vito.palasciano

SAP BPM: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats

Vito Palasciano — Tue, 11 May 2010 09:58:42 GMT

The current Blog would underline and publish several considerations on SAP BPM. Such as, SWAT analysis (based on a full experience with multiple projects), and gathering the opinions of subject matter expert that have been involved in the design, testing, and implementation phases.

The goal of this Blog is to gather information and suggestions for using BPM technology throughout IT lifecycle. At the end of this Blog we ask that you provide comments, opinions and your point of view.

“Swatting” a project on SAP BPM technology means to consider the following strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats…..

Business view: increase the level of maturity of internal business process management, by simplifying and automating the procedures.

Using paperless processes will drastically cut the cost incurred by the company; Other benefits include: reducing manual handling of paper, instant delivery and from a clear audit trail (process traceability and visibility). It will also avoid high production and storage costs, archival, search and retrieval troubles; saving the company significant time and money by improving the company ROI.

Automated processes permit to reduce errors and process lead times, providing a step by step guide, made available to each user involved in the process activities, therefore making it easy to understand the process guided procedures with a clear definition of roles and responsibilities.

Improving business processes through a standardization and content integration enhancement, will optimize time required for information sharing across different business units (calls, emails, papers, etc…)

Cultural resistance is one of the major threats inside a BPM project, because, inevitably, things are indeed going to change. Cultural resistance should be used as important and useful feedback, as well as a potential scale of success for the project: what would cause end-users/stakeholders to be hesitant? It could be the lack of certain processes in the project.

The big opportunity for a company is to take advantages of using BPM to increase the level of maturity of internal business process management, by simplifying and automating the procedures.

IT view: the more technology closes the gap between IT and Business, the better chances it will have to succeed.

But let me move on from business consideration and switch to Information Technologies.

The use of BPM is a natural way to switch to the Service Oriented Architecture technologies, because those technologies require the interaction of several applications of different nature, and BPM will consume the services of those applications. SOA is based on the use of standards that take on a huge meaning also in BPM.

At first glance, SAP BPM seems to be not really flexibility, therefore a low adaptability to the business change requests and excessive timing to update the process and to align the design to the business needs. But, actually, all these problems can be overtaken counting on a team with a strong technical known-out.

Therefore, behind the scenes, it is necessary to understand the correct way to develop a methodical approach. The following lists a few key suggestions to keep in mind:

It is important to avoid complex BPM; it is better to divide the macro-process into multiple and simpler processes. This will enable you to easily govern and manage the process.
Creating a Developer Component for each BPM assists in defining compiling and building simpler processes.
Import the context in the BPM as soon as you are sure it is the final version. Continuous changes jeopardizes project schedules and timelines, causes misunderstandings, lack of comprehension of a project scope, and disruptions to BPM processes.

I will appreciate any feedback. Thanks!

SAP Search Engine

Vito Palasciano — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 16:48:02 GMT

There are several places where one can find useful SAP documentation, but sometimes it is rather complex to remember all the possibly interesting links or to keep track of them all. How many times didn’t it happen to us to need a particular blog or article or any other type of material and not to remember if it was on SDN site, on SAP help site or somewhere else? Wouldn’t it be great to have a unique place where to search for a particular document being able to scan with one single shot a whole lot of SAP-related sites?

Now there is a solution to this tedious problem. It is called Saphoo (www.saphoo.com) and it is a site we have created by means of Google co-op technology. Saphoo is a one-shot SAP Search Engine where you can find SAP resources that are actually spread over several SAP sites.

Please, do use this new service and do not hesitate to provide me with your preferred SAP resource link so that I can enrich saphoo’s resource base. In this way we will be able to render this tool more and more powerful.

Enjoy your Saphoo!

Vito Palasciano

Google maps inside MDM

Vito Palasciano — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 16:26:13 GMT

Introduction

Sometimes it can be useful to locate a vendor in order to understand in which part of the world it carries out his business activities. This blog describes how to encapsulate Google Maps directly into MDM so that it will show the vendor address each time a vendor is selected. h3. Getting to work… Using the Google maps Web site (http://maps.google.com/) it is possible to search an address everywhere in the world. Once an address has been located, the “link“ functionality (the hypertext indicated by the red arrow) can be used in order to obtain the full link to the map, as highlighted in the red frame.

In the example above the link is http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=Italy,+MILAN,+VIA+CALDERA+21 where the parameters are language (English, in this example) and address (Italy, MILAN, VIA CALDERA 21, in this example).

SAP MDM provides us with a tool named Web Tab which can be used to call an external application just by adding an URL in the Links table in Console and specifying same parameters.

It is necessary to paste a new link version into the Web Tab URL: http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=<f:geo_map>

where parameter geo_map is a calculated field in MDM that contains Country name, City and Company Name separated by a comma.

Additionally, it is necessary to set the Web Pane URL in the configuration option in MDM Data Manager:

From now on, it will be possible to select a vendor and see the related map, as in the following examples:

And, finally, hoping to have sooner or later open a branch at Beau Vallon Beach ….

Enjoy your maps!