SAP BPM is a relatively recent offering from SAP. SAP customers are looking to evaluate SAP BPM in comparison to the mainstream BPM vendors such as Savvion, Lombardi, Pegasystems, Metastorm and others. In this blog, we recommend the usage of SAP centric products such as SAP BPM for customers having major investments in SAP.
SAP runs most of the core business processes across its customers. The SAP Business Suite provides comprehensive transactional support for core business processes such as financials, sales, procurement, manufacturing, operations, HR etc. SAP has built a rock solid business process platform for managing these core processes on the SAP application server to manage processes within the SAP ERP product.
With mergers, acquisitions and extended supply chain, the business processes are spanning multiple systems and business partners. SAP has recognized this industry need; SAP has a clear roadmap towards business process execution and management for extended processes spanning multiple systems, applications, users and partners.
SAP BPM suite is the business process platform for managing these extended processes. However, the SAP BPM product set is a relatively new entrant in the well entrenched BPM market. Hence, customers would tend to evaluate SAP BPM with the mainstream BPM vendors before taking a decision on the BPM adoption.
A few important BPM product evaluation criteria are:
1. Support for long running processes, process versioning, compensating transactions
2. BPM infrastructure related to performance, load balancing and scalability
3. Integration of business rules
4. Security, role based access
5. Reporting capabilities
6. Business activity monitoring
7. Simulation capability
8. Design and Development environment, productivity
9. Operational support, monitoring and management
10. Pricing, vendor stability, installed base, customer references, consultants availability
SAP BPM may not hit the top place today in comparison to the best-of-breed BPM products. However, SAP customers need to look at the holistic view of adopting and standardizing on the SAP platform for all their business and technology needs.
Advantages to standardizing on the SAP BPM platform:
1. Native integration with SAP Business Suite
2. Rapid prototyping capability for integration to SAP suite
3. Reuse of your team’s skills in SAP development using WebDynpro and ABAP
4. Integration with SAP security and consistent role management
5. Familiar SAP Portal look-and-feel to users for SAP BPM interactions
6. Unified monitoring through SAP Solution Manager
7. Pricing in line with your contract for the SAP product bundle
Our recommendation to customers having a SAP-centric strategy is to adopt SAP BPM for business process management. SAP BPM is central to SAP’s strategy on business process management, and the product is getting better with every release. Native integration to SAP products (SAP ECC, SAP SCM, SAP CRM etc.), usage of skills of the SAP development team and faster development would outweigh the adoption of a new BPM product in the long run.
By Welingkar on Sep 5, 2011
Manish, instead of giving misleading titles to your posts, why not be honest and state that you just want to plug SAP NetWeaver BPM, whether your readers are interested or not! We would not waste our time reading such tripe. Comparison, indeed! (If you work for an Indian SI or services vendor, you are pardoned, for your attitude is understandable. Plug whatever helps reduce our bench strength- the customer be damned being the motto of most Indian services companies)
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