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tamasszirtes
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The Dutch SAP users group (VNSG) organized a BPM event yesterday. I attended this BPM day and I would like to share my personal impressions. I cannot give a complete summary of event, because there were parallel tracks, so by definition I missed many of the sessions, plus I spent quite some time at the stand of my company and talking with a lot of people. On the other hand, I guess that’s the whole idea behind such events.


After Frank Luyckx’s opening words (chairman of the VNSG BPM focus group), Derek Miers (Principal Analyst serving Business Process Professionals, Forrester) gave a very interesting keynote session about how Forrester sees the BPM market. I experienced Derek as a very outspoken expert (I guess that’s not too surprising for a Forrester analyst). I found especially interesting his personal assessment of how far SAP is in the area of BPM. In his opinion SAP NW BPM has some unique strengths in modeling (pools, support for various event concepts, rules, etc.), but should be less focused on integration with SAP systems and should tell the BPM story better.


The rest of the morning I decided to skip some sessions to talk about BPM at our stand. According to the official registrations there were 200 participants for the event, I estimated less (maybe because of the snow fall in the morning), but anyway, the Netherlands is a small market, kind of everyone knows everyone, so such a day is perfect for meeting customers, ex-customers, partners and friends too.


After the lunch I attended the forum discussion with Ann Rosenberg (Global Business Process Management Lead, SAP Field Services), Derek Miers (Forrester), Georg Simon (Software AG), Toine van Eeden (USG People) and Hans Diepstraten (DSM/Creetion). It was very interesting to see how differently people from different background talk about BPM. I especially enjoyed Toine van Eeden’s practice-based reflections, but I may be subjective, I am always looking for customer opinions.


Siebe van der Veen presented the BPM experience of Kadaster. They use ccBPM heavily, they went through a heavy learning curve to create a high-volume complex solution and they are considering the move to NW BPM in the future.  Another BPM implementation story was told by Ann Rosenberg who explained how SAP itself uses BPM. This was a very comprehensive story, but well, the minimum is that SAP should eat its own dogfood successfully 😉 The closing keynote was again from Ann Rosenberg. She talked about all the new developments in the BPM area (e.g. the new add-ons to ASAP) and introduced her upcoming book titled Real-World BPM in an SAP Environment. We even got a taste of it via a short story about the Danish Defense.


After the closing reception and taking apart our stand I think we all ended up on the over-congested highways. One thing is sure; I had plenty of time in the car to decide to share my impressions in a blog.


I missed many of the sessions, if you attended those, feel free to add comments to this blog.

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