Tag: processmining

New video series with Futuroot

I’ve been remiss with blogging the past couple of months, mostly because I’ve been involved in several pretty cool projects that have been keeping me busy. As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, I recently wrote a paper for Flowable about end-to-end automation and the business model transformation that it enabled.

I’ve been working on a video series for a process mining startup, Futuroot, which specializes in process intelligence for SAP systems. We’re doing these as conversational videos between me and a couple of the Futuroot team, each video about 20 minutes of free-ranging conversation. In the first episode, I talk with Rajee Bhattacharyya, Futuroot’s Chief Innovation Officer, and Anand Argade, their Director of Product Development. Here’s a short teaser from the video:

You can sign up here to watch the entire video and be notified of the future ones as they are published. We’ve just recorded the second one, so watch for that coming out soon.

SAP acquiring Signavio into Business Process Intelligence unit

I first met Signavio CEO Gero Decker in 2008, when he was a researcher at Hasso Platner Institut and emailed me about promoting their BPMN poster — a push to have BPMN (then version 1.1) recognized as a standard for process modeling. I attended the academic BPM conference in Milan that year but Gero wasn’t able to attend, although his name was on a couple of that year’s modeling-related demo sessions and papers related to Oryx, an open source process modeling project. By the 2009 conference in Ulm we finally met face-to-face, where he told me about what he was working on, process modeling ideas that would eventually evolve into Signavio. By the 2010 BPM conference in Hoboken, he was showing me a Signavio demo, and we ended up running into each other at many other BPM events over the years, as well as having many online briefings as they released new products. The years of hard work that he and his team have put into Signavio have paid off this week with the announcement of Signavio’s impending acquisition by SAP (Signavio press release, SAP press release). There have been rumors floating around for a couple of days, and this morning I had the chance for a quick chat with Gero in advance of the official announcement.

The combination of business process intelligence from SAP and Signavio creates a leading end-to-end business process transformation suite to help our customers achieve the requirements needed to gain a competitive edge.

Luka Mucic, CFO of SAP

SAP is launching RISE with SAP today, with the Signavio acquisition a part of the announcement. RISE with SAP is billed as “business transformation as a service”, providing business process redesign (including Signavio), technical migration (which appears to be a push to get reluctant customers onto their current platform), and building an intelligent enterprise (which is mostly a cloud infrastructure message).

This is a full company acquisition, including all Signavio employees (numbering about 500). Gero and the only other co-founder still at Signavio, CTO Willi Tscheschner, will continue in their roles to drive forward the product vision and implementation, becoming part of SAP’s relatively new Business Process Intelligence unit, which is directly under the executive board. Since that unit previously contained about 100 people, the Signavio acquisition will swell those ranks considerably, and Gero will co-lead the unit with the existing GM, Rouven Morato. A long-time SAP employee, Morato can no doubt help navigate the sometimes murky organizational waters that might otherwise trip up a newcomer. Morato was also a significant force in SAP’s own internal transformation through analytics and process intelligence, moving them from the dinosaur of old to a (relatively) more nimble and responsive company, hence understands the importance of products like Signavio’s in transforming large organizations.

Existing Signavio customers probably won’t see much difference right now. Over time, capabilities from SAP will become integrated into the process intelligence suite, such as deeper integration to introspect and analyze SAP S/4 processes. Eventually product names and SKUs will change, but as long as Gero is involved, you can expect the same laser focus on linking customer experience and actions back to processes. The potential customer base for Signavio will broaden considerably, especially as they start to offer dashboards that collect information on processes that include, but are not limited to, the SAP suite. In the past, SAP has been very focused on providing “best practice” processes within their suite; however, if there’s anything that this past year of pandemic-driven disruption has taught us, those best practices aren’t always best for every organization, and processes always include things outside of SAP. Having a broader view of end-to-end processes will help organizations in their digital transformations.

Obviously, this is going to have an impact on SAP’s current partnership with Celonis, since the SAP Process Mining by Celonis would be directly in competition with Signavio’s Process Intelligence. Of course, Signavio also has a long history with SAP, but their partnership has not been as tightly branded as the Celonis arrangement. Until now. Celonis arguably has a stronger process mining product than Signavio, especially with their launch into task mining, and have a long history of working with SAP customers on their process improvement. There’s always room for partners that provide different functionality even if somewhat in competition with an internal functionality, but Celonis will need to build a strong case for why a SAP customer should pick them over the Signavio-based, SAP-branded process intelligence offering.

Keep in mind that SAP hasn’t had a great track record of process products that aren’t part of their core suite: remember SAP NetWeaver BPM? Yeah, I didn’t think so. However, Signavio’s products are focused on modeling and analyzing processes, not automating them, so they might have a better chance of being positioned as discovering improvements to processes that are automated in the core suite, as well as giving SAP more visibility into how their customers’ businesses run outside of the SAP suite. There’s definitely great potential here, but also the risk of just becoming buried within SAP — time will tell.

Disclosure: Signavio has been a client of mine within the last year for creating a series of webinars. I was not compensated in any way for writing this post (or anything else on this blog, for that matter), and it represents my own opinions.

My writing on the Trisotech blog: better analysis and design of processes

I’ve been writing some guest posts over on the Trisotech blog, but haven’t mentioned them here for a while. Here’s a recap of what I’ve posted over there the past few months:

In May, I wrote about designing loosely-coupled processes to reduce fragility. I had previously written about Conway’s Law and the problems of functional silos within an organization, but then the pandemic disruption hit and I wanted to highlight how we can avoid the sorts of cascading supply chain process failures that we saw early on. A big part of this is not having tightly-coupled end-to-end processes, but separating out different parts of the process so that they can be changed and scaled independently of each other, but still form part of an overall process.

In July, I helped to organize the DecisionCAMP conference, and wrote about the BPMN-CMMN-DMN “triple crown”: not just the mechanics of how the three standards work together, but why you would choose one over the other in a specific design situation. There are some particular challenges with the skill sets of business analysts who are expected to model organizations using these standards, since they will end up using more of the one that they’re most familiar with regardless of its suitability to the task at hand, as well as challenges for the understandability of multi-model representations that require a business operations reader of the models to be able to see how this BPMN diagram, that CMMN model and this other DMN definition all fit together.

In August, I focused on better process analysis using analytical techniques, namely process mining, and gave a quick intro to process mining for those who haven’t seen it in action. For several months now, we haven’t been able to do a lot of business “as is” analysis through job shadowing and interviews, and I put forward the idea that this is the time for business analysts to start learning about process mining as another tool in their kit of analysis techniques.

In early September, I wrote about another problem that can arise due to the current trend towards distributed (work from home) processes: business email compromise fraud, and how to foil it with better processes. I don’t usually write about cybersecurity topics, but I have my own in-home specialist, and this topic overlapped nicely with my process focus and the need for different types of compliance checks to be built in.

Then, at the end of September, I finished up the latest run of posts with one about the process mining research that I had seen at the (virtual) academic BPM 2020 conference: mining processes out of unstructured emails, and queue mining to see the impact of queue congestion on processes.

Recently, I gave a keynote on aligning intelligent automation with incentives and business outcomes at the Bizagi Catalyst virtual conference, and I’ve been putting together some more detailed thoughts on that topic for this months’ post. Stay tuned.

Disclosure: Trisotech is my customer, and I am compensated for writing posts for publication on their site. However, they have no editorial control or input into the topics that I wrote about, and no input into what I write here on my own blog.

It’s webinar week! Check out my process intelligence webinar with @Signavio on Thursday

On Thursday, I’m presenting a webinar on process intelligence with Signavio. Here’s the description:

How do you get a handle on your company’s disrupted processes? How do you get real-time visibility into your organization’s strengths and weaknesses? How do you confidently chart a path to the future? The key is process intelligence: seeing your processes clearly and understanding what is actually happening versus what’s supposed to happen.

For example, your order-to-cash process is showing increased sales but decreasing customer satisfaction. Why? What is the root cause? Or, you have an opportunity to offer a new product but aren’t sure if your manufacturing process can handle it. To make this decision, you need a clear line of sight into what your organization can do. These areas are where process intelligence shines.

This webinar will help you answer questions like these, showing you – with examples – how process intelligence can help you drive real business results.

Rather than my usual focus on process automation, I’m digging a bit more into the process analysis side, particularly around process mining. With the current situation with a largely distributed workforce for many businesses, processes have change and it’s not possible to do Gemba walks or job shadowing to collect information on what the adjusted processes look like. Process mining and task mining provide the capabilities to do that remotely and accurately, and identify any problems with conformance/compliance as well as discover root causes. You can sign up at the link above to attend or receive the on-demand replay after the event.

I also posted last week about the webinar that I’m presenting on Wednesday for ABBYY on digital intelligence in the insurance industry, which is a related but different spin on the same issue: how are processes changing now, and what methodologies and technologies are available to handle this disruption. In case it’s not obvious, I don’t work for either of these vendors (who have some overlap in products) but provide “thought leadership” presentations to help introduce and clarify concepts for audiences. Looking forward to seeing everyone on either or both of these webinars later this week.