SAP, the omnipotent ERP system with many mysteries. It is often regarded as complex, or a black box, so unfortunately organizations actually use a fraction of the wealth of information they collect to improve their business performance. Let’s take supply chain as an example as its state has direct impact to business. The performance is usually followed through numerical KPI reports giving statistics on lead times, delivery accuracy or stock rotation. But is this enough to ensure the optimal running of such a core process? Wouldn’t it be great to have timely access to information which gives basis to make relevant changes with the wanted impact rather than just guess WHY the reported delivery time has gotten longer.
Getting the WHY from SAP, and even quickly, is just about knowing, which data tables are needed. And then a process mining software that has the built-in capability to acquire the right information directly from SAP and transform it to an end-to-end process visualization. Automated data acquisition is key and our software QPR ProcessAnalyzer delivers just that. When talking to customers, the value of being able to see how their supply chain runs in reality is almost priceless. Yes, they systematically follow performance metrics, have different dashboards but what has been lacking is the visibility to the process itself, the process reality.
As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words, or numbers in this instance. This truly is the case when looking at a process flowchart that is based on facts. Keeping with the supply chain example, from the flowchart, organisations can see immediately at what stage of the process the promised delivery time is compromised or an order is not handled according to guidelines. And it takes just one click to get to the root cause, the WHY. With the right process mining tools, organisations can harness their SAP data to build an understanding of where the issues lay so that they know what needs to be corrected in order to improve the supply chain performance. The time spent on trial and error is removed, saving money, enabling better sales and ultimately delivering better customer experience with a smoothly working process.
When striving to best possible process performance, it’s not enough to rely just on statistics. You need to understand the real underlying problem before you can effectively improve anything. It’s the same with your own performance or condition. If you notice a pain, a problem, you get an expert to tell you what you need to do to fix the issue right away rather than randomly try different things, hoping one would eventually work. Or do you?
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