bpmNEXT 2016 demo session: 8020 and SAP

My panel done — which probably set some sort of record for containing exactly 50% of the entire female attendees at the conference — we’re on to the bpmNEXT demo session: each is 5 minutes of Ignite-style presentation, 20 minutes of demo, and 5 minutes for Q&A. For the demos, I’ll just try capture some of the high points of each, and I highly recommend that you check out the video of the presentations when they are published after the conference.

Process Design & Automation for a New Economy – Ian Ramsay, 8020 BPM

A simplified, list-based process designer that defines a list of real-world business entities (e.g., application), a list of states unique to each entity (e.g., approved), lists of individuals and groups, lists of stages and tasks associated with each stage. Each new process has a list of start events that happen when a process is instantiated, one or more tasks in the middle, then a list of end events that define when the process is done. Dragging from the lists of entities, states, groups, individuals, stages and tasks onto the process model creates the underlying flow and events, building a more comprehensive process model behind the scenes. This allows a business specialist to create a process model without understanding process modeling or even simple flowcharting, just by identifying the relationships between the different states of business entity, the stages of a business process, and the people involved. Removing an entity from a process modifies the model to remove that entity while keeping the model syntactically correct. Interesting alternative to BPMN-style process modeling, from someone who helped create the BPMN standard, where the process model is a byproduct of entity-state modeling.

Process Intelligence for the Digital Age: Combining Intelligent Insights with Process Mining – Tarun Kamal Khiani and Joachim Meyer, SAP, and Bastian Nominacher, Celonis

Combining SAP’s Operational Process Intelligence analytics and dashboard (which was shown in last year’s bpmNEXT as well as some other briefings that I’ve documented) with Celonis’ process mining. Drilling down on a trouble item from the OPInt dashboard, such as late completion of a specific process type, to determine the root cause of the problem; this includes actionable insights, that is, being able to trigger an operational activity to fix the problem. That allows a case-by-case problem resolution, but adding in the Celonis HANA-based process mining capability allows past process instance data to be mined and analyzed. Adjusting the view on the mined data allows outliers and exceptions to be identified, transforming the straight-through process model to a full model of the instance data. For root cause analysis, this involved filtering down to only processes that took longer than a specific number of days to complete, then manually identifying the portions of the model where the lag times or certain activities may be causing the overly-long cycle time. Similar to other process mining tools, but nicely integrated with SAP S4 processes via the in-memory HANA data mart: no export or preprocessing of the process instance history log, since the process mining is applied directly to the realtime data. This has the potential to be taken further by looking at doing realtime recommendations based on the process mining data and some predictive modeling, although that’s just my opinion.

Good start to the demos with some new ideas on modeling and realtime process mining.

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