With SAP Signavio Value Accelerators you no longer must start your projects from a blank page. Discover how SAP Signavio Value Accelerators help you kick start your project, accelerate analysis, deployment and make your transformation a success, first time and with less effort – From analysis and indication of your running processes, over best practice recommendation and valuation, to real acceleration with ready-to-use content in SAP Signavio.

Setting Sail with SAP Signavio

Imagine your business and its processes are like a ship sailing across the vast sea of business transformation. Just like a captain navigates their vessel through unpredictable waters, business leaders must steer their organizations through complex and ever-changing environments. This blog post will show how you can harness the power of SAP Signavio and its Value Accelerators to become the skilled captains of the enterprises, ensuring you reach the desired destinations in time.

Three pillars of SAP Signavio

SAP Signavio’s Transformation Methodology is your comprehensive navigation kit, carefully designed to steer your organization through the complexities of business transformation. Just as a skilled captain relies on their toolkit for direction, this methodology provides you with the strategic guidance needed to navigate the course successfully.

The SAP Signavio Process Transformation Suite, on the other hand, is like the embodiment of your crew, equipped with the right tools to sail the ship. Much like a well-prepared crew knows the ins and outs of their vessel and its tools, this suite empowers your teams with the capabilities to manage and execute the business transformation effectively.

And lastly the focus of this blog post, the SAP Signavio Value Accelerators represent the vital sailing skills. Just as a seasoned sailor possesses the expertise to read the elements, these accelerators provide the practical insights and solutions needed to adapt, overcome challenges, and navigate with confidence.

Together, these components form a seamless synergy, ensuring that your business transformation voyage is not just a journey, but a successful and fulfilling adventure.

Why it’s a smart time to learn how to sail

In the dynamic and ever-evolving landscape of business, learning how to sail with SAP Signavio Value Accelerators is not just a choice; it’s a smart and strategic decision. As Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum, aptly puts it, “In the new world, it is not the big fish which eats the small fish, it’s the fast fish which eats the slow fish.” Let’s just think for a little moment that he was talking about ships.

In this era of rapid change and innovation, being nimble and adaptive is the key to success. Traditional approaches that move at a slow, ponderous pace may find themselves left behind, devoured by the agile competition. It’s the businesses that can swiftly adjust to the shifting currents and capitalize on emerging opportunities that will thrive.

Learning how to transform, and doing so with the efficiency and agility that SAP Signavio offers, ensures that your organization becomes one of the fast ships, ready to stay ahead of the competition. It’s a smart time to embark on this journey and equip your organization to master the unpredictable waters of today’s business world.

Many transformational programs struggle to hit the finish line on time and on budget due to typical pitfalls

• Extended Pilot Phases and Anchored Progress: Like a ship feeling safe in its harbor, organizations often linger for too long in the pilot phase, delaying full transformation and dropping anchor on progress.
• Tempestuous Transformation Challenges: Navigating transformation can feel like battling turbulent waters, with resource constraints, shifting priorities, and internal resistance pushing the desired destination further away.
• Waning Momentum and Commitment: Persistent challenges can erode momentum and commitment, leaving the captain and crew questioning the feasibility of reaching their destination.
• Foggy Goals and Uncertainty: Many organizations grapple with unclear transformation goals, like a ship lost in a fog of conflicting objectives and priorities.
• Storms of Errors and Reworking: Transformation can encounter errors and extensive reworking, akin to a ship caught in a tumultuous storm, slowing progress and depleting resources.

In your quest to master the art of sailing your business ship, you must understand and address these challenges that can hinder your progress. SAP Signavio, with its Value Accelerators, offers a set of instructions, ensuring that you stay on course and reach your desired destinations in a timely and efficient manner.

SAP Signavio Value Accelerators support business transformation and continuous improvement

In our journey to explore the transformative power of SAP Signavio, we’ve navigated through the challenges that arise on the seas of business. Now, let’s turn our attention fully to SAP Signavio Value Accelerators, the guiding knowledge of your voyage, and how they support not only the initial transformation but also the continuous improvement needed to stay ahead. These accelerators serve as your sailing instruction, ensuring your ship not only reaches its destination on time but continues to chart a successful course in the long run.

Overview of SAP Signavio Value Accelerators for each transformation phase

Through some of the main dimensions of business transformation – Business Strategy, Processes, People and Systems – We deliver content for each phase of transformation to improve time to value.

For this demonstration I would like to introduce Paul Purchaser (and for now leave the sailing analogy behind). Maybe known from SAP ERP trainings, Paul is also transformation lead for his companies “Sourcing and Procurement” business domain, respectively the end-to-end process “Source to Pay”. His company is using SAP ECC as its main ERP system, plus already leveraging SAP Signavio capabilities for process modelling exercises – With the goal to implement SAP S/4HANA Cloud. For the beginning Paul wants to do workshops with diverse stakeholders to talk about their current capabilities and processes. Since he doesn’t want to start from a blank page, he remembers a note which is referring to Value Accelerators for Architecture and Process Design. He already heard about the SAP Signavio Process Explorer and the rich content this tool consolidates. He is reading though the consumption guideline he received and is ready to import the content into his companies SAP Signavio workspace.

[After the successful import] Browsing through the imported content Paul is amazed and now able to copy or move specific diagrams into his folders to have a content baseline for the planned business strategy workshops, with the goal to define financial and strategic targets. The imported Business Capability Map for “Sourcing and Procurement” from SAP’s Enterprise Architecture Framework and its corresponding information in the dictionary is a great baseline to start business strategy assessments with corresponding stakeholders. After the final workshop, it is getting clearer that in the business area “Supplier Invoice Management” the company is lacking capabilities and needs further investigation. Especially the company needs to investigate around “Supplier Invoice Processing”, since colleagues are complaining about too many manual steps to process a supplier invoice:

Value Accelerators for Architecture Design – Business Capability Map for Sourcing and Procurement

Sidenote: The functionalities of LeanIX will help even more in the future in project phases like these.

Furthermore, Paul leverages the process content from the import for his strategic discussions (also originated from SAP’s Enterprise Architecture Framework). With this starting point and interlinked diagrams, he and his colleagues are getting a business-oriented overview of the whole end-to-end process “Source to Pay”. Since in the first workshops he already figured out that there is a challenge in the processing of supplier invoices, he wants to have a deeper look into the “Invoice to Pay” module of the overall end-to-end process:

Value Accelerators for Process Design – Source to Pay and the module Invoice to Pay

The corresponding Business Value Flow Diagram for “Invoice to Pay” represents the sequenced business activities from receiving and processing a supplier invoice until it is paid. Since Paul and his team already figured out that they need to investigate the receiving of supplier invoices in more detail, he wants to have a deeper look into the business activity of “Receive and process supplier invoices”.

While checking corresponding business capabilities to this business activity (all linked in the imported dictionary), Paul understands that there more capabilities (e.g., Tax Determination and Calculation) involved which are linked to the finance domain of the company, what keeps him thinking of reaching out to his finance colleagues to have a collaborative approach into the next transformation step – Stop thinking in silos while start to implement a real end-to-end mindset.

Since the company is already leveraging SAP Signavio Process Manager for its process modelling exercises, colleagues from Paul were able to link the corresponding BPMN diagram to the chevron which represents this business activity. This as-is analysis is a crucial part to prepare for the upcoming transformation. Looking into this documented process Paul already has the suspicion that the manual effort in this process may be one of the challenges the stakeholders in the workshops were talking about. If the BPMN diagram represents the reality, colleagues are downloading supplier invoices if received via email manually and when imported into their current system they must fill a parallel draft with the relevant information. And Paul assumes that they are handling thousands of supplier invoices on a recurring basis:

The current as-is process of “Receive and process supplier invoices”

From a business strategy and value chain point of view Paul got first ideas about what to further investigate. But this is all still based on assumptions. The next reasonable step is to investigate the companies’ data. Until now Paul leverages Value Accelerators for Architecture and Process Design, but he learned that there is more – Value Accelerators for Analysis and Mining. In this value identification phase, it is most important to identify, classify and prioritize use cases, leverage internal and external benchmarks, and calculate and align the data-driven value case.

[Some days later] Paul finally understands why they called it “fast mining”. Since the company is running SAP ECC, colleagues were able to link it to SAP Signavio Process Insights within hours. Since the tool is running with a first data load, Paul can’t wait to investigate what the data is telling. There are multiple entry points into the data, but Paul chose to directly jump into the “Invoice to Pay” part, since he and his team already figured out that especially the invoice part seems to be a challenge. Looking into available process flows for “Invoice to Pay”, Paul understands that “Supplier invoice issuing to FI-AP clearing” is exactly what he is looking for:

Value Accelerators for Analysis and Mining – Deep dive into Invoice to Pay

Jumping into this flow he gets an overview of the corresponding steps with information around the number of documents and time it takes to process them. He already starts to feel uncomfortable thinking about the colleagues’ complaints and thousands of supplier invoices being downloaded and filled manually (if their assumptions turn out to be true). What makes his feeling even worse is the acknowledgement of most frequent blockers and other information the tool provides. Paul realizes that the complains and the BPMN diagram he investigated some days ago speaks the truth, currently 97% of supplier invoices (and therefore 14.000 documents) are created by dialog users, which means a lot of manual effort for the colleagues to handle, and it explains why it takes on average 5 days to get an invoice into the system after it is issued:

Value Accelerators for Analysis and Mining – Numbers & blockers of the selected process flow

Clicking on the blocker Paul is additionally able to benchmark this investigation internally, for example looking into different company codes to understand the distribution of created documents and the corresponding automation rate.

Continuing his investigation, Paul finds the “Performance Indicator” tile which lists a lot of indicators corresponding to the chosen process flow. Thinking back about his “wants to collaborate” with the finance colleagues, he spots the indicator “Financial documents created” which seems to also involve an (external) industry benchmark. Looking into this data he recognized that is it not just the low automation rate of receiving and processing supplier invoices, furthermore the creation of financial documents in the company overall is from an industry benchmark perspective critical. With an automation rate of 9% the overall company performs significantly below the industry median. Another reason for Paul to stop thinking in silos and reach out to the finance colleagues for a collaborative approach to work on the automation rate:

Value Accelerators for Analysis and Mining – External benchmark of “Financial documents created”

To go even deeper into the current analysis, Paul remembers an already held introduction workshop around Value Accelerators for SAP S/4HANA Transformation (plug and gain approach). This approach combines the capabilities of SAP Signavio Process Transformation Suite (especially SAP Signavio Process Insights and SAP Signavio Process Intelligence) with the Value Accelerators for Analysis and Mining and for Architecture and Process Design. Paul thinks back about the workshop:

Value Accelerators for SAP S/4HANA Transformation (plug and gain approach)

The plug and gain approach helps to understand the inner working of a company. A first analysis can be performed using the “Process Discovery” widget to investigate how many events and execution paths are performed. Additionally, it is possible to switch to the “Cycle Time” metric to see which execution paths take more time during the execution. The process execution path analysis enables a better understanding of how the process is executed. The process paths on top of the reference process model stresses the primary process flows. In addition, the Best-Run Scores for the different execution steps are shown below – To be used to prioritize the process improvements.

When aiming to transform and improve processes, it can help to understand exactly what transaction codes are currently in use for certain processes and process steps. This can be important as part of an SAP S/4HANA transformation – Furthermore with the possibility to know to what extent standard transactions and for which process steps custom transactions are in use. This information is useful if it is intended to reduce the use of custom transactions. It’s especially important if the goal is to start a transformation journey towards SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition, where such custom transactions aren’t supported. This as-is, process improvement, harmonization potential and custom code analysis helps to prepare the upcoming definition of the transformation projects scope.

Leaving the memories of his first plug and gain workshop behind Paul thinks that this is for sure useful, but for now he wants to leverage what is already available today in his workspace. Since the data has proven his first assumptions when talking to stakeholders and looking into the BPMN diagram, Paul is wondering what to do next. He thinks back to the report he received and remembers that next to the “Performance Indicators” tile the tool was mentioning “Correction and Innovation Recommendations”. Jumping back to the tool he figures out that based on the insights, the tool gives intelligent recommendations to work against current blockers. When investigating SAP S/4HANA Capabilities the tool for example mentions “Invoice Processing” capabilities which can be helpful for a next step. Additionally, when browsing through “Intelligent Technologies”, he spots an AI scenario called “Supplier invoice extraction from email and upload” – When thinking back to the BPMN diagram and the current manual step of downloading thousands of invoices when received via email, this sounds like the perfect fit:

Value Accelerators for Analysis and Mining – Innovation Recommendations

Exploring more capabilities Paul lands in the “Transformation Planning” section, which links process flows to best practice solution processes. For his investigated process flow the tool recommends an SAP best practice solution process flow with regards to “Accounts Payable”. Maybe Paul should show this his finance colleagues, since he personally is more concerned about the supplier invoice processing, than the payables part. But nevertheless, these insights now lead Paul to be point of thinking about a possible target architecture and identify relevant SAP solution components and other solutions and start defining the roadmap:

Value Accelerators for Analysis and Mining – Transformation Planning

Right in this moment Paul hits an enlightenment. Paul recognized the true power of the content and why they call it Value Accelerators. This seems to be more than just a recommendation – Because when clicking on one of the “Transformation Planning” links, he gets redirected to the SAP Signavio Process Explorer, and since he just downloaded the content into his own workspace some days ago, the recommended content is available at his fingertip. Therefore, Paul and his colleagues are not just given recommendations to use something, the to-be-used-best practice is directly available in their very system. Jumping back to the content import, investigating the Business Capability Map for “Sourcing and Procurement” (he copied and used in his workshops in the first place) he spotted other views of the content which represents the solution architecture, therefore leading to solution capabilities which are having references to SAP S/4HANA Best Practices:

Value Accelerators for Process Design – Best Practices for “Supplier Invoice Processing”

Sidenote: This insight path is not only reachable via “Capabilities”, but additionally via the “SAP Product Portfolio” entry of SAP Signavio Process Explorer. It represents an SAP S/4HANA solution capability model and all the corresponding best practices, inclusive set up instructions, task tutorials by SAP Enable Now, test script, information around transaction codes, Fiori apps and much more.

With the recommended content in the workspace Paul now also can leverage the compare functionality of SAP Signavio Process Manager to investigate the BPMN diagram to compare it to the best practice. He sees what the Value Accelerators were telling him – A low automation rate when receiving supplier invoices is a blocking factor in the company’s process, it is recommended to leverage SAP S/4HANA best practice capabilities and AI scenarios. For example, leveraging an “RPA bot Extraction” instead of downloading the invoices manually and using services like “Document Information Extraction” instead of manually filling the invoices:

Comparison of the as is process and the recommended best practice

Paul cannot stop browsing through the content after his first enlightenment. In which he finds another treasure: In SAP Signavio Process Insights he stumbled upon the “Value Analysis” tile, which represent a value report for corresponding performance indicators. He directly spotted the already investigated “Financial documents created” row which estimates a recurring monetary benefit around 165.000€ when the company jumps from a current automation rate of 9% to 49% (which is “just” the industry median). Finally, Paul understands why they called is Value Accelerators:

Value Accelerators for Analysis and Mining – Value Analysis

After just some days Paul went through the phases of Value Accelerators and understand its quintessence. From first indications with business content backed workshops thanks to the import and first analysis and mining insights, to the part in which – based on the data – next steps are recommended, to the point that the recommendations and possible improvements are valued and finally accelerated through their availability in the SAP Signavio workspace. With the help of SAP Signavio Value Accelerators Paul feels comfortable to tackle the next steps of his company’s transformation. And after all this input it’s hard for him to imagine how much more value add the plug and gain approach will bring the company’s overall transformation.

Important to mention is that this S/4HANA transformation journey doesn’t end here. Paul and the other transformation leaders need to evaluate standards, tools & methodologies to successfully take the next transformation steps. They need to define a governance process, a setup from an organizational perspective, define a holistic transformation toolchain (from Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM) over Business Process Management (BPM) to Application Lifecycle Management (ALM)) and need to think about a user enablement concept. In this regard it is recommended to leverage the SAP Signavio for SAP S/4HANA transformation methodology, which combines SAP Signavio capabilities with SAP’s proven Activate methodology.

For the end let’s head back to our sailing analogy.

Benefits of Sailing with Instructions

As we are about to finish our voyage through the sea of business transformation, you find yourselves entering calmer waters where the benefits of SAP Signavio Value Accelerators become evident. These benefits can be likened to the favorable winds that fill your sails and propel your business ship forward, ensuring you reach your destination swiftly and with great success.

Guided by Clear Pathways: Just as a skilled navigator relies on charts and maps to guide their ship through uncharted waters, SAP Signavio Value Accelerators provide guidelines to businesses. They allow organizations to steer their business transformation journey without starting from scratch. By aligning different stakeholders on shared goals and priorities, these accelerators act as the instruction to ensure that everyone is on the same course.

Smooth Sailing with Proven Solutions: Leveraging the wisdom of those who have come before us, SAP Signavio Value Accelerators serve as beacons of proven solutions and best practices. They help us reduce the risk of errors and setbacks, much like well-charted routes that have been successfully navigated by countless others.

Swift Onboarding and Adaptation: Business transformation can be like a complex voyage, but with SAP Signavio Value Accelerators, it’s as if you have pre-built content that streamlines the onboarding process. This content not only reduces the efforts required by your crew but can also be customized to meet your specific requirements.

A Charted Course to Continuous Improvement: Just as a captain continually monitors the ship’s progress and adjusts course as needed, SAP Signavio Value Accelerators help organizations establish a continuous improvement loop. By monitoring results over time and reacting fast, when necessary, businesses can ensure that they stay on track and make the right course corrections.

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In the world of business transformation, navigating the turbulent waters and reaching your destination can be challenging. However, with the guidance of SAP Signavio Value Accelerators, think of us as your seasoned sailing instructors, we provide the expertise to steer your organization confidently through uncharted territory, ensuring alignment, reducing errors, speeding up onboarding, and promoting continuous improvement. Let us help you sail smoothly towards your transformation goals, making the journey not only manageable but also enjoyable.