Are you starting to build your SAPTechEd Agenda?

Well, I am.  I have already looked thru many sessions – it really is like being a kid in a candy store, although a kid who can only have one candy at a time (not at all like ‘real’ kids).  And I am looking forward to learning lots of new things, or even re-learning old things, which is almost the same due to my advanced years.

But one opportunity I do not want to miss – besides speaking at my own session with Owen Pettiford on ‘Comparing SAP Business Workflow with SAP Business Process Management’ (Session PMC116) – is to attend an ASUG sponsored pre-conference session on SAP Operational Process Intelligence (Monday, October 15, 1:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m.

Here is the extract from the abstract for this session:

Are your business processes “flying blind”? Are you relying solely on “after the fact” reporting and analytics to manage your business processes? Well, this workshop will introduce you to the groundbreaking innovations available today and provide the roadmap of how SAP is putting its technology innovations (SAP HANA, SAP NetWeaver Gateway, the complex event processing (CEP) platform, and mobility) to work to provide real-time actionable intelligence into your business processes spanning SAP Business Suite, SAP Business Workflow, and SAP NetWeaver Process Orchestration. Knowing about your business sooner, rather than later, provides a competitive edge by reducing the amount of time required to take action to solve a business issue or satisfy a business need. In short, SAP operational process intelligence (OPI) enables you to better manage through unexpected situations and to optimize for the future. This seminar will provide in-depth coverage and demos of process observer technology to enable visibility into built-in processes. Process observer is freely available to SAP Business Suite customers on the more recent enhancement packages. This component allows for managing business process performance in real-time at the process-instance level within and across SAP systems.

The reasons I am interested in this session are multiple. 

1. It uses SAP Business Workflow (if you are running it) as part of the data collection process.
2. Other tools, such as BPM, and Process Orchestration provide input as well.
3. There will be some other stuff thrown in for good measure… HANA, BRFPlus, ODATA/REST – all of which are exciting, and I figure that understanding one core element of this product may help me get a ‘leg up’ on the rest.

Myself, I have always found that users are much more interested in the accumulation/reporting/analytics of business process data than ever before.  To them, being able to see where the bottlenecks are is critical to improving the process.  And I am a big fan of improving the process!  The olden days when it was enough to show a single Purchase Order making its way through the approval process are gone. 

How about you?  Are you attending any Pre-conference seminars?  Do you think your users need to have more information on the processes that run your company?