Sap BPM At first glance
"The SAP NetWeaver Business Process Management (SAP NetWeaver BPM) component helps you model, execute, and monitor your business processes based on a common process model. It can help you improve the efficiency of business processes, reduce errors in complex repetitive tasks, and lower exception-handling costs" (SAP NetWeaver BUSINESS PROCESS MANAGEMENT). I tried to look how easy it is to migrate and to learn this tool for futuristic approach. Here is a brief summary about my experience.
While the BPM is hot and latest trend among the developers, Most of the sap professionals wants to grab the opportunity and get ready for next gen technology. I also started with same purpose and I find it really enjoyable and exciting. Here is my experience with the BPM first time .
What is BPM
In the word “Business Process Modelling” (BPM) the most important one is “Business” which should not be altered for any reason, and it should be modelled logically in a process, in such a way that most of the tasks can be automated. The tasks which need the human interaction should be modelled with Human activities. I also learned that all the Business process in general is set of certain operation including Activities(Tasks), Notifications(Tasks), Exclusive Choices (Decisions), consolidation of decisions (Parallel Join) and someone taking decision behalf of others (Uncontrolled merge).
Optimising process through BPM:
Business Process optimisation was really an easy to do productive task by which the the results can be obtained in very effective fast and easy manner for example i did the Order To cash scenario using the BPM and i was really amazed to see the possibility of optimisation of business process even the standard one like order to cash process. It enables the process to monitor at each and every steps, to integrate and test the business rules easily at design time by specify the test scenarios. More so ever it enables the Business process Automation truly.
Although SAP BPM is in premature state as compared to some other BPM tools like J-BPM Pega and IBM BPM I came to this conclusion while doing our last project which was quite larger and complex then a normal BPM process there are lots of benefits which can be reaped by logical thinking and proper implementation.
Top 5 benefits from the developers perspective.
SAP BPM helps to understand the process flow more easily and conveniently by pictorial representation of the process.
BPM provides easy monitoring and error tracing during the runtime by making every step visible through flow diagram and detailed history logs of of the process with basic, advances filters.
Provides the visibility to runtime data (Data available in process context) which further enables a better tracking fo the process flow. The run time data is visible but still can not be changed if it is not correct or as expected which points that SAP-BPM is still in immature state.
Easy to integrate with the UWL, including the priority given time frame for completing the task and a brief description about the process step for all the human activities.
- Automatic UI Generation based on the data object reducing the effort to creating the application and exposing the required context data.
Off-line processing can be done using the notification activities and E-mail with the link and small description direct to users inbox more so ever using adobe form for off-line data collection.
Learning BPM becomes very easy with the help of sap ES-workplaceprovided predefined scenarios. which i consider as a good start point which provide easy to incorporate hands on for SAP Netwever BPM.
