Supercharge Your SAP Signavio Reporting with Neo4j & KNIME: A Practical Guide

In this video, we explore an innovative approach to enhancing the reporting and analysis capabilities of SAP Signavio using open-source tools Neo4j and KNIME. While SAP Signavio provides robust BPM modeling and transformation features, its built-in reporting options can be limited, particularly when managing large repositories with complex cross-references and custom attributes.

This guide showcases:

  • Overcoming challenges of out-of-the-box reporting in SAP Signavio, including reliance on cumbersome Excel exports.

  • Mining data out of SAP Signavio into a Neo4j graph database for efficient analysis of dictionary items, diagrams, and relationships.

  • Using CypherQL in Neo4j to perform advanced consistency checks and governance tasks.

  • Integrating Neo4j with KNIME for automated data pipelines and seamless export to tools like Power BI for dynamic visualizations.

By combining SAP Signavio with Neo4j and KNIME, you unlock unparalleled flexibility and sophistication in reporting, without additional licensing costs.

This video is ideal for:

  • SAP Signavio users managing large repositories or extended metamodels.

  • BPM professionals seeking advanced reporting and governance solutions.

  • IT and business analysts looking for cost-effective tools to integrate and analyze process data.

  • Data enthusiasts exploring open-source tools for data visualization and process optimization.

BPM Open House Party – Report from the GARAGE

While Russell and Caspar spent time with our guests preparing some meals in ‘Hell’s Kitchen’, we were in the garage playing with heavy tools: ‘how operating models and value flows can be used for effective business steering’ (see following figure for definitions).

It is no light matter to dive deep into verbal exchanges with top managers on strategies for establishing effective business steering based on operating models and value flows. 

Our discussions began with a short introduction of our guests and then went along some guiding questions we had prepared. 

A variety of insights were shared among our growing number of guests in the garage. For example we learned about the difficulties in industries whose competitive advantage lays in product development (R&D, PLM). 
The timespan between resource inputs and outputs is long resulting in a challenge for the top management when deriving strategies for business steering in such a context.
Another guest drew attention to his experience struggling to get buy-in from management to use a Business Process Management (BPM) methodology as the basis for deriving performance metrics for business steering. On this topic many participants shared their approach on linking KPIs to business processes, some more mature organisations even derived KPIs from their enterprise process models.

For us as hosts it was an amazing experience to see the dynamics within the meeting. Over long periods, our guests took turns in leading and facilitating the conversation. So handling the heavy tools wasn’t so hard after all; We could just lean back and listen into this exchange of thoughts. So thank you to all the participants for your engagement and openness.

Also we would like to thank the party host Gülsüm who helped in the background to make this afternoon such a rewarding and exceptional event.

Ike and Markus

Planning as part of Business Flows

On September 20th we have launched our latest Business Flows Release. One of the new features has been the End-to-End Domain of Forecast-to-Plan (F2Pl). The new release raised many registrations for the free trial of Business Flows. But is also raised a lot of questions with regards to Forecast-to-Plan. In response to these questions, I am writing this blog and we have updated the F2Pl domain profile on our website.

The nature of planning is less procedural and sequential as many other business domains. And supply chain planning is very industry, company, business unit and even plant or production line specific. In addition, the planning horizon of a planning task impacts detailed activities. These circumstances also influences the character of our Forecast-to-Plan domain. It emphasizes the necessity of integration, interaction and feedback loops to and from the other domains and planning disciplines.

Reference planning landscape - integration into operational domains

The domain is structured in a reference planning landscape for manufacturing industries, which perfectly ties into the existing Business Flows model as both are build on a SCOR-like foundation.

Five planning disciplines create the heart of our reference landscape and are considered as scenario clusters in the F2Pl domain. These disciplines are: Demand Planning, Distribution Planning, Production Planning, Procurement Planning and Master Planning. The orchestration of these disciplines is key and lies in the responsibility of the Sales and Operations Planning function (S&OP).

The planning disciplines are tightly integrated into the corresponding operational domains. Each domain has a different character which are described in the corresponding domain profiles on our website:

Due to the highly strategic nature of Strategic Network Planning (SNP) we currently do not elaborate on the interconnection with Forecast-to-Plan in more detail. And there are further interfaces that are of interest depending on your specific situation. Just to name some:

The orchestration of planning disciplines and integration into operational domains is covered on level 1 and level 2 of our reference process model. These integration points to SNP, A2R, L2O and P2D are considered in the advisory notes of the Business Flows reference model.

Impact of projects and business transformation

Planning is impacted by projects in a different way than by the operational domains. In addition, the effects depend on the kind of project. On the one hand, there are projects in engineer-to-order environments that need to be considered. On the other hand, there are more strategic projects that influence the supply capacities or demand generation and in effect the planning. Such are projects like construction of new production facilities, re-designing the supply setup during network optimization, M&A or carve-outs, R&D product development, launching a new brand or addressing new markets or sales channels.

In the end, all these kind of projects can be summarized as business transformation. And how do you consider ongoing transformation in planning? The answer to this cannot be provided in a reference model. But we are convinced that Planning needs to constantly adapt itself in order to cope with the changing environment. Exactly herein lies the motivation of our Resilient Planning approach. Besides comprehensive and consistent data, and integration into operational domains, the consideration of ongoing transformation is a key challenge in planning.

For more insights, please:

Keep Calm the End of R/3 is Near! Free Webinar - 10.04.2018, 14:30 CEST

- Russell Gomersall

Or how Business Flows helps you from falling off the digital cliff

SAP's announcement to prolong mainstream maintenance until the end of 2025 will reassure SAP customers, that they receive adequate time to migrate to the new S/4 HANA digital platform. Taking into consideration the pressure on companies to ‘digitalize’, this seems like a fair amount of time. On the other hand, experience of past and current business transformation initiatives left many stakeholders uncertain about if or how to proceed with current deployments of SAP’s Business Suite and when best to change to the new technology. Considering this, 2025 seems nearer than you may think.

This will be the reason why many customers are currently evaluating S/4 HANA and rethinking their business transformation strategy.

During evaluations many questions relate to the major shift in technology such as

  • In memory technology

  • Fiori Apps (UI and mobile applications)

  • Cloud

  • Application architecture and integration

To answer this, SAP and implementation partners such as Steeb offer ‘value maps’ with pre-scoped solutions for various industries.

As a starting point we believe this approach is of great value. Nevertheless, one must consider that simplification as proposed by SAP and the shift to new technologies can result in companies neglecting the requirements of their existing organization and processes.

Taking the magnitude of the strategic shift into consideration, we believe the evaluation needs to go deeper in order to answer questions such as

  • What are the core business drivers we want to excel in and how can SAP’s digital platform help us achieve these targets?

  • How much simplification can the company afford and in which areas do we need to stay ‘complicated’?

  • Which deployment strategies fit to my companies setup?

  • How are organization and people impacted by the new technology?

 We recommend to focus on 3 elements in preparation of your S/4 HANA evaluations:

  1. Scope your core operating models by defining E2E scenarios

  2. Define strategic Business Drivers and map them to the scenarios

  3. Define your enterprise structures and deployment entities (regions/countries/sites) and create sub-scopes of your processes

In Business Flows we offer accelerators for this preparation. 

  • Comprehensive E2E business process reference model for industrial enterprises

  • Business/Value driver library

  • S/4 HANA Capabilities (mapped to Scenarios)

  • S/4 HANA Simplifications (mapped to Scenarios and Processes)

With this prepared, you can engage with business functions (experts) from your organisation and S/4 HANA experts (typically SAP or system integrator) to identify fits and gaps of the S/4 HANA solution, elaborate answers to the above mentioned questions as well as define a high level migration strategy. 

In our webinar we would like to present to you our approach to S/4 HANA evaluations based on Business Flows and show examples on how to define feasible scenarios for your migration and identify the key opportunities and threats.
On the bottom line, we believe in the context of 2025 the End of R/3 is Near but you can Keep Calm if you go about it the right way.