SA Viewer is a ‘lite’ version of Lanner’s WITNESS Simulator product. It only animates the BPMN Process Flow diagrams from System Architect, and more importantly provides important dashboard information about the simulation.
Viewing Parent and child diagrams at the same time
SA Viewer provides you with eight windows to use during the simulation session. You select a window, put it into play, and then choose what to show in that window. In this way you can have multiple diagrams or dashboards open at the same time
To view the child diagram at the same time as the parent diagram, open another window through the Windows command, and then select to fill that window with the child diagram.
1 Select Window, and observe that there are eight windows available – in our example below, windows 1, 5, 6, 7, and 8 are being used by the Reservations diagram.
2 Select window number 5:Reservations so that you have two windows with the Reservations diagram open on the work area.
3 With the second window (number 5) in focus, go to the Select Drawing drop-down menu, and select the child diagram, Check Room for Availability, from the drop-down list. You can use the zoom commands to get a view of the full diagram.
View detailed dashboard results
•Select Window, 3:Detailed Dashboard Results.
Get a statistical report on a symbol
Often there is one symbol doing the main work on a Process Flow diagram. You can run a Statistics report against any symbol on the diagram by selecting it and choosing Reports > Statistics; alternatively, right-click the symbol and choose Statistics.
1 Select the Take Reservation Details process and choose Reports > Statistics.
2 Click the Chart button. You can see how busy this particular process is in the overall flow, the percentage of time that it is free, and so on.
Exploding a symbol
•Select the Take Reservation Details process and choose Reports > Explode.
The explosion statistical report gives you statistics at an instant in time about the symbol chosen. For example, Lower SL = Service Levels that you are aiming for. Time entered is the time that the current token (Reservation) entered the process, in seconds.
Running reports for Six Sigma, Service Levels, and Activity Utilization
SA Viewer provides reports for Six Sigma, Activity Utilization, Queue Sizes, Service Levels, Resource Utilization, Throughput, and Cost Breakdowns. These are all custom reports created for the System Architect user, and they are available from the SA Viewer toolbar, and also by selecting Reports > Reports Using. A customer with full WITNESS can create their own reports in addition to these. (Users cannot create their own reports in SA Viewer.)
1 Select Reports > Report Using to open the User Defined Report Selector dialog. You will see reports listed for Six Sigma, and so on. These are the same reports that can be accessed through the buttons on the toolbar pictured above. Run the Six Sigma report.
Essentially, Six Sigma is a ratio of the number of completed objects within specified goal divided by the total number of objects that are run through the model. Objects that end up in non-significant events are counted; rejected objects are not counted.
2 You can right-click inside the Six Sigma report (and the output from the other reports) and save the report as a jpg, and so on. You are clicking inside the graphing companion that is being used for the report output. If you want the data itself, however, you would be better off with Reports > Statistics, and so on.
Other SA Viewer commands
Other SA Viewer commands are described below.
Reports, By On Shift Time
If you have an activity or a resource that is on a shift, and that resource is only available half the day, toggling this ‘on’ will show that the person is busy 100 percent of the time when he is doing the task. This will get reflected in the reports. If you click so it is not selected, the resource will be shown to be 50 percent busy.
Run, Trace
Run, Trace outputs the step messages (seen in the Interact box – the dialog that is shown when you are in step mode) to a file – specifically a trc file.
Hammer and Wrench
The Hammer and Wrench tools enable you to simulate what happens when a person takes a break. If you select the middle number under a process (which represents the activity itself), and then click Hammer, you have broken the process and the queue will start to build. To fix it, stop the model from running, select the middle number, and then hit it with the wrench. You can see how long it takes to recover, or not.
Run, Time Scaling
Run, Time Scaling goes from green to purple. You should try to run the model as an equal rate to real time. In doing this, you are keeping the clock at an equal rate to real time. If Time Scaling turns purple, the clock is running too slow; if it is green then it is running at the speed it wants to run (that is, 100 times faster than real time). Normally the clock will run based on how much activity it has got – it will run faster if there is nothing going on.
