BPM with ARIS & SAP Solution Manager

                     Core of any business is its process. These processes generate revenue and thus are crucial for any organization. In the current competitive & volatile market, it is required to be most updated and transparent across the organization to be able to adapt to any changes in the market demand. This needs an organization to be transparent in terms of the process followed for a given business and be able to execute the steps centrally.

With the availability of variety of software available in market, companies have option to choose the best fit to be able to manage processes and execution of the corresponding steps. Constraint over here is- business would need a platform where they can easily manage the entire business processes without having deep technical knowledge. On the other hand IT would need robust software that can have complete control over the steps execution that can meet the company’s requirements. SAP has made collaboration with one of the leading BPM software - ARIS. ARIS avails an easy to navigate and business oriented process management tools. Advantage with this environment is- it can be synchronized with SAP Solution Manager. Thus, the complete business process hierarchy can be synchronized with SAP Solution Manager. This avails the business processes for IT environment to configure relevant SAP systems and ensure process oriented IT implementation.

Fig 1: ARIS – Solution Manager Synchronization  

With the synchronization of ARIS and SAP Solution Manager, business can drill down to the documentation and configurations (if needed) and as well IT can look back into complete details of the updated business processes and corresponding steps. In short, the synchronization brings business and IT on one common platform to work and ensure a business oriented IT environment.  

Initially this synchronization between Solution Manager and ARIS was restricted to project phase. However with introduction of ARIS for SAP Netweaver 7.1, the new concept of transforming maintenance project has made ARIS capable of supporting the synchronization throughout SAP Solution lifecycle.

Fig2: ARIS and SAP Solution Manager Synchronization during different phases of business process lifecycle

Thus, the synchronization can be used during blueprint and realization phases of the project for business process update across SAP Solution Manager and ARIS¹ (step 2a in figure2).

During testing phase you can go for creating a new test project which can be synchronized in the same ARIS database with its corresponding end-to-end scenarios that can be used for complete end-to-end testing and reporting activities² (steps 1 and 2b in figure 2).

This way entire process management during the project phase for any implementation or rollout can be accomplished. However, the developed and published business processes are as well needed to be maintained and kept updated in Operation (Maintenance) phase. This is the phase of maintenance and optimization of business processes to be able to update business as per current business requirement. For this, a new solution is needed to be created in both SAP Solution Manager and ARIS. With SAP Solution Manager, the change management functionality enables you to use maintenance project for any kind of updates to the final solution delivered by a given project (shown as 3 in fig 2). This is a standard SAP Solution Manager functionality available in SAP Solution Manager.

With ARIS for SAP netweaver 7.1 release, you can create a blank database as maintenance database which is synchronized with maintenance project of SAP Solution Manager (point 4a of fig 2) via transfer project option. Then the created ARIS Solution database can be converted into Solution by choosing the new functionality Transform implementation project available via the menu Sap -> Advance -> Transform implementation project. Select the maintenance database in the next popup. This activity adds an ID to each business process node in attribute- Solution ID thus converting the normal project into a Solution. Once the Solution ID is maintained, your ARIS and SAP Solution Manager systems are ready for synchronization during the maintenance phase. At this stage now you are able to synchronize the ARIS Solution Database with Solution Manager Maintenance project.

NOTE: To update the Solution ID in ARIS Solution database, entire business structure is needed to be checked out in maintenance project of SAP Solution Manager and synchronized with maintenance database of ARIS.

Afterwards, to be able to continue the synchronization during maintenance phase, once the required process structures are checked-out to corresponding maintenance project in SAP Solution Manager (point 3 of fig 2), those are needed to be synchronized and updated in the maintenance database of ARIS (point 4a of fig 2). This activity assigns a new structure ID to all these processes. So, you need to update the new process structure ID to the ARIS Solution database. Choose option transform maintenance project using menu SAP -> Advance (point 4b of fig 2). The IDs are updated and again you are ready for synchronization between SAP Solution Manager Maintenance project and ARIS Solution database (point 4c of fig 2).