Posts tagged as:

SAP

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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SAP Netweaver Business Rules overview #sapteched09

October 13, 2009

This session was a quick overview of business rules. Business rules, Michael says, represent the constraints and behaviors of your business – your policies, not just your IT rules like database integrity rules. Business rules are owned by the business – eligibility, pricing, CRM practices and so on. Michael divided these rules up into things [...]

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SAP Executive Q&A – #sapteched09

October 13, 2009

Here at SAP Tech Ed 2009 and my first session is an executive Q&A. First up was some discussion of the day’s announcements:

Extension of engagement with HP, integrated Neoview with Business Warehouse so customers can combine Business Objects and Neoview. as well as extending the services relationship (obviously important given HP’s acquisition of EDS).
SAP EcoHub [...]

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Enhancing BPM with Business Rules and Analytics at Air Products

October 7, 2009

Charlie Lewis of Air Products described how they have been using workflow and business rules (FICO Blaze Advisor). Air Products is a Fortune 300 company that primarily supplies industrial gases in a variety of markets. Charlie begun by describing the communication and work challenges of a diverse company across many countries where different groups have [...]

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SAP TechEd

September 23, 2009

[ October 13, 2009 to October 15, 2009. ] I am going to be attending SAP TechEd in Las Vegas. While I am mostly going to get up to speed on SAP’s support for business rules and analytics, I will also be running three expert “lounge” sessions. Two 30-minute “face-to-face networking sessions” on getting started with business rules and one such session on decisioning [...]

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Using busines rules in stable, core processes

September 3, 2009

Talking with SAP today I made the comment that the best place to use business rules was often in stable, core business processes because those processes don’t change, only the decision rules within them. This clearly struck a chord with @GregChase and it made me think I should write a slightly longer version of what [...]

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SAP NetWeaver BPM reviewed

August 23, 2009

Sandy Kemsley has posted a long and detailed review of SAP Netweaver BPM on her blog. It sounds like they have done some good work integrating the Yasu rules engine. Obviously she has better luck getting people at SAP to brief her than I do! Hopefully one day I will have something to add on [...]

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Driving harmonization for competitive advantage

March 12, 2009

Kevin Hogan of Accenture talked about how implementing a warranty system can drive harmonization and competitive advantage.  His focus was on a recent case where they helped a company implement an SAP-based Warranty solution. The case is a global heavy equipment manufacturer with about a focus on Europe and North America. They were running 4 [...]

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Predictions for 2009

December 18, 2008

I just went back to check and found no predictions on the blog for 2008 (so I get a 100% accuracy rating with no errors) so I thought I would make some for 2009. In no particular order then:

Cloud computing will impact decision management.
There are already at least two decision management vendors offering decisions in [...]

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The small impact of business rules on the big players

November 21, 2008

Jim Sinur brought up an interesting point today when he blogged IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP have bought Business Rule Technology. What’s up with that? The big players seem to be toying with business rules – there’s plenty of activity but not much understanding or commitment.

SAP bought Yasu but until recently did not show much [...]

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First Look – Savvion Business Rules Management System

November 17, 2008

Savvion today announced it has released a Business Rules Management System. Now this may suprise you – after all Savvion is a Business Process Management vendor – but I think it is a sign of the growing recognition that decision management is important to business process management. Before this announcement Savvion was using Yasu’s product [...]

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First Look – Savvion 7.5

November 11, 2008

I got a quick overview of Savvion 7.5 this week. Savvion is one of the pure-play BPM vendors with customers in Telecommunications, Media, Financial Services and Manufacturing (along with some retail and healthcare). They released version 7.5 at the end of September.
Savvion has recently been investing in domain-specific vertical solutions built on their horizontal [...]

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Last chance for the EDM Summit

October 16, 2008

There are only 12 Days Left to register for the first Enterprise Decision Management Summit so get off your butt and register!

Neil and I Co-Chairs and readers of the blog can get a discount. We are presenting twice – A Pre-Conference Tutorial Succeeding as a Decision-Centric Organization and a Keynote Competing [...]

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First thoughts on the IBM/ILOG announcement

July 28, 2008

I got a chance to speak with ILOG today and do some thinking so it’s time to write more about the IBM and ILOG announcement. As it is an acquisition of one publicly traded company by another neither company can legally say very much. As a result I, like everyone else, have a bunch of [...]

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First Look – Visual Numerics

June 27, 2008

Visual Numerics is a 100 person, privately held company that’s been around for a while – nearly 40 years – and yet is largely under the radar thanks to the size of other “analytics” companies. As the business world moves from BI to analytics it is sometimes finding that BI tools are really focused on [...]

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