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SAP's BPM Starter Kit: a fair start
Friday, May 28, 2010 by Neil Ward-Dutton
As I mentioned in our 2009 report SAP’s BPM play,
“SAP’s BPM play both opens new process improvement territory up for SAP to work on, and also helps SAP protect its position as a supplier in the face of other vendors with BPM technology offerings who threaten to make the value of its applications more opaque to customers.”
SAP was one of the primary beneficiaries of the BPR wave of business improvement that washed over industry in the early 1990s β and indeed this is still the case today. Most organisations that report an active interest in business process improvement today cite “implementation of packaged applications” as the chief route through which they implement process improvements.
Whether BPM specialists like it or not, SAP is a big part of the business process improvement picture, particularly when looked at from a business management perspective. Nevertheless, SAP has struggled to deliver technology and assurances that match industry expectations about the current BPM wave.
A big part of the challenge for SAP has been the variety of tools it had to offer: not only its core applications portfolio but also the relatively recent NetWeaver BPM technology as well as its partnership with IDS Scheer for solution modelling, NetWeaver Process Integration… and more.
Against this backdrop, the announcement of SAP’s new BPM Starter Kit (announced a couple of weeks ago at SAPPHIRE) promised to provide resources to SAP customers to help them figure out how BPM might apply in the context of their SAP investment. In light of the confusion that exists around precisely what BPM is and what itβs good for, the material is arranged around four “use cases”:
- Transform your business (in other words: a business-led, big change approach)
- Set up a continuous process improvement program (business-led, incremental change)
- Build a process-based composite application (technology-led, incremental change)
- Redesign your IT for a process-based SOA (technology-led, big change).
SAP positions the use case material as “enabling customers to understand how business processes can be enriched and extended” – but the truth is that right now the introductory material looks as if it’s been written in a real hurry, and you’re not going to learn very much at all from it. However the material does provide a handy jumping-off point for some in-depth SAP-specific resources as well as outlines of relevant consulting and education services and customer case studies.
SAP clearly has more work to do here, but by publishing this material it’s at least demonstrating that it’s serious about helping customers figure out what BPM means in a SAP context. It’s a fair start.
Posted in BPM