This is the second part of a Blog Series, where 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

After we did setup the Communication Arrangement in S/4HANA Cloud (Public Edition) to be able to consume our oData Endpoint for “Material Documents – Read, Create”, we can now continue with the SAP Signavio Process Intelligence side of the house.

Setup oData Connector in SAP Signavio Process Intelligence

As a first step, we can add the connection in Signavio Process Intelligence. We open the “Connections” section of Signavio Process Intelligence. There, we click on “Create” to setup a new connection.

We want to consume an oData service, therefore we switch to “Others” tab, use the connector for “Open Data Protocol” and enter a name for the connection.

Create New Connection – oData Protocol

When we look closer at the “Material Documents – Read, Create” (Link)  documentation, we see under “Authentication”, that BASIC authentication is supported and we did setup user and password in the first part of the blog. So, we choose BASIC as well for the connection in SAP Signavio Process Intelligence.

Create New Connection – Authentication Method

In the next screen, we enter the credentials from S/4HANA Cloud (Public Edition) Communication User (Username / Password – which we created in the first part of the Blog Series) and add the Service Root point for the oData Service. Important: even if we picked already BASIC as authentication, we need to pass on AuthSchema=BASIC in the request URL as additional parameter.

Create New Connection – Parameters

After we SAVE, the system is checking, if the connection is working and if this is the case, a “Valid” symbol with a green light is added to the screen next to the title of the connection.

Create New Connection – Validity Indicator

With that, we have concluded the first step on the SAP Signavio Process Intelligence side – establishing in general the connection to the oData Service.

Create “Source Data” in SAP Signavio Process Intelligence

After establishing the connection between S/4HANA Cloud (Public) Tenant and SAP Signavio Process Insights in general, we now can investigate the data part of the connection. We need to define the Source Data – again we choose “Create” and switch to the “Other” tab to pick “Open Data Protocol”. Don’t forget to enter a respective “Source Data Name”.

Create Source Data – oData Protocol

After choosing the protocol / type of Source Data, we need to pick a connection – we choose the Connection we just created in the last step.

Create Source Data – Pick Connection

With that, we basically did connect to our S/4HANA Cloud (Public Edition) tenant and are now able to add tables we want to extract. So let’s click on “Add table.”

Create Source Data – Add table

Now you can select from the respective segments which are provided via the oData Service. In our example, we start with the A_MaterialDocumentHeader section – as we would like to extract on the one hand side “Header” data from the Material Document and later on extend this with “Item” data.

Create Source Data – Select Table

In a next step, we can define the scope of Columns or parameters which we want to extract. It might be useful to restrict the available columns to only the relevant parts which we need for our investigation – to reduce data footprint and traffic and to make the data easier to consume.

Create Source Data – Select Columns

Finally, we need to pick the keys out of the extracted columns.

We did add now the first table, A_MaterialDocumentHeader. We repeat the same for A_MaterialDocumentItem, as we want to leverage as well Item data for our analysis. After we finished this, we can start the extraction of the data. Under “Logs” tab, we can see the status as well as the logs after completion.

Create Source Data – Extraction

One final note: in case you want to restrict the data load not only from the scope in terms of tables / columns, but also from the actual rows or data records you want to extract, you can configure this as well in the “Source Data” section. After you added the tables, you can click on the three dots and “Configure” the extraction of this table. There, you find options to partition the data load (to split the extraction into smaller chunks) as well as the SQL filter section, where you can add respective “WHERE” statements to limit the data. (In below example, we only want to consider “Goods Receipts”, which are identified via Goods Movement Code ’01’, from 2020 onwards.)

Create Source Data – SQL Filter

This concludes the second step of our scenario. In the last blog, we will look into setting up the Process Data Model in SAP Signavio Process Intelligence – stay tuned.

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