value driven bpm and operational

BPMS Watch Industry Trend Reports Independent Expertise in BPM September 2012

2012 Bruce Silver Associates BPMS Watch: www.brsilver.com 500 Bear Valley Road, Aptos CA 95003 USA Contact: Bruce Silver, Principal [email protected] +1 831 685-8803

VALUE-DRIVEN BPM AND OPERATIONAL PROCESS INTELLIGENCE WITH SAP

Advanced Capabilities from a Surprising Source SAP, well-known as a leader in the enterprise applications space, is often overlooked as a

supplier of BPM technology, but the company has been quietly moving forward with BPM on a

broad front, and in fact has a great story to tell. Their goal is to be the preferred BPM technology

supplier for SAP customers, not just for application integration and workflow software but for

BPM in the large, including business and solution modeling, end-to-end performance visibility,

and BPM methodology. When you consider that the customer list for the SAP Business Suite

includes a substantial fraction of the worlds largest companies (and a growing number of midsize companies as well), that is an ambitious objective.

This report describes the scope and recent progress in that effort, and details the specific products

that will roll out this year. Together these offerings comprise a single product family spanning

the range from process automation to tools and methods for value-driven BPM. SAP is actually leapfrogging its BPMS competitors by linking business-driven models of capabilities,

strategies, and goals at the enterprise level directly with end-to-end solution modeling, executable

implementation, and runtime process visibility. And while BPMS vendors like to talk about

orchestrating reusable business services, the reality is that most enterprise applications installed

today dont fit that nice SOA model. SAPs BPM program addresses that reality by unifying process modeling, orchestration, and performance monitoring across heterogeneous IT

infrastructure, including the SAP Business Suite, new SOA-style services, and custom/legacy

software.

A key enabler of that unification is BPMN as the lingua franca of BPM. SAP uses BPMN

pervasively throughout its BPM offering in tools for both business and IT, ranging from cloud-

based collaborative process modeling to Business Suite solution modeling, workflow automation,

integration on the ESB, and end-to-end process visibility. These tools include:

Gravity, a collaborative cloud-based process modeling tool for business users, hosted on SAP StreamWork

Business Process Blueprinting, a capability of SAP Solution Manager for defining the process logic embedded in the Business Suite, exposing its steps for integration and

custom extension.

SAP NetWeaver Process Orchestration, the unified process automation platform combining SAP NetWeaver BPM, SAP NetWeaver BRM (Business Rules Management),

and SAP NetWeaver Process Integration (ESB).

SAP Operational Process Intelligence, built on SAP HANA, with unified views of process steps, regardless of implementation, providing operational process insight to line-

of-business users.

A major focus of the effort is operational intelligence, making runtime process performance

visible in real time across heterogeneous activity implementation infrastructure and delivering it

Value-Driven BPM and Operational Process Intelligence with SAP

2012 Bruce Silver Associates 2

to a variety of devices, including mobile. Process visibility is more than business activity

monitoring (BAM). It requires what IDC calls a business navigation system, a dashboard of

information about not only the current state of the process but the destination and the best route to

get there. In the end-to-end process environment of SAP customers, this means insight into

multistep transactions across system domains: What is the current state? What is the lead time?

These end-to-end processes involve systems, like ERP and CRM, that are not under the control of

a BPMS or even based on an explicit process model. Managing them effectively requires

visibility into the enterprise integration bus and possibly even to trading partners in the extended

enterprise. Operational intelligence means collecting business events from all these sources,

correlating them with each other and contextualizing them in an end-to-end process definition,

aggregating them in performance metrics, and performing analytics. All of these elements are

part of SAPs offering and roadmap.

Another key theme is value-driven BPM, with tools and methods that link business modeling and

analysis with solution modeling and ultimately implementation in IT systems. Value-based

means making smart decisions about which pieces of the business to invest in, which processes

will create the most value with extensions. It is about identifying the best opportunities for BPM

within the enterprise without imposing a predetermined implementation architecture. SAP

understands that enterprise applications and legacy systems need to be brought inside the BPM

tent without requiring them to be reimplemented as SOA components.

SAP is introducing a broader definition of BPM, based on identifying opportunities and modeling

different ways to achieve them. A key element in the strategy is solution modeling using

Business Process Blueprinting. This creates an end-to-end process description encompassing

activities both within and outside the scope of a BPMS and a blueprint pinpointing the specific

steps that require changes in implementation. It is an essential planning tool linking business and

IT. A second important element, on the roadmap for now, involves tools for business that support

analysis of core capabilities, the business services that support them, and the processes those

services require. These business modeling tools are still in the labs, but play an important role in

SAPs value-driven BPM strategy.

Collaborative Process Modeler in the Cloud SAP provides a browser-based collaborative BPMN modeler embedded in SAP StreamWork.

StreamWork is a team collaboration environment hosted on the SAP Cloud and SAPs Java-platform-as-a-service, SAP NetWeaver Cloud. The BPMN tool, now generally available, is often

referred to as Gravity, after the project under which it was originally developed. It runs in a web

browser with no installation necessary, so corporate users and external users, such as system

integrators or partners, can collaborate on process modeling in real time. The tool is aimed at

business users involved in aspects of process modeling ranging from specifying the steps to reach

a decision to creating business views of an automated process.

Because it provides an instantly available platform for process diagramming and collaborative

discussion, Gravity has become an important element in SAPs BPMN Everywhere strategy. The tool guides creation of correct BPMN syntax, so special training is not required. Gravitys BPMN palette is extensive, supporting the most commonly used BPMN 2.0 shapes and symbols.

SAP recognizes that end-to-end business processes typically involve interactions between

multiple BPMN processes, so unlike some competing tools Gravity supports pools and message flows. The tools shared team workspace allows multiple users to simultaneously edit and comment on the same process model. Participation markers indicate each participant and

their contributions to the process model.



Gravity provides a direct path from business requirements to implementation design with zero-

footprint business-friendly tooling. But it goes one step further, engaging business users who are

not BPM specialists with features like graphically tracing the steps of their own one-off

processes. Business analysts can similarly step through a process following different routes to

capture feedback from stakeholders directly in SAP StreamWork. In this way, even business

users reluctant to engage in a process-orientated way of thinking are automatically immersed in

process management and become familiar with graphical process models. The tool thus not only

caters to a broad business need, but also provides a ready interchange with the SAP NetWeaver

Process Composer for executable process design.

Figure 1. Gravity provides collaborative BPMN modeling within the SAP Streamwork environment

(Source: SAP)

Process Orchestration BPM today blurs the line between human-centric and integration-centric processes. Business

processes today require both interactive human workflow and fast, reliable application

integration. SAP NetWeaver Process Orchestration provides both within a unified BPMN-based

product family.

Figure 2. Process Orchestration provides a unified architecture for BPM and Process Integration

(Source: SAP)



Process Integration Runtime AEX

Prior to 2011, SAP NetWeaver BPM and SAP NetWeaver Process Integration were separate

products, based on separate infrastructure. Process Orchestration now combines them on a

common Java EE server and infrastructure services, including scalability, clustering, and

monitoring, and a common Eclipse-based tooling platform in SAP NetWeaver Developer Studio.

These platforms are not new for SAP NetWeaver BPM, but represent a change for SAP

NetWeaver Process Integration. In Process Orchestration 7.31, the Process Integration runtime,

called Advanced Adapter Engine Extended (AEX), runs together with SAP NetWeaver BPM and

SAP NetWeaver Rules Management on a single system ID and a single JVM. In addition,

Process Orchestration provides fast, reliable connectivity between the BPM engine and AEX

based on SAPs proven SOAP-based Java Proxy Runtime, a reliable messaging protocol without the overhead of WS-RM.

AEX provides routing, transformation, reliable messaging, and a long list of adapters. What

distinguishes it from its counterpart in other BPM platforms is that AEX, like BPM, is BPMN-

based. This provides not only better visualization of integration flows at design-time but a

common language for analyzing and monitoring every level of an end-to-end business process.

AEX mappings in Java and XSLT can be called directly from BPM.

Separating Integration and Process Design

Process designers should not need to understand the interface details of specific systems and

applications. They should be able to model processes in BPM more abstractly and let an

integration expert add the system-specific integration details. Process Orchestration offers that,

and further divides those integration details into a stateful integration-centric process that runs in

the BPM environment and one or more stateless integration flows that run in AEX, SAPs integration bus. Here stateful refers to a long-running process that, for example, sends one or

more request messages and waits for the responses, and stateless refers to a short-running flow

that sends a message and handles message transformation and routing, but does not wait for a

reply.

The linkage between BPM and AEX basically works like this: From BPM, each service task,

send task, or throwing message event in a Process Composer model references a service interface

in the Enterprise Service Repository (ESR) and a corresponding sender component. In the AEX

environment, Process Integration Designer models communication between the process and the

target entity as a BPMN collaboration diagram linking the service interface in the Sender pool (in

this case, the process) to a stateless IFlow pool, and from there to one or more service interfaces

in Receiver pools. The BPMN message flows linking the pools are called channels, configurable

to the specific capabilities of sender and receiver. The integration flow, shown unconfigured in

Figure 3, is also a BPMN process, but is limited to a few configurable templates, each

representing a specific integration pattern. This allows SAP to provide its customers system

sizing a performance guidelines for integration flows.

Figure 3. Integration Flow Modeling in Process Integration Designer (Source: SAP)



Integration Design Methodology

In the integration design methodology, Step 1 is defining the service interfaces. The Enterprise

Service Browser in SAP NetWeaver Developer Studio lists existing datatypes, message types,

and service interfaces in the Enterprise Service Repository (ESR). The tooling provides editors to

define the operations and message types of the service interface and a graphical message-

mapping editor to define interface mappings from and to the fields of the different interfaces

involved (Figure 4). This part works like most BPM/SOA middleware.

Figure 4. Enterprise Service Builder (Source: SAP)

What sets SAP apart from the norm is Step 2, the integration flow created in Process Integration

Designer, describing the sequence of message handling steps between the process and the system

or entity providing the invoked service. Like process models, integration flows are BPMN-based,

but they are constrained to follow specific integration patterns. The developer simply configures

the template to match the target service interface of the respective receiver system. For example,

a Receiver split pattern (Figure 5) allows the sender to select receivers based on some data

condition.

Figure 5. Integration Flows support specific integation patterns (Source: SAP)

Step 3 is modeling the integration-centric process in NetWeaver BPM Process Composer,

including the mappings between process variables and service input and output messages.

Consider, for example, a message start event (Figure 6). Data types imported into Process



Composer from ESR are used to define both the start message and a process variable (BPMN data

object). Using those schemas, the start event output mapping defines the mapping between the

received message and the variable.

Figure 6. Mapping between messages and data is BPMN-based (Source: SAP)

BPMN End-to-End

Using BPMN pervasively through the entire chain and for the end-to-end process as well makes it easier to understand the process logic in detail, and to communicate that logic in a

common visual language across all levels of the organization. In most BPM Suites, application

integration is a technical detail invisible in the process diagram; often it is defined in a completely

separate language. Now, with SAP NetWeaver 7.31, customers may elect to treat it as a separate

BPMN integration-centric process called by the end-to-end process. In that stateful integration

scenario, the end-to-end process model calls the integration-centric process, which in turn calls

the integration flows and processes the responses from other integration flows, returning a result

to the end-to-end process. While this adds to the overall count of BPMN processes, it allows the

end-to-end model to remain independent of all the integration details. This enables better

separation of concerns between the process expert and integration expert, and allows the technical

infrastructure to change without changing the end-to-end process model.

The net result is a unified BPMN-based framework for both modeling and execution of end-to-

end business processes. At runtime, process participants can take advantage of all the capabilities

in place in the SAP BPM environment. For example, tasks are presented through the Universal

Worklist along with other tasks from the SAP Business Suite, and can leverage the same SAP

forms management available to SAP Business Suite applications. On-premise processes can even

be extended with on-demand collaboration.

Collaborative BPM via StreamWork

A task modeled in an SAP NetWeaver BPM process can generate a collaborative decision-

making activity in SAP StreamWork, so that knowledge workers both inside and outside the



organization may collaborate on tasks. SAP NetWeaver BPM uploads notes and attachments to

SAP StreamWork as determined by the task owner, enhancing structured business processes with

collaborative decision-making. While the Enterprise-hosted version of SAP StreamWork

distinguishes between internal and external users, external users do not need to purchase SAP

StreamWork licenses in order to participate, enabling ubiquity of the process without

jeopardizing security or governance.

Figure 7. Streamwork collaboration can be incorporated into NetWeaver BPM (Source: SAP)

Value-Driven BPM

New Tools for Business Modeling

Value-driven BPM means involving the business more directly in implementation planning

decisions, leveraging an integrated stack tools connecting business modeling to IT

implementation. SAPs view of such a stack is shown in Figure 8. The top two layers, labeled business-driven, contain tools that support functional decomposition of the business into

capabilities, business services, and ultimately the processes required to implement those services.

The term process model in this context is used more loosely than in Process Orchestration, since the flow is rarely automated or even precisely defined.

The business-driven layers provide a framework for understanding the overall business

architecture, enabling intelligent decisions on IT investment. In order to fully deliver value-

driven BPM, SAP understands it must provide tools in the business-driven layer and link them to

IT-driven tools for solution modeling, implementation, and operational intelligence. In fact, such

business layer tools are under development in SAPs labs but the company is not yet ready to announce them.



Figure 8. Model stack required for value-driven BPM (Source: SAP)

Business Process Blueprinting

In this report we focus on the middle layer of Figure 8, the solution model, straddling the business

and IT domains. The solution model does not define the technical implementation, but rather the

links between business requirements for IT investment and the specific systems and data

involved. SAPs tool for solution modeling is SAP Solution Manager. This tool, which provides Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) for all SAP applications, is not new. It is used to plan

upgrades and maintenance patches for essentially all SAP Business Suite customers.

Solution Manager provides the essential link between the Business Suite and BPM. Each activity

in a Business Suite app such as ERP, CRM, or SCM represents an isolated transaction. The app

defines no process that defines the required order of these activities. An activity can be called at any time. This is very unlike a BPMN process, in which an activity can only occur when the

specific preceding activity in the process model is complete. In reality, the business does have a

process in mind for Business Suite activities, but that process logic is not explicit or enforced by

the app.

Solution Manager communicates, but does not enforce, the logical order of steps in a Business

Suite process. For any step, Solution Manager knows the SAP transaction involved and its

specific implementation configuration. Solution Manager also describes the logical order of

activities required to fulfill a business requirement for a new or improved business process. In

either case, that logical order depends on the details of the implementation of each activity,

whether an SAP transaction, BPM task, or legacy custom code. This description is what SAP

calls the solution model. The solution model describes the business requirements for an

implementation rather than the technical implementation design.

Solution Manager provides a common language for describing the steps of a business process,

regardless of the underlying implementation of its activities, in a solution model. In doing so it

allows modeling of end-to-end business processes that cut across wide spectrum of technical

components, including Business Suite apps, NetWeaver BPM, and custom code.

Business Process Blueprinting is a new tool that sits on top of SAP Solution Manager to exploit

this common language, depicting these processes in BPMN diagrams. These diagrams support a

methodology that translates end-to-end process scenarios into requirements for solution

implementation. Users can search and adapt process logic from SAP Best Practice content in

Solution Managers Business Process Repository.



Figure 9. Business Process Blueprinting maps Solution Manager business scenarios, processes, and

steps to BPMN (Source: SAP)

A project in Solution Manager contains multiple business scenarios, each containing multiple

business processes composed of steps (Figure 9). Business Process Blueprinting translates these

Solution Manager concepts into BPMN. A business scenario becomes a BPMN collaboration

diagram, representing processes as pools interacting via message flows. Each business process a control flow executed by a single system, either a Business Suite app, NetWeaver BPM process,

or custom app becomes a BPMN process. The process flow is thus exposed for modification by either extending or replacing individual steps, typically by insertion of a new NetWeaver BPM

process.

Figure 10. Procurement scenario with manual order entry, modeled as BPMN collaboration

diagram (Source: SAP)

For example, Figure 10 illustrates a Procurement scenario in which a custom app calls a Business

Suite app in which the Release purchase requisition step is extended by a NetWeaver BPM



process. Each of those technical components is represented as a pool, revealing the steps as

BPMN activities and inter-component interactions as messages.

Figure 11. Enhanced Business Process Blueprinting puts BPMN inside Solution Manager. (Source:

SAP)

Based on flexible REST interfaces, Business Process Blueprinting provides graphical display and

configuration of process logic that spans multiple system architectures (Figure 11). New

Business Process Blueprinting capabilities available in Solution Manager 7.31 include scenario

modeling using BPMN, embedding of BPMN graphics in Solution Manager, maintenance of

interfaces, enhanced documentation, and simpler installation and setup.

SAP Operational Process Intelligence Just as Business Process Blueprinting exposes the flow logic hidden in heterogeneous end-to-end

processes, operational process intelligence demands a mechanism for making performance in

such processes visible at runtime. For that purpose, SAP intends to ship a new product in the

fourth quarter of 2012, powered by their in-memory database, SAP HANA. SAP Operational

Process Intelligence seeks to provide end-to-end process visibility in any kind of software-

supported operational business scenario. The goal is better and faster operational decisions,

driven by real-time insight into the volume, velocity, and variety of structured and unstructured

business data.

Operational Process Intelligence Views

A role-based workspace provides personalized views of process and context data. Business

events generate data that is correlated and contextualized by HANA platform services into the

information model, tables, and calculation views known as the operational data foundation. On

top of this data foundation, SAP provides a number of out-of-the box Process Visibility patterns

for real-time analysis of operational data in a process context. Progress Tracker, for example,

allows process participants to track the progress of their requests at the individual instance level.

They can easily navigate across different status categories (all requests, overdue, at risk, on

track), based on cycle-time and milestone goals (KPIs).



Figure 12. SAP Operational Process Intelligence, Progress Tracker (Source: SAP)

Simple status tracking, however, is not enough. In end-to-end business processes, you would like

to be able to detect conditions or events that will have a negative impact on the business outcome

or customer experience and organize a response to remediate the problem. Within a single BPM

process, Process Analytics or BAM can usually do this, but its not so easy when those conditions or events could occur anywhere across multiple packaged and custom applications within the

enterprise or even in the systems of trading partners.

SAP Operational Process Intelligence provides this through configurable views of an operational

business scenario. It groups observable activities into aggregated views using the notion of a

phase, defined by the start and end activities plus selected measures and indicators. The whole

scenario is composed of a sequence of phases. The Phase View (Figure 13) provides a business

user such as the process operator or department manager with an overview of all instances and

their individual statuses (red, green, yellow) in the phase. In addition, a mouse hover shows the

average processing time of all instances within a phase compared to the target value. Users can

navigate between green, yellow, and red instances using the status bar.

Figure 13. SAP Operational Process Intelligence, Phase View (Source: SAP)

In addition to the Phase View, the Process View (Figure 14) displays instances by status (at risk,

overdue, on track) and lets you further navigate and filter by the phase. As such, the Process



View provides a fast path to investigate all problem instances, with immediate information about

process performance, such as average versus target processing time.

Figure 14. SAP Operational Process Intelligence, Process View (Source: SAP)

The Performance View (Figure 15) gives the process operator or department manager a holistic

overview and insight into critical measures and key performance indicators. It includes a number

of predefined measures and indicators (e. g. cycle time, number of violations), letting business

users observe their operations without custom development. The Performance View provides

continuous analysis for several KPIs that reveal not only how the indicators have changed over

time but their real-time value and expected future evolution.

Figure 15. SAP Operational Process Intelligence, Performance View - Predefined Measures and

Indicators (Source: SAP)



To increase development productivity, SAP Operational Process Intelligence also provides

integrated tooling that lets developers or technical consultants define custom measures and

indicators in a few clicks. In addition to the predefined KPIs, the Performance View visualizes

any custom measures and indicators specific to the business scenario, and allows the process

operator to react immediately to changes in their values.

Figure 16. SAP Operational Process Intelligence, Performance View - Custom Measures and

Indicators (Source: SAP)

The Performance View also provides a detailed analysis of each measure and indicator (Figure

17), showing the actual status, targeted value, breakdown (e. g., by region), along with past and

expected future values.

Figure 17. SAP Operational Process Intelligence, Performance View - Indicator Detailed View

(Source: SAP)



SAP HANA-Based Runtime

The SAP Operational Process Intelligence runtime implements state-of-the-art rule processing

and database technology, leveraging SAPs in-memory database and analytics engine, SAP HANA. Business rules are executed natively inside HANAs CalcEngine to compute the end-to-end process log and observation views, correlating event streams from multiple sources within a

common process context. SAPs Rule Composer allows users to author and manage business rules, data validation and quality rules, and transformation rules. The rules are executed natively

on HANA DB, tremendously improving performance. In addition, the browser-based Rules

Editor allows business users to own and manage their own rules without IT intervention. In future

releases, SAP plans to further extend its SAP Operational Process Intelligence product with

decision support methods to manage analyze automated decisions (business rules), and drive

human event resolution activities via tasks and actions directly on its SAP HANA platform.

Design Tools for Operational Process Intelligence

SAPs Operational Process Intelligence Design Time provides advanced tooling supporting the assembly and discovery of operational business scenarios. Design includes assembly of process

fragments into an observable process model, configuration of observation models, and

specification of correlation rules and process metrics for the analytical runtime. Discovery

includes auto-detection of and connection to SAP NetWeaver Gateway resources, including

NetWeaver BPM, SAP Business Workflow, NetWeaver PI and Business Suite applications.

At a high level, these visibility components provide operational process insight into multi-step

transactions that cross system and domain boundaries. Workspace dashboards not only reveal the

current status of a process but can project metrics such as overall process lead time. Most

important, they support Business Suite applications where no native process model exists,

exposing an integrated view across transactional and orchestrated data and event providers.

Thus operational process insight extends down into the middleware, with detailed visibility into

the integration and business network based on business document exchange in both business-to-

business and application-to-application integration conversations. For example, it can tell you,

Which partners missed the SLA for Shipment Notice? Going forward, SAP Operational Process

Intelligence will provide an important element for operational analytics and optimization, feeding

metrics and evaluation data potentially also into the Business Warehouse and SAP Solution

Manager.

The Bottom Line Core end-to-end business processes the ones that actually run the business are rarely deployed as a consistent set of business services following the SOA paradigm. Instead, they are usually

based on a mix of packaged enterprise apps, legacy custom code, and new SOA-style services,

with no explicit process model to connect them. BPM in the real world has to be able to

automate, monitor, and manage processes that span this messy heterogeneous environment.

SAP acknowledges this reality and embraces it in its BPM platform, providing critical capabilities

missing in conventional BPM Suites. These include, among others:

Business Process Blueprinting, a mapping of end-to-end business scenarios defined in SAP Solution Manger into BPMN, supporting end-to-end implementations spanning the

Business Suite, legacy code, and new NetWeaver BPM processes.

NetWeaver Process Orchestration, a unified runtime for automated workflow and application integration, supported by a common graphical language for modeling and



process monitoring BPMN again and a methodology that separates the concerns of the process designer and integration specialist.

Operational Process Intelligence, based on SAP HANA, that provides a dashboard of KPIs real-time, historical trends, and future projections that cut across the heterogeneous environment.

If your mission-critical processes are built from the ground up on a single service-oriented

architecture, BPM is easy. But in the real world, that is almost never the case, and providing a

consistent modeling, automation, and performance visibility platform that supports BPM

spanning the SAP Business Suite, legacy code, and new designs thats not easy. Most BPMS vendors dont even try to do it.

SAP is doing it today. If you are a Business Suite customer looking for BPM, you should

seriously consider SAP as your BPMS supplier.

Bruce Silver

September 2012

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