Introduction to Process Performance Manager

Process Performance Manager (PPM) provides comprehensive analysis functions (Slice & Dice, ad-hoc analyses, reporting, etc.) to monitor and evaluate the performance of business units and business processes from various perspectives (e.g., results view vs. view of processes leading to results). By combining business process data, social interaction patterns, and result data users can create integrated analyses for measure evaluation. These analyses allow comprehensive insight into daily routines and results of a company and thus represent the basis for benchmarking and weak point analyses - e.g., early identification and resolving of bottlenecks or problematic interaction patterns.

Process performance management

Business processes are operational business activities. Effective company management therefore requires active business process controlling (Business Process Intelligence). Process performance management continuously monitors planned goals and warns in time if deviations from the plan occur so that suitable countermeasures can be initiated. This is how companies achieve improved process quality, which directly impacts business performance. The continuous monitoring of actual business processes therefore closes the gap between corporate strategy and its operational implementation.

Process Performance Manager

PPM supports you in analyzing your processes by providing comprehensive online analysis options based on measures and by representing your actual, measured processes. For an efficient process analysis, PPM gathers the necessary data from your operational systems, automatically reconstructs the processes across the whole system, and calculates the measures required for these processes. The individual process instances, i.e., actual processes or transactions (e.g., an order #4711 received by FAX on 17-Sep-2005) are imported from a freely definable source system (such as SAP MM) and represented in an EPC (event-driven process chain). For data extraction from your source systems, PPM provides all required interfaces and extractors.

Process analysis

Process analysis mainly involves specifying process and function measures (cycle times, frequencies, costs, adherence to deadlines and quality guidelines), as well as representing the actual process in an EPC view. The visualization functions have been developed in such a way as to make a process view more informative and easy to read. PPM provides a wide selection of chart types and tables for you to display the results of your analyses clearly and in detail.

Example

The following illustrations show examples of a process analysis of the cross series processes of the Order processing.

The first example shows a trend chart with the process cycle time for the year 2008. It illustrates the development of the process cycle time in the course of the year and how the actual measure behaves in relation to the planned values.

Example: Trend chart of process cycle time

analyse_trendverlauf

The following example shows a process instance in the form of an EPC, which PPM automatically generated based on the measured processes. It illustrates the actual flow of an individual process of the cross series process type in the Order processing process type group.

Example: Display process instance as EPC

analyse_epk_einfuehrung

The following example illustrates the data measured by PPM for the selected process instance. The data of the process instance or the individual process elements, such as functions or events are displayed as attributes.

Example: Process instance attributes

analyse_epk_attribute

Tip

The PPM user interface provides you with all of the functions required to set your analyses and display the results.