Comments on: SAP NetWeaver BPM

By: Column 2 : Salesforce Releases Force.com Visual Process Manager

Column 2 : Salesforce Releases Force.com Visual Process Manager — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 20:13:46 +0000

[...] to what I said about SAP NetWeaver BPM, this isn’t the best BPMS around – in fact, in the case of Force.com, it’s little more than [...]

By: SAP BPM – a discussion #sapteched09 — JT on EDM

SAP BPM – a discussion #sapteched09 — JT on EDM — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 23:06:47 +0000

[...] has recently announced and previewed 7.2 of their Netweaver BPM product (as discussed by Sandy here). While this release was really focused recently on improving modeling with BPMN there are a [...]

By: Column 2 : NetWeaver update #SAPTechEd09

Column 2 : NetWeaver update #SAPTechEd09 — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 22:01:01 +0000

[...] new things in master data management as well as business process and the models within them; when I reviewed the NetWeaver BPM platform, I talked about the strong process instance data models that they include, which is critical for [...]

By: SAP NetWeaver BPM reviewed — JT on EDM

SAP NetWeaver BPM reviewed — JT on EDM — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 04:22:07 +0000

[...] Kemsley has posted a long and detailed review of SAP Netweaver BPM on her blog. It sounds like they have done some good work integrating the Yasu rules engine. Obviously she has [...]

By: Sandy Kemsley

Sandy Kemsley — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 01:59:56 +0000

Thanks for your comments, Rajan. I definitely agree that the KPI and dashboards are necessary for adoption, although in general I find that simulation is not used as much as you would think in most BPM implementations: it’s one of those things that is really pushed during vendor demos, but many organizations end up never using it in practice.

SAP isn’t the fastest moving vendor in the BPM space, but they do have the advantage of an existing relationship with their clients, which gives them an edge. They will need to catch up in a lot of these areas in order to turn those relationships into real BPM solutions, however.

By: Rajan

Rajan — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 01:55:24 +0000

Comprehensive review. Rules functionality, although tech oriented, is a good add-on. Among the missing capabilities, Simulation & KPI/Dashboard are very critical for customer adoption of NW BPM. Without simulation its hard for the business analyst to know the impact of introducing a new process or changes on the business. KPI/Dashboards provide run-time view of the processes, which can be used to fine tune the processes for better business alignment.
SAP is already late to this game, BPM is fast gaining traction among customers. SAP needs to add missing capabilities quickly and make it more robust, otherwise customers will go for leading vendors BPM solution.

By: Djebar Hammouche

Djebar Hammouche — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 09:23:57 +0000

From my experiences : all system must be designed to change, thinks that a process will be stable is an suicidal approach. Most traditional ERP project forget it and go the failure or to an permanent beta/development phase : “process changes in an ERP are difficult and require many hours from developers”

About UI, and in general User Experience, is very importent for End User :For the end-user, the interface is the system (cf http://97-things.near-time.net/wiki/97-things-every-software-architect-should-know-the-book).
From your review, missing BPMS features are:

* monitoring process and in particular, points of KPI measures cf to an elegant solution, consider INTALIO approach
* modelling :
o another BP modelling paradigm for BP patterns usages eg. human centered process, document process, social networking, composite/multidimensional perspectives
o composition of processes (mashup business processes) which are very useful in context of virtual enterprise. eg SAP processes. this point will be useful in innovation/refactoring initiative in enterprise.
o template processes to implement best practices
* simulation, and in particular testing
* execution: in particular how to deploy bp ?
* User Experience friendly features : Tool for people not for only IT experts.
o Different Perspectives, in particular for business process auditor
o UI task generation eg. Make user friendly the build of UI forms, setup of an event driven architecture (Asynchronous WS call)
o Notifications, event driven process User experience patterns

Meanwhile, the tool was in the good way.

regards
djebar