SAP

Role of Business Intelligence in process improvement

April 29, 2011

Bill Gassman spoke on the role of Business Intelligence – BI – in process improvement. Bill means “big BI” – everything to do with intelligence about your business, the discipline of BI and analytics, not just a “BI” product. The road to intelligent operations he says has “haves” and “have nots” – some have BI [...]

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Operational Intelligence Panel

April 29, 2011

A panel of customers (TXU Energy, Pfizer, NY State Dept Taxation and Finance – one of my favorite Decision Management stories and included in this white paper for instance) discussed how to link processes to performance management with Daryl Plummer  of Gartner and the folks from ebizQ. No attempt to make a coherent story, just [...]

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Decision Management Product News Recap Q1 2011

April 6, 2011

Here is a recap of product news for Q1 2011
Analytics

First Look- Eagle Eye Analytics

Advanced predictive modeling for the Property and Casualty insurance market

First Look – SAS High Performance Computing

Distributed grid environment providing parallel job execution across multiple servers with shared physical storage

First Look – Opera Solutions

Analytics service provider that aims to improve machine intelligence and [...]

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SAP Run Better Tour Keynote

February 23, 2011

Running smarter is the key theme of the BI 4/EIM4 launch (though the online event is apparently not running at all, let alone running smarter). The launch of the two together – Business Intelligence and Enterprise Information Management –is deliberate on SAP’s part. Information is power and being able to discover, integrate, cleanse and use [...]

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An Update – SAP BI and EIM 4.0

February 22, 2011

It’s been a while since a major release of BusinessObjects/SAP BI so 4.0 is a big deal – over a million person hours invested. SAP’s overall focus is to help companies “run smarter” and obviously the work on BI 4.0 has to be part of this overall environment – how do analytics help companies run [...]

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Webinar: Smarter ERP with Decision Management

February 2, 2011

Large companies rely on their Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and other enterprise applications to manufacture, distribute and manage the products their customers need. The behavior of these operational systems is critical to how a company treats, and is perceived by, its customers, its partners and its suppliers. Yet these systems [...]

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Book Review – BRFplus Business Rule Management for ABAP Applications

January 12, 2011

My friend Carsten Ziegler, with Thomas Albrecht, has just released a new book on business rules for SAP customers – BRFplus — Business Rule Management for ABAP Applications. I was delighted to provide a foreword to this book as I think BRFplus is a terrific tool for SAP customers, [...]

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Where to start with business rules

September 26, 2010

I was working on my chapter for the forthcoming SAP BPM book (Applying Real-World BPM in an SAP Environment) and it occurred to me that I rarely write about where to start with business rules. After all, most IT departments like to do a low-risk first application of a new technique. So where to start?
Well [...]

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Job – Machine Learning Expert in Palo Alto

May 18, 2010

Heard about an interesting job at SAP’s Palo Alto location today:
The Global Business Incubator at SAP® is a global organization dedicated to developing innovative businesses targeted at meeting the needs of new market opportunities.  Each of the initiatives is structured like a start-up company, consisting of a small team of individuals responsible for all aspects [...]

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Flexible yet permanent – the power of business rules

May 18, 2010

Syndicated from ebizQ
Sapphire, SAP’s big show, is on this week and I have been following the twitter stream (I was invited but couldn’t make it). Merv Adrian (@merv) had a sequence of posts about some SAP customers (Shell and Unilever) that really struck me:

Shell … “Once you pour electronic concrete, it’s hard to get out.”
Unilever: [...]

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Some thoughts on SAP/Sybase, CEP and decisioning

May 13, 2010

There have been a number of twitter conversations around the recent SAP/Sybase news that make me want to write more than 140 characters in response. These fall into three main categories:

Does the announcement have an impact on those considering decision management strategies
What, exactly, do mobile workers need and does Sybase deliver this for [...]

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Webinar: Business rules and decisions in BPM (SAP)

May 4, 2010

[ May 6, 2010; 6:00 am to 7:00 am. ] I am giving a webinar for SAP on business rules and decisions in BPM. You can register here and the recordings will be available. This is one of a series promoting SAP’s new book on BPM, which I am writing a couple of chapters for. You can also download a white paper I wrote for [...]

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Teradata Customer Warner Bros Home Entertainment

April 28, 2010

Thomas Tileston of Warner Bros Home Entertainment (DVDs, games and digital distribution part of Warner Bros) was next talking about their use of SAS and Teradata. He started with a little history as he has been using SAS for 20 years or so.

In the early days analytical data set preparation was 70% of the work [...]

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Stephen few on the problem with BI

March 22, 2010

Syndicated from BeyeNetwork
In a recent post, Big BI is Stuck: Illustrated by SAP BusinessObjects Explorer, Stephen Few took issue with the claims of SAP BusinessObjects Explorer. I have not spent any time with the product so I am not going to discuss his specific criticisms but I was struck by a [...]

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Update from SAP Co-CEOs

March 15, 2010

Got a quick update today from the new co-CEOs of SAP – Bill McDermott and Jim Hagemann Snabe.
Jim focused on their innovation strategy – making significant steps into on-demand business applications, aiming to support a hybrid approach allowing customers to mix on-demand and on-premise software. In addition they aim to increase support for running the [...]

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New SAP BPM/business rules book coming

March 3, 2010

Syndicated from ebizQ
I am working with some folks at SAP on a new BPM book – Applying Real-World BPM in an SAP Environment. I am working on chapters about the role of decisions in processes (check out this post for some help on this topic) and on the use and management of business [...]

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Accelerating SAP BPM with Business Rules #sapteched09

October 15, 2009

A hands on session at SAP TechEd discussing business rules in the context of SAP Netweaver BPM. The basic pitch was reiterated – business rules embedded in code are hard to maintain, hard to expose to the business users and hard to estimate change costs while rules outside the system are scattered and hard to [...]

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BRFplus – rules and ABAP #sapteched09

October 14, 2009

Carsten Ziegler started off re-iterating the same benefits of business rules that came up when the BPM team discussed rules. He used an insurance policy application and pricing scenario as an illustration. The rules for this scenario are organized into a catalog that contains various rulesets, either if..then rules or a decision table, just like [...]

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SAP BPM – a discussion #sapteched09

October 14, 2009

Sandy Kemsley and I spent an interesting hour discussing SAP BPM with Wolfgang Hilpert.
SAP has recently announced and previewed 7.2 of their Netweaver BPM product (as discussed by Sandy here). While this release was  really focused recently on improving modeling with BPMN there are a number of other improvements:

Creating user interfaces based on these processes [...]

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Process-centric Composite Applications with SAP Netweaver #sapteched09

October 13, 2009

Composite applications combine various existing functions into a new application, typically managed using a business process or orchestration as the framework. SAP talks about core business processes, those built into the enterprise application backbone,and composite business processes that integrate and extend these processes by reusing the services within them. Specifically a composite application contains:

Workcenter
Where users [...]

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