SAP’s BPM 2008 conference is going on today and tomorrow in Las Vegas. Although I won’t personally be there, I am certainly following what is going on. I just read Sandy Kemsley’s review of her first morning at the SAP BPM 2008 conference. I found a number of interesting take-aways from her blog post.
According to Sandy, Ann Rosenberg from SAP’s Business Transformation Consulting Group claimed that automated activities typically make up less than 20% of activities in a business process. She seemed to mention this in order to distinguish between which processes should be handled inside the SAP core solution vs. those processes which should be handled within NetWeaver. Essentially, the process has to be pretty big, bad, and ugly in order to justify the inevitable cost and complexity of tackling it in NetWeaver. So, if it isn’t a place where serious cost savings can be created through process efficiencies, then SAP seems to be saying that users should try to stay inside the SAP system itself.
We have had a lot of experience with SAP here at ProcessMaker because we get a lot of SAP clients that come to us because they want to add a level of BPM to their existing SAP implementation. I tend to agree that automated activities do make up about 20% of most business processes on average. The other 80% would be more traditional “workflow” or human-centric activities which involve document control flows. However, it seems to me that too big of a differentiation is often made between the “automated” activities and the “manual” activities. A BPMS needs to handle both with ease and grace or it just isn’t doing the job. In my opinion, companies like SAP have greatly over complicated their BPM approach so they eventually get caught telling customers that they should only use NetWeaver to handle some of their BPM needs. Seems to me that their BPM approach is just a little too complicated for about 80% of possible applications, hence they can only try to sell in 20% of the cases.
This has left a nice sweet spot for vendors like ourselves with ProcessMaker. As Sandy notes, “in the context of BPM, the SAP business suite can be exposed as just another set of services to be invoked from BPM (which, of course, any other BPMS vendor who works with SAP customers knows already).”
Sandy is correct. We’ve known about it for a long time. And we consider ourselves among the smaller, more agile, and much less expensive (ProcessMaker is open source) alternatives in the BPM world. ProcessMaker lets companies more easily take advantage of using SAP as “just another set of services” through our Web Services Integration. Our Web Services setup is so easy to use that it is really just as easy to create custom automated interactions with SAP as it is to build custom forms and approvals in ProcessMaker itslef. In other words, we really don’t care whether PM interacts with a 3rd party system or whether it is simply handling its own forms and approvals.
A few months ago, a large telecom company came to us and asked us to help them analyze the possibility of using ProcessMaker for a custom purchase approval process that they wanted to implement. After a number of meetings, we asked them why they didn’t just build the approval process in SAP. They answered that they had in fact analyzed this alternative but concluded that it would require them to purchase additional licenses and hire a trained SAP consultant which would cost them $1,500 per day and about the same amount per additional license.
Hmm…not too difficult to analyze. With ProcessMaker, they could easily learn how to create the workflow and make it interact with SAP. Then they could create it themselves, and they could purchase a PM support plan at 13% the annual cost of the SAP licenses.
The economics here are just too powerful to ignore. Especially in today’s economic climate, we believe that more and more customers will begin to realize that there are powerful ways to extend their SAP investments without having to go through another painful and expensive SAP implementation with a BPMS that just doesn’t do what they need it to do.
