Bruce Silver’s latest white paper on SAP NetWeaver BPM explains “SAP’s place in the BPM landscape and describes its new offering in that arena”.  This paper highlights the challenge on how to provide end-to-end business processes that go beyond organizational and geographical boundaries.

SAP is perhaps the world’s leading supplier of process automation technology – over half of the world’s business transactions, involving 12 Million users in 120 countries, touch one of 140,000 SAP systems – but is only now making a full entry into the BPM arena. The applications in SAP’s Business Suite, such as ERP and CRM, already automate the majority of its customers’ core process logic, and in doing so deliver both efficiency and standardization. But BPM is just as much about business-IT alignment, linking strategy to execution and governance to business integration, as it is about process automation. SAP recognizes this, and its approach to BPM must harmonize these new dimensions with its customers’ substantial existing investment in process automation via the SAP Business Suite. In that sense, the company’s BPM strategy differs from that of a pureplay BPM technology vendor or a SOA middleware supplier. SAP offers a set of mutually reinforcing BPM building blocks that leverage existing customer investment while providing a unification roadmap for the future.

Originally code-named “Galaxy,” SAP NetWeaver BPM includes the following main components:

• Process Composer, a BPMN-based modeling and executable design tool, part of the NetWeaver Composition Environment
• Process Server, the JEE-based runtime execution engine. Unlike the orchestration engines of some of SAP’s competitors, SAP’s process server is BPMN-native, so that flow semantics are not lost in translation between modeling and execution. Avoiding the notorious “roundtripping problem” is critical to business-IT alignment.
• Process Desk, the process runtime user environment within the NetWeaver Portal supporting dynamic role-based views.

White paper’s main topics include:

• What is BPM? (linking strategy & execution)
• Standardize, Integrate, Innovate
• Role of the Business Process Expert (BPX)
• Core and Edge Processes
• Understanding the Core Processes
• Extending and Integrating
• Composing Edge Processes
• BPM in the NetWeaver Platform
• A Closer Look at NetWeaver BPM
• Modeling

Click here to download the full white paper

Additional links and resources

• Bruce Silver’s BPMN Article Series