Bussiness Process Validation

What are the differences between Valire's Validator and BAM (Business Activity Monitoring) applications?

Answer:

• Valire's Validator software solution tracks specific business transactions in order to validate they ended properly as planned. BAM solutions, do not track business transactions, but rather focuses on key performance indicators measurement and monitoring. Its main purpose is to improve the organization performance.

• Although Valire's software is able to monitor stable ERP processes, its uniqueness pop up when the processes are not stable, while BAM suites stabilized processes only.

What are the differences between Valire and automated testing solutions?

Answer:

• Automated testing solutions can be programmed to run a batch of pre-configured business scenarios through the ERP application, knowing in advance how it should end, and validate that the correct system output was created. This model best fits regression testing done during the normal course of the ERP maintenance where new versions are created constantly, and the QA department needs a tool that will improve its productivity and decrease its dependency on QA labor. This solution can be used in the lab only, and is not suitable for production environment.
• Valire on the other hand, is a true validation system that validates each of the business outcomes regardless the input and without knowing in advance the information that is processed through the system. Valire can therefore serve throughout the life cycle of the ERP and especially during the go-live production period.

• Valire and this test automation solutions can be used as complementary tools in the QA lab environment, where the QA automation tool will be used to process testing scenarios through the system automatically (replace the QA labor), and Valire’s Validator will be used to validate that each of the scenarios ended with the correct business outcomes.

What is the difference between Valire's Validator and code analysis application?

Answer:

• Code analysis application is used when you need to predict which business processes will be affected by a code change done in the ERP customization. This tool serves ERP implementers and unlike valire's Validator, it does not detect failures in specific business transactions or in any data at all.

Why is Valire’s solution better than developing and using off line reports?

Answer:

• Some offline reporting solutions like SAP BW are suitable for business users tracking key business indicators. In this case managers usually track few reports that aggregate large mass of data to reflect overall business effectiveness and trends.

• Valire's Business Process Validation rules are designed to identify errors online during the process, and alert on it to business users in order to prevent business damage. Its strength is in doing it efficiently and in a scalable way.

• The cost of developing and maintaining offline reports is by far more expensive than monitoring the business process with Valire's solution. Each business rule in the Validator, equivalent to a separate off line report, is normally done with a very minimal development effort of around 1-2 hours.

• Offline reports significantly load the ERP system when processed; this is the reason why they normally run during nights or slow business time. The Validator does not load the system, and it can run in parallel with the business operation.

Why do I need an external control system versus developing internal control functionality or “plug holes” where ever needed?

Answer:

• The “plug holes” and/or internal control functionality serves local specific need, and it’s not practical to use it since there are endless number of potential “holes” in the deployment.

• You need to have a global control system that overlooks your application business behavior to detect all types of failures. Once realizing the cause of the problem, the enterprise might choose to prevent it from happening again by developing the internal “plug hole”. In a sense it complements an external control system.

• Cost of development is higher than doing it internally.

• Since the internal control or “plug hole” is part of the system code, it is intrusive in its nature, so there is a risk that if a change was applied to the business process without thinking of changing the internal controls, a real damage would be introduced to the system.

• Many times you might want to know that a failure event has happened (even if it was blocked by the system internally).

Is the amount of work needed to setup the business logic into the Validator similar to the setup time investment done in the SAP system?

Answer:

• No! Field experience shows that the business logic setup time investment done in the Validator is around 0.5-1% of the setup time done on the SAP system. The main reason for this difference is that with SAP business logic requirements are implemented into the system while in the case of the Validator the business logic is written using a validation language into the application for the purpose of process monitoring.

• With SAP you must implement the whole business logic, while with the Validator you can decide which business process you want to monitor.

Does the Validator load the SAP application when fetching and processing the business data?

Answer:

• The Validator fetches the business document from the SAP data base into its own embedded data base. The load of this read only task is insignificant.

• The processing of the business documents for validation is done on Valire’s separate server and therefore has no affect on the SAP application

Can the Validator predict if a business document will contain an error before the document is generated?

Answer:

• The Validator has no prediction capabilities. It is able to online validates that the business documents contain no errors immediately after it was created in the SAP data base

Does the Validator modify the SAP data base while fetching the business data?

Answer:

• The Validator is a passive system that only reads information from the SAP data base. No data modification is done by the Validator!

Can the Validator detect flaws that happened in the past and were missed?

Answer:

• Absolutely Yes. You can setup a new validation rule into the Validator and run it on historical business data to find out if any of this process error type actually happened. As a matter of fact, Valire uses this capability to run process audits service for enterprises.

End FAQ