This part of the blog series will focus on the challenges faced with the implementation of the Vendor Master Data governance solution based on SAP MDM, BPM and ECC. In the beginning we faced several technical issues like MDM PI adapter was not functioning properly leading to Syndication failure; later the issue was fixed with a SP update. Below I have listed some of the challenges that we faced during the course of project:
Mail Notifications: Only after we designed a process using BPM, we came to know about the limitations in customizing the notification mails that are send at each process steps. We went ahead with a custom mail notification that fulfilled the requirements of the business users.
KPI Reporting: One of the main reason for going ahead with Netweaver BPM was the out of the box KPI functionality, later we realized that it was very minimal and did not offer what the client wanted so we had to go for a custom development.
Mapping between tasks: It was a pain doing mappings between the different activities since the auto mapping function failed several times and we had to map them manually.
Limited customization options for BPM Tasks: The client wanted to modify the default appearance of the task option but we were unable to do anything on this front as no public APIs were available for BPM.
Blackberry Support: Client wanted that the business users should be able to complete their tasks using their mobile devices, but that cannot be achieved since BPM is not supported on blackberry yet.
Syndication failures: Since the Global Data syndication from MDM to ECC could fail, so we did not have any control to ensure that Global data is preset in ECC before the local data could be posted. To overcome this issue, we had split the data posting part into two tasks wherein the first one was used to post the Global data and the next one for posting local data to make sure that Global data existed in the system before the local data is posted and there are no failures.
Request Archiving: All the process data is lost once the process is completed (In CE 7.1.1) so we have to find a way to preserve the data for every request. We designed a archiving solution wherein we made log archive files for all the request to keep a track on the request details.
Although we faced all these issues with the initial version of Netweaver BPM, most of the limitations are not there in CE 7.2 due to introduction of new features like KPI export functionality to BI, improved automatic context mapping, automatic UI generation from process context and improved administration functions like preserving data for completed processes.
Link to Part 1, Part 2 & Part 3.
Mail Notifications: Only after we designed a process using BPM, we came to know about the limitations in customizing the notification mails that are send at each process steps. We went ahead with a custom mail notification that fulfilled the requirements of the business users.
KPI Reporting: One of the main reason for going ahead with Netweaver BPM was the out of the box KPI functionality, later we realized that it was very minimal and did not offer what the client wanted so we had to go for a custom development.
Mapping between tasks: It was a pain doing mappings between the different activities since the auto mapping function failed several times and we had to map them manually.
Limited customization options for BPM Tasks: The client wanted to modify the default appearance of the task option but we were unable to do anything on this front as no public APIs were available for BPM.
Blackberry Support: Client wanted that the business users should be able to complete their tasks using their mobile devices, but that cannot be achieved since BPM is not supported on blackberry yet.
Syndication failures: Since the Global Data syndication from MDM to ECC could fail, so we did not have any control to ensure that Global data is preset in ECC before the local data could be posted. To overcome this issue, we had split the data posting part into two tasks wherein the first one was used to post the Global data and the next one for posting local data to make sure that Global data existed in the system before the local data is posted and there are no failures.
Request Archiving: All the process data is lost once the process is completed (In CE 7.1.1) so we have to find a way to preserve the data for every request. We designed a archiving solution wherein we made log archive files for all the request to keep a track on the request details.
Although we faced all these issues with the initial version of Netweaver BPM, most of the limitations are not there in CE 7.2 due to introduction of new features like KPI export functionality to BI, improved automatic context mapping, automatic UI generation from process context and improved administration functions like preserving data for completed processes.
Link to Part 1, Part 2 & Part 3.
