tuned.
Share this article
