ARIS Solution Scenario: Enabling SOA
The potential of SOA lies not only in its underlying technologies and ability to reduce costs, but also in the way it facilitates a quick and flexible response to new market situations. Enterprise services enable new and innovative business models to be deployed fast, using business processes not previously captured in the SAP system. But this potential cannot be fully leveraged unless enterprise services are synchronized with business workflows, which necessitates identifying the processes that provide or consume services. By means of process-based analysis, ARIS Solution for Process-Driven SAP offers efficient access to SAP’s SOA technology and allows users to set up a company-wide SAP enterprise service repository.
Key Benefits
- Deploy and customize the enterprise services provided by SAP
- Create a company-wide SAP enterprise service repository
- Analyze and derive business services based on business processes
- ARIS for SAP connects the process and SAP worlds
Scenario Overview
Enabling SOA allows process-driven analysis of business and technical services to create a service blueprint and support a roadmap. Existing services can also be incorporated into the process architecture and compared with planned services. The underlying procedure is based on the ARIS Value Engineering (AVE) methodology.
ARIS Value Engineering breaks down Business Process Management into four phases. The AVE method provides work package combinations with defined inputs and results to cover all phases. In the strategy phase, company data is recorded, strategic objectives defined, and processes analyzed with regard to their service suitability. This preliminary analysis provides a valuable basis for the design phase. The defined service designs are then executed in the implementation phase and monitored during the subsequent controlling phase.
Strategy Phase
The first step in service analysis is to capture key company data and information from the enterprise environment, including the services and products to be created and/or identification of business areas. Business areas with high relevance are then described in more detail in terms of their processes and assessed for service suitability. This process and analysis information is used in the strategy phase to establish the service suitability of existing processes.
Design Phase
Development planning activity for new services is carried out in the design phase. Existing services can be imported at the same time. A fit/gap analysis is performed to establish which service requirements can be met by which of the existing services and where new services need to be developed.
The analysis results are applied to the logical design of services. At this stage, logical service descriptions are also assigned to the service blueprints to be implemented.
Implementation Phase
This phase involves implementing the services or service-oriented processes described in the design phase. A roadmap is created, containing a timeline for implementation of missing technical or business requirements. The service interface is also checked during this phase. The majority of these work packages run in non-ARIS tools, e.g., in the SAP system or in development tools. However, all activities remain based on business processes created in the previous strategy and design phases.
Controlling Phase
After going live, the ongoing services are monitored. In addition to technical monitoring, the focus here is on compliance with the service levels defined in the design phase.
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