Jim SinurThe road to BPM is now usable with the SAP offerering, but get ready for some steerage. Like anything in this world there is “good news” and “bad news”. On balance, I would say that there is more good news than bad for current SAP customers. Until recently SAP was struggling to convince folks that they had a solid Business Process and Business Rules story, but I think things have turned in a pretty good direction.
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Current SAP Customers will be pleased that SAP has provided a reasonable BPM offering that is able to leverage existing SAP assets. This will allow customers extend SAPs best practices to site specific best practices. Most SAP customers have had to add functionality without the assist of SAP BPM/BRM, which made the management and connection of this functionality was left to every customer. SAP has now provided a good enough BPM, BRM and a composition environment that will make things easier for their customers. With that, the BPM facility still has some rough edges and is not consumable by business professionals. While the process models are easy to read, an eclipse environment is not conducive to user development. The BAM facility is not seamless and is more report like than real time and animated. On the other hand the process model supports event recognition in addition to state management. The business rules are graphic in nature and support multiple rule representations.
For those considering SAP for BPM/BRM without employing SAP application assets, the story is quite different currently. The technology is far from sophisticated today and business types will not find a usable development, work place environment and process visibility set of features. It is a programmer environment mostly today with some exceptions. There is a glimmer of hope in the way architecture has been designed. The process engine can support unstructured processes and has a significant service repository available to the developer. The BRM has the ability to group rules by self defined groups, but not fully tapped yet. Over time SAP will make the BPM/BRM environments easier to use and more powerful.
Good news; bad news
SAPs BPM/BRM is good enough to make progress for most SAP clients, but I would not recommend the features for others at this time. Time will tell.
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Category: BPM Business Process Improvement Business Rules Tags: BPM, Business Rules
