In this Blog Series, I will guide you through how you can leverage oData Services to load data into SAP Signavio Process Intelligence to investigate your Business Processes. As an example, we use S/4HANA Cloud as a source system and load data via oData Connector from SAP Signavio Process Intelligence.
The steps will be split into several posts (links will be added as soon as all blogs are published):
- Part 1: Pick API Service and create Communication Scenario in SAP S/4HANA Cloud
- Part 2: Setup oData Connector and Source Data in SAP Signavio Process Intelligence
- Part 3: Include Data into the Process Data Model
So let’s start:
Pick API Service
First of all, we need to pick a Business Scenario and look for a respective oData service available with S/4HANA Cloud (Public Edition). We can leverage SAP API Business Hub for that. With Product “SAP S/4HANA Cloud”, we can check under the tab “API” for relevant oData services (Link).
Let’s imagine our Business Scenario is an investigation on “Procure To Receipt” Process, we already have Purchase Order Data extraction but want to add now the “Goods Receipt” for respective Purchase Orders. For that, we can use “Material Documents – Read, Create” (Link: https://api.sap.com/api/API_MATERIAL_DOCUMENT_SRV/overview) to extract the material documents representing a goods receipt for purchase order.
Material Document – Read, Create oData Service
In the “Attributes” Section, we can find the respective Communication Scenario we need to setup – Material Document Integration (SAP_COM_0108) – and the Best Practice Scope Items this oData Service is belonging to Core Inventory Management (BMC). So, to be able to use this, we need to setup SAP_COM_0108 in S/4HANA Cloud (Public Edition) tenant.
Create Communication Arrangement in S/4HANA Cloud
To setup the Communication Scenario, we need respective authorization in S/4HANA Cloud (Public Edition) tenant. For that, we need SAP_BR_ADMINISTRATOR or SAP_BR_CONF_EXPERT_BUS_NET_INT Business Role to be able to access respective apps “Maintain Communication Users”, “Communication Systems” and “Communication Arrangements”.
As a first step, let’s start with the “Communication User”. For simplicity reasons, we use PI_SAP_COM_0108 as User Name and let the system propose us a secure password. With “Save”, the user will be saved and is ready-to-use.
Maintain Communication User
As a second step, we create a Communication System. If we want to establish bi-directional communication between two systems, this is quite important – but in our case it’s only a shell managing the requests later on from SAP Signavio Process Intelligence.
We open the app “Communication Systems” and create a new “Communication System” – as System ID and System Name, we pick again PI_SAP_COM_0108. A Host Name and a Logical System is mandatory, even if we do not need this for Inbound Communication – so we pick general Signavio Cloud Server (Europe).
Create Communication System
For Inbound Communication, we assign the user we just created. Note: for this communication scenario, it is mandatory to also enter an “Outbound Communication”. As this is not used in our case, we can only fill in a placeholder. We save and are only one step away from finishing this.
(Alternatively, you might use the “Inbound Only” option in the Communication Arrangement if you only want to use the Communication Arrangement to consume data)
Create Communication System – Inbound Communication User
As a last step, we now need to create the Communication Arrangement. For this, we use the app “Communication Arrangements” and pick SAP_COM_0108 as Scenario ID. You can choose your own Arrangement name – we stick with SAP_COM_0108.
As Communication System, we assign the system we just created a few minutes back. With that, also the Communication User is assigned automatically.
Create Communication Arrangement
With pressing “Save”, the Communication Arrangement gets activated. Copy the API Service URL – in our example https://[host]-api.s4hana.ondemand.com/sap/opu/odata/sap/API_MATERIAL_DOCUMENT_SRV – as we need this in for the connection in SAP Signavio Process Intelligence.
This concludes the first step of our scenario. In the next blog, we will look into setting up the oData Connection in SAP Signavio Process Intelligence – stay tuned.
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