Business Process Exception Management (BPEM) Interviews Q&A

Business Process Exception Management (BPEM) FAQ

1. What is BPEM? What is the difference between BPEM and EMMA?

Business Process Exception Management is the successor of EMMA in IS-U/CCS 4.72. It enhances the exception management functionality known in EMMA by now supporting also most online transactions within IS-U/CCS. Thus, BPEM enables you to monitor and manage errors that occur in most business processes within IS-U/CCS. The most important enhancement within BPEM in IS-U/CCS 4.72 compared to EMMA in IS-U/CCS 4.71 is the Business Process Analysis (BPA). BPA enables you to capture relevant KPIs regarding the performance of the business processes within IS-U/CCS by providing the necessary content within the 3.52 of the SAP Business Information Warehouse.

2. What is Business Process Analysis? What is its link with BPEM? Is it available for everyone?

Business Process Analysis is part of BPEM. It provides powerful BW content to deliver KPIs measuring the performance of your business processes from meter reading to invoicing as well as clarification case handling. Business Process Analysis measures time elapsed for completing a business process like meter reading entry and what transaction was used (e.g. Front Office Process within the Interaction Center or specialized transaction). It provides time measurements on the processing of clarification cases from first changes until completion. Those measurements can be evaluated by department or single user. In order to use the Business Process Analysis within BW, it has to be activated in BPEM. From that point in time on, the executed business processes within IS-U/CCS will log the relevant information in the application log. Data extractors within BPEM move the data into BW automatically when preparing the jobs and generating the cases. The new content within BW 3.52 provides the necessary information to determine KPIs like number of implausible meter reads, time for changing a move-in etc.

Please be aware that the process analysis is only available to customers using IS-U/CCS 4.72. Reporting on case processing however, is available to any customer using the FI-CA component. This includes the solutions of other industries. If you are not using IS-U/CCS as your industry solution, please contact the responsible SAP Industry Business Unit for your industry.

3. What is a business process area? Who defines it? Can it be customized?How do I know that SAP has defined a business process code for SAP delivered transaction/s that I am interested in?

A business process area groups together the business processes that belong to the same application area. For example, the business process area EMR for Meter reading groups business processes regarding meter reading like "EMR00001 Enter Meter Reading Result as Plausible", "EMR00002 Enter Meter Reading Result as Implausible", "EMR00003 Meter Reading Result" etc.

In the current , only IS-U/CCS has defined the business process areas for the supported business processes. The business process area follows the standard naming e.g.

• EBI:For all supported business processes in the IS-U/CCS billing area.

• ECS:For all supported business processes in IS-U/CCS customer services area etc.

For the SAP defined business processes, the business process area is pre-defined and configured and can not be changed.  Customer can definetheir own business process area for there own custom defined processes.

 For more details please follow the BPEM Cook book and best practices

4. What is a business process code, who defines it? Can it be customized?

A business process code represents a specific business process like in IS-U ""Enter Meter Reading Result as Plausible", "Manual billing". On the one hand, a business process is the smallest measurable unit for the Business Process Analysis. On the other hand, a business process could be divided in a main business process and its sub business process.

For example, when the business process "Create Move-In" is executed with transaction EC50 then the business process "Create Move In" is the main process and the business process "Enter Meter Reading Result as Plausible" is a sub process since it is executed as part of "Create Move In".

Technically, a transaction, report, front-office process, workflow etc. executes one or more business processes which are logged in the system with their respective business process codes.  However, within Business Process Analysis main and sub business processes can be identified separately if needed.

In IS-U/CCS 4. 72 SAP delivers the supported business process areas and codes. There are no restrictions for the business process area in terms of numbers of business process codes and their naming. But as a best practice one should introduce a naming convention for business process codes to distinguish them easily from business process codes of another business process area. SAP has chosen to use the business process area as the first three letters of the name of the business process code.

IS-U/CCS has defined a unique business process code for each process that can be conducted in the system under each business process area.

Each business process code defines a unique business process e.g.

For more details please follow the document with title 'BPEM Cook book and best practices' that is available on the SAP Service Marketplace under the link "SAP for Utilities", "Product Information", "Business Process Exception Management"

 Please check the appendix for pre-defined/configured business process areas and codes for IS-U/CCS business processes.

5. In previous (SAP R/3 4.71) it was easy to analyze a job with the help of transaction code. Now, how can I find out which transaction has given which business process code and falls under which business process area. Also, what is the link between them if there is any?

If you do not know the business process area and code, you can still analyze any transaction that you are interested in by specifying it one of the other available selection criteria. If a business process code has been assigned to more than one transaction, than you can check the table V_EMMA_TCODE. For SAP IS-U/CSS every BPEM supported transaction logs the business process code in the system which is displayed in the main output list. In the current , other industry solutions have not specified business process areas and codes for their business processes. The same business process code can be assigned to several transactions in the system if they are conducting the same business process.

6. What is the difference between the application log displayed via BASIS tool 'SLG1' and application log displayed via BPEM? Why can't I see the same details in SLG1?

SLG1 is a tool provided and supported by the BASIS. BPEM is a tool that has been designed and delivered by the FI-CA industry solution. BPEM relies on the same application log written in the system that are used by SLG1. The main difference is that BEPM shows all the messages for the same business objects together even if the messages are distributed into several different application log intervals. This way user does not have to search for the messages for the same business objects in different application logs. Also, in BPEM you can search particular message/s, business object/s across several executed jobs as well. BPEM shows the executed job results as the statistics of it i.e. total number of business objects processed, objects processed successful, and similarly total number of erroneous objects. Similarly it also separates the messages of processing business objects with messages issued the program and is/are not related with any processed business object. For details please check the cookbook.

7. The application log is part of BASIS but EMMA/BPEM is not available in for any other industry beside the one who run their businesses on FI-CA core. Is there any plan to make it available for everyone as it seems to a very generic tool/application and would be great to have?

BPEM is developed in FI-CA core and currently only available to the industry solutions developed in FI-CA e.g. IS-U/CCS, IS-T, IS-M, FS-CD, etc.

8. I do not have any defined business process area and business process code, can I still use EMMA/BPEM to analyze the application log of my transaction?

Yes, you can still use BPEM to analyze the application log of the executed transaction for which you are interested in by maintaining the proper customizing in IMG.

9. I am getting the message 'No message found for the selected job', what does it mean?

If the executed job some how was unable to log the application log, then BPEM/EMMA can not do anything and returns you the message 'No message found for the selected job'. Also, if the job was aborted in the middle or was canceled after getting executed, then an entry in BPEM/EMMA will exist but the system will not be able to find the application log since it might not have written one.

10. I am receiving the message EMMA-095 'Method XXXXXXXX is not implemented in class', what does this mean? how can I resolve this?

The class method to analyze the application of the business process code of the job you are analyzing is not maintained in the table V_EMMA_BPCODE. If, for the job you are analyzing business process code which is not maintained in the system, then maintain the class method for the transaction of the job to be processed by using the table V_EMMA_TCODE.

If you want to implement your own class method to analyze the job, please use the interface 'IF_EMMA_LOGMSG_PROCESS' to implement it. SAP delivers a default class method 'CL_EMMA_PROC_APPLLOGMSGS_V2' to analyze application log for all types of jobs/business processes/transactions.

11. How can I find the application log of a job? Since there are differenttypes of processing jobs, how do I know which method or function module should I use to retrieve application log in order to analyze my job via BPEM?

SAP delivers 4 standard class methods to retrieve application log from system for analysis of different type of applications. These methods are based on the way the application writes messages in the application logs. These methods are based on the type of transactions processing e.g. dialog transaction, mass activities, etc. In the case if customer creates their own transaction and that writes an application log in the system, they can use the pre-defined SAP standard method or can define their own by using the interface (see Cookbook).

12. I am getting the message EMMA-006, what does it mean? Can I fix the problem or should I contact SAP?

You are trying to change a case that does not have a valid status i.e. either 'NEW' or 'In-process'. The case has already been closed or canceled. Please check the cook book for more details.

13. How can we report on the user's activities on cases?

For example, we would like to report on the mean time a case stays in a user's inbox until it is completed or how often a user forwards a case to another user?

In the 4. 72 BPEM writes change documents whenever a change is made to a case. The change documents are displayed in the case log, just like in the previous of 4.71. However, now the log appears in time descending order as compared to time ascending order in 4.71. This way, the user always sees the latest changes on top of the case change log. In order to report on the user's activities and case performance during case processing, Business Process Analysis as part of BPEM has defined the necessary content in the 3.52 of the SAPBusiness Information Warehouse. The BW reporting on case processing is available for every customer using the FI-CA component.