Someone must react immediately!

Wednesday, February 27, 2008

The concept of delivering highly important critical information has always been a key part in any project.
Alert Management helps prevent delays in the processing of critical situations, because the time between discovering and responding to such situations is reduced considerably.

Just like 6Sigma has the DMAIC and the DMADV rules I would like to define it by calling it DDA rule.



















DDA rule: Define-Detect-Analyze


Define: Alerts are defined in the alert category using transaction ALRTCATDEF.


Detect: Alerts are detected by defining the the key metrics which affect the daily business. Business Objects in the Business object repository have events which can be defined in the Alert Category and notified to the users via the Portal, Email or even SMS. For example, Purchase Order which is a business object when specified in the alert category with the event “cancelled” is notified immediately in the Portal, email or SMS.


Analyze: The optional subsequent activities in the Alert Categories provide innovative means of solving critical Issues in the system. A URL which contains the roadmap for the solution can be linked to solve the Alert displayed on the Portal. The Portal Solution has an option of displaying a link to the Business Object which directly takes you to the respective transaction n SAP to solve the issue. Other Innovative solutions can be used, for example providing the amazon.com link as a solution when the books in the inventory fall below a specified threshold.
Critical scenarios:
> Insufficient system resources, system administration (mySAP Technology, CCMS)
> Delivery problems for an important order (mySAP SCM)
> Drastic decline in revenue (mySAP BI)
> An important customer terminating a contract. (mySAP CRM)
> An unplanned stoppage in production occurs, such as may be caused by machine damage or there being an insufficient number of employees (production alert)
> The free capacity on your SAP system's database is running low (technical alert).
> Incoming purchase orders, out of stock situations, and ASN past due.
These detective Controls will trigger an alert notification which will be displayed in the Portal and also via e-mail, fax, or even SMS. The key importance is the fact that Business users need not log into their systems every time to inspect for errors.

The Alerts from an Alert Management System can be received by the following ways:
In the Universal Work List (UWL of the Enterprise Portal) as of SAP Netweaver ’04
In an application that accesses the alerts using an API
In your email inbox
In the Alert Inbox. The Alert Inbox is an application based on Business Server Pages (BSP),
which can be called using the transaction ALRTINBOX or the corresponding URL
(http ://:/sap/bc/bsp/sap/alertinbox)

However there are concerns most business users raise and that involves crowding of emails and unable to track the alerts that are received in their inbox. Several times employees leave the firm and some important past alerts are passed away in your exchange server. I’ve heard some folks telling me that the perfect way to organize or store all the alerts is to involve the UWL as this is stored in the Portal and one way or the other they can always be retrieved.

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