SAP

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 [...]

Read the full article →

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 [...]

Read the full article →

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 [...]

Read the full article →

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 [...]

Read the full article →

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 [...]

Read the full article →

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 [...]

Read the full article →

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 [...]

Read the full article →

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 [...]

Read the full article →

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 [...]

Read the full article →

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 [...]

Read the full article →

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 [...]

Read the full article →

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 [...]

Read the full article →

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 [...]

Read the full article →

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 [...]

Read the full article →

First Look – OutSystems Agile Platform

June 27, 2008

OutSystems came to my attention at the Forrester IT Forum as they were suggested as a tool with good support for what Forrester calls Dynamic Business Applications. Founded in 2001 they have 100+ customers mostly in Portugal and the Netherlands but increasingly also in the US. Of these they identify 17 existing customers that have [...]

Read the full article →

The Future of Enterprise Applications

May 20, 2008

I had to blog the last two sessions on paper – there are no power sockets in the hotel (the Palazzo at the Venetian in Las Vegas, conference planners please note) and my battery eventually gave up. So, back in the hotel now, here’s a summary of the notes I took.
Sharyn Leaver presented on the [...]

Read the full article →

Delivering “Policy-Oriented Enterprise Management”

December 5, 2007

Charlie Bess had an interesting post over on the EDS blog that led me to this article in the November IEEE journal titled: Toward the Realization of Policy-Oriented Enterprise Management (fee charged). The article is by Matthias Kaiser from SAP labs here in my home town. He is doing some research with a group at [...]

Read the full article →

Empowering executives in 2008

November 21, 2007

Timo Elliott of the BI questions blog had a “prediction” about 2008 this month – 2008: From Business Automation to Business Optimization?. Timo makes some great points and I agree with his premise that past is about automating business processes and the future is going to be about optimizing the business, in part by ensuring [...]

Read the full article →

SAP “gets” rules

October 17, 2007

SAP made a big move today towards enabling decision management. Not only does the SAP platform seem more and more service-capable, I hear today that they have bought Yasu, one of the smaller but capable business rules management systems. It will be interesting to see how SAP plans to use Yasu. Hopefully they won’t just [...]

Read the full article →