On April 16 and 17 the SAP User Group Days were held in Maastricht, The Netherlands. It was a great event. There were more than 2000 Dutch participants.
Angelique de Vries, MD of SAP The Netherlands, started with a key note where she presented Business Process Management as one of the three main topics for companies today. Later in the morning Mr. Lazaridis of SAP AG, explained in detail the SAP BPM Roadmap and the positioning of SAP NetWeaver BPM and ARIS. He stated that companies need ARIS to understand how the organization runs, by modeling end-to-end processes. Both manual and automated processes, supported by SAP and non-SAP. Only a percentage of the customer-specific processes are SOA candidates. The whitespace or ever-changing processes are SOA candidates and will be represented in the SAP Process Composer in order to be executed service-oriented. He summarized that ARIS helps to bring business complexity back to process models, SAP transforms the model to execution. In other words: Business-to-Model with ARIS, Model-to-Execute with SAP NetWeaver BPM.
The attention for BPM in the presentations resulted in a very busy IDS Scheer booth. Lots of questions were about the positioning of ARIS, the SAP Process Composer and the Enterprise Service Repository (ESR). We demonstrated at the booth that in ARIS it is possible to navigate through the SAP ESR and merge the required service information to ARIS. In ARIS the Service Architecture is build up capturing all the relations of the ESR between Process components, Business objects, Interfaces, etc. (watch flash). In ARIS Service Discovery can be done by mapping enterprise services on process steps, supporting by SAP SDN help. After this mapping, fit/gap analysis and Business Blueprint reports can be generated. A lot of enthusiasm was created by this live demo. Reactions are welcome about this hot topic!
