Tag: SAP

CamundaCon 2024 Day 2: Technical Keynote

We’re kicking off day 2 of CamundaCon in New York with the technical keynote, featuring Bernd Rücker, Co-Founder and Chief Technologist; Daniel Meyer, CTO; and Bastian Körber, Principal Product Manager. Bernd opened the session talking about organizations’ conflicting goals to continue innovating their business while also transforming and modernizing their technical architecture. This was an interesting although possibly unintentional tie-in with the SAP integration session that I attended at the end of the day yesterday, where the migration example from SAP ECC to S/4HANA falls into the latter category, but the business leaders are pushing for the business innovation and don’t want to “waste” time on technology modernization. Adding RPA/AI bots and moving to an orchestrated architecture allows for gradual architecture modernization while making the business processes much more agile by externalizing the processes from the legacy systems.

We saw a demonstration of claims handling showing their upcoming IDP (Intelligent Document Processing) capability, which calls AI to extract information from receiving documents then figures out what to do with the information. The goal is to map that information onto the data elements in the process model, which then allows documents to be automatically integrated into processes with little or no human intervention.

We also saw some of their upcoming lightweight RPA capabilities built on the open source Robot framework. The addition of IDP and RPA — necessary if Camunda wants to work their way into the new Gartner BOAT category — are intended to be relatively lightweight, and not replace the need for more robust IDP and RPA products if an organization is already using third-party products, which can just be treated as external services to be orchestrated as part of a Camunda process.. Hopefully these will actually be “good enough” to be generally used, rather than being toy versions that are just there to chase the analyst categorization that we’ve seen from many other vendors in the past.

The demo also includes other AI calls and SAP integration, highlighting their new/upcoming features. Worth watching the replay of the demo when the sessions are released next week to see Bernd walk through it all (with a bit of help from Daniel).

Daniel took over to discuss the next generation of automation platform, which expands their orchestration environment through the addition of AI at a number of different points. This is exposed in the modeler as IDP, RPA and AI connectors and services.

Bastian described the AI offerings in more detail, starting with the BPMN Copilot, which can be used to create BPMN diagrams based on text descriptions. There have been natural language processing interfaces to BPMN model generation around for quite a while, both in research and as some released products, but this adds LLMs behind the text processing for better results — the more text that is provided, the less AI hallucination. Output is not (necessarily) intended to be the final version, but a fairly advanced starting point for a human modeler to then continue modifying and completing. The LLM is using publicly available information to provide best practices for process models. The BPMN Copilot demos well but feels like a bit of a party trick. A cool party trick, but maybe not something that’s going to be mainstream for a while. Some of the underlying technology can definitely be used, however, for automated process optimization or at least optimization recommendations, by bringing process mining data and some natural language to bear.

Daniel referred to Forrester’s definitions of AI Agents (task automation) and Agentic AI systems (orchestration of multiple types of tasks including AI agents). AI agents may be descendants of RPA bots, where some level of AI is already in use, while Agentic AI is focused on autonomous systems that optimize themselves without human intervention.

We also saw a demo of a travel booking process that uses AI agents to organize, research and present options based on a general description of a desired trip booking. These agents are orchestrated into a process with some human touch points, where the AI options are shown as recommendations: calls to third-party AI/LLMs as part of an orchestrated process, demonstrating AI agents and agentic AI in the context of E2E business orchestration

There was another example of a claims process with an ad hoc subprocess, blending deterministic and ad hoc in the same process where AI can be used to decide which activities are executed in which order within the ad hoc subprocess. The ad hoc subprocess has been in BPMN for a long time, but usually used to represent case management with human decisions or standard decision management on which activity to perform next; now, an LLM acts as the Next Best Action selector.

Daniel finished up with release dates: all of the features discussed will be released in 8.7 or 8.8 within the 2025 calendar year.

As we kick off the second day with an informative keynote, I also want to give a shout out to the Camunda events team, who keep everything running smoothly when I’m sure there are mini disasters happening behind the scenes every minute. Kudos!

CamundaCon 2024 Day 1: Integrating Camunda and SAP

I’ve been following Camunda a long time, and I’m pleased to see that they’ve “grown up” enough to have a separate analyst session at the conference, which I attended this afternoon. Because it was an open discussion of the roadmap and other topics, it was all under NDA. Sorry!

However, after we finished the analyst session, I ended the day listening to Camundi (Camundis?) Tobias Conx and Volker Burke talk about their upcoming SAP integration. This was only publicly announced a few weeks ago, but they seem to have hit the ground running and have quite a bit done already. Volker is a recent hire and is an SAP mentor, which means that he’s well-respected in the industry in addition to having a certain level of proficiency. He previously worked at a company that did quite a bit of Camunda-SAP integration, and showed some of the benefits of adding Camunda as a process orchestrator to SAP.

In this type of integration, Camunda orchestrates SAP automations in a similar ways as if the SAP modules and functions are any type of services. However, the connectors have been more tightly coupled so that they run in the SAP infrastructure. These connectors are set up as applications within the SAP BTP (Business Technology Platform), then the Camunda view of the connector is a technical OData connector allowing for those applications to be executed to read/write data between Camunda and SAP. Camunda forms can even be rendered within SAP Fiori.

There are some important use cases for this, including transforming and migrating from SAP ECC to S/4HANA, which allows multiple ECC systems to be migrated to S/4HANA over a period of time — something that many SAP customers are still struggling with. There’s also a number of different industry solutions that use the OData interface to SAP together with Camunda and other components, such as Cognizant’s Accounts Payable solution. SAP customers can also use this for their own internally-created process orchestrations that tie SAP together with Salesforce and other platforms in use.

In many of the use cases, SAP Fiori or BTP provides the user interface which connects to a Camunda process task, then other OData tasks within the process execute SAP functions to read/write data.

This will be released by Camunda in January 2025, and will be part of the 8.7 release without any extra licensing fee. Assuming you’re already using SAP BTP, it will not impact SAP licensing either.

That’s it for day 1 of CamundaCon 2024 here in New York. I’m off to the evening reception — where everything is off the record once the bar opens — and I’ll be back here blogging about day 2 in the morning.

SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse with HANA

Continuing in the SAP World Tour in Toronto today, I went to a breakout innovation session on NetWeaver Business Warehouse (BW) and HANA, with Steve Holder from their BusinessObjects center of excellence. HANA, in case you’ve been hiding from all SAP press releases in the past two years, is an analytic appliance (High-performance ANalytic Applicance, in fact) that includes hardware and in-memory software for real-time analysis of non-aggregated information (i.e., not complex event processing). Previously, you would have had to move your BW data (which had probably already been ETL’d from your ERP to BW) over to HANA in order to take advantage of that processing power; now, you can actually make HANA be the persistence layer for BW instead of a relational database such as Oracle or DB2, so that the database behind BW becomes HANA. All the features of BW (such as cubes and analytic metadata) can be used just as they always could be, and any customizations such as custom extractors already done on BW by customers are supported, but moving to an in-memory provides a big uplift in speed.

Previously, BW provided data modeling, an analytical/planning engine, and data management, with the data storage in a relationship database. Now, BW only provides the data modeling, and everything else is pushed into HANA for in-memory performance. What sort of performance increases? Early customer pilots are seeing 10x faster data loading, 30x faster reporting (3x faster than BW Accelerator, another SAP in-memory analytics option), and a 20% reduction in administration and maintenance (no more RDBMS admins and servers). This is before the analytics have been optimized for in-memory: this is just a straight-up conversion of their existing data into HANA’s in-memory columnar storage. Once you turn on in-memory InfoCubes, you can eliminate physical cubes in favor of virtual cubes; there are a lot of other optimizations that can be done by eventually refactoring to take advantage of HANA’s capabilities, allowing for things such as interfacing to predictive analytics, and providing linear scaling of data, users and analysis.

This is not going to deprecate BW Accelerator, but provides options for moving forward that include a transition migration path from BWA to BW on HANA. BWA, however, provides performance increases for only a subset of BW data, so you can be sure that SAP will be encouraging people to move from BWA to BW on HANA.

A key message is that customers’ BW investments are completely preserved (although not time spent on BWA), since this is really just a back-end database conversion. Eventually, the entire Business Suite ERP system will run on top of HANA, so that there will be no ETL delay in moving operational data over to HANA for analysis; presumably, this will have the same sort of transparency to the front-end applications as does BW on HANA.

SAP World Tour Toronto: Morning Keynotes

There was a big crowd out for SAP’s only Canadian stop in its World Tour today: about 900 people in the keynote as Mark Aboud took the stage to discuss how SAP helps companies run their business, and look at the business trends in Canada right now: focus on the customer to create an experience; improve employee engagement by providing them with better tools and information to do their job better, increase speed in operations, managing information and distributing information. He moved on to talk about three technology trends, which echo what I heard at CASCON earlier this week: big data, cloud and mobility. No surprises there. He then spoke about what SAP is doing about these business and technology trends, which is really the reason that we’re all here today: cloud, analytics and mobility. Combined with their core ERP business, these “new SAP” products are where SAP is seeing market growth, and where they seem to be focusing their strategy.

He then invited CBC business correspondent Amanda Lang to the stage to talk further about productivity and innovation. It’s not just about getting better – it’s about getting better faster. This was very much a Canadian perspective, which means a bit of an inferiority complex comparing ourselves to the Americans, but also some good insights into the need to change corporate culture in order to foster an atmosphere of innovation, including leaving room for failure. Aboud is also providing some good insights into how SAP is transforming itself, in addition to what their customers are doing. SAP realized that they needed to bring game-changing technology to the market, and now see HANA as being as big for SAP as R/3 was back in the day. As Lang pointed out, service innovation is as important (or even more so) than product innovation in Canada, and SAP is supporting service businesses such as banking in addition to their more traditional position in product manufacturing companies.

Next up was Gary Hamel, recently named by the Wall Street Journal as the world’s most influential business thinker. Obviously, I’m just not up on my business thinkers, because I’ve never heard of him; certainly, he was a pro at business-related sound bytes.  He started off by asking what makes us inefficient, and talking about how we’re at an inflection point in terms of the rate of change required by business today. Not surprisingly, he sees management as the biggest impediment to efficiency and innovation, and listed three problematic characteristics that many companies have today:

  • Inertial (not very adaptable)
  • Incremental (not very innovative)
  • Insipid (not very inspiring)

He believes that companies need to foster with initiative, creativity and passion in their employees, not obedience, diligence and intellect. I’m not sure that a lot of companies would survive without intellect, but I agree with his push from feudal “Management 1.0” systems to more flexible organizations that empower employees. Management 1.0 is based on standardization, specialization, hierarchy, alignment, conformance, predictability and extrinsic rewards. Management 2.0 is about transparency (giving people the information that they need to do their job), disaggregation (breaking down the corporate power structures to give people responsibility and authority), natural hierarchies (recognizing people’s influence as measured by how much value they add), internal markets (providing resources inside companies based on market-driven principles rather than hierarchies, allowing ideas to come from anyone), communities of passion (allowing people to work on the things for which they have passion in order to foster innovation), self-determination (allowing freedom to move within corporate control structures based on value added), and openness (external crowdsourcing). Lots of great ideas here, although guaranteed to shake up most companies today.

The only bad note of the morning (aside from having to get up early, rent a Zipcar and drive through morning rush hour to an airport-area conference center far from downtown) was on the Women’s Leadership Forum breakfast. Moderated by a Deloitte partner, the panel included a VP of Marketing from Bell and Director of Legal for Medtronic. Where are the women in technology? Where are the women entrepreneurs? The woman from Bell, when asked about lessons that she could share, started with “work harder, every day – just that extra half hour or so”. That is so wrong. We need to be working smarter, not longer hours, and we need to take time away from work so that we’re not focused on it every day of our life if we expect to show true innovative leadership. About 20 minutes into the conversation, when the moderator turned the talk away from business and started asking about their children, horseback riding and the dreaded “work-life balance”, I left. What other business leadership forum that didn’t have the word “women” in the title would have included such topics? Quite frankly, this was an embarrassment.

SAP Run Better Tour: Business Analytics Overview

Dan Kearnan, senior director of marketing for business analytics, provided a overview of SAP’s business analytics in the short breakout sessions following the keynote. Their “run smarter” strategy is based on three pillars of knowing your business, deciding with confidence and acting boldly; his discussion of the “act boldly” part seemed to indicate that the round-tripping from data to events back to processes is more prevalent than I would have thought based on my previous observations.

We covered a lot of this material in the bloggers briefing a couple of weeks ago with Steve Lucas; he delved into the strategy for specific customers, that is, whether you’re starting with SAP ERP, SAP NetWeaver BW or non-SAP applications as input into your analytics.

He briefly addressed the events/process side of things – I think that they finally realized that when they bought Sybase, they picked up Aleri CEP with it – and their Event Insight solution is how they’re starting to deliver on this. They could do such a kick-ass demo using all of their own products here: data generated from SAP ERP, analyzed with BusinessObjects, events generated with Event Insight, and exception processes instantiated in NetWeaver BPM. NW BPM, however, seems to be completely absent from any of the discussions today.

He went through a number of the improvements in the new BI releases, including a common (and easier to use) user interface across all of the analytics products, and deep integration with the ERP and BW environments; there is a more detailed session this afternoon to drill into some of these.

I’m going to stick around to chat with a few people, but won’t be staying for the afternoon, so my coverage of the SAP Run Better Tour ends here. Watch the Twitter stream for information from others onsite today and at the RBT events in other cities in the days to come, although expect Twitter to crash spectacularly today at 1pm ET/10am PT when the iPad announcement starts.

Blogger/Analyst Session with Mark Aboud at SAP Run Better Tour

We had the chance for a small group of bloggers and analysts (okay, I was probably the only one with “blogger” on my name tag) with Mark Aboud, Managing Director of SAP Canada, and Margaret Stuart, VP for the Canadian BusinessObjects division. Since this was a roundtable Q&A, I’ll just list some of the discussion points.

  • 50% of SAP Canadian customers are small and medium businesses, sold through their partner network. ERP sales tend to be made through larger partners, whereas analytics are handled by a larger number of smaller partners as well.
  • Business ByDesign has only been launched in Canada within the past 60 days, making it difficult to tell much about the uptake here. There is one live production customer in Canada now, although they were not able to name names. Pricing and minimum number of users is similar to the US offering.
  • It sounds like HANA is a focus in Canada, but nothing concrete to talk about yet – seems like the analytics sales team is being focused on it and has built a good pipeline. Maple Leaf Foods, who spoke at the keynote, is considering it. The use cases exist, but the customer may not realize that the solutions to big data analytics are within their reach.
  • StreamWork is pretty much a big zero in Canada right now: they’re starting to talk to customers, but it sounds like very early days here. I was promised a follow-up on this question.
  • They’re putting a lot of weight on mobile apps for the future, particularly in industries that have remote users. I’m envisioning an underground miner with an iPad. Winking smile
  • The use of analytics such as BusinessObjects has become much more agile: it’s not taking 6 months to create an analytical view any more, the end users have the expectation that this can be done in a much shorter time.
  • I posed the question about how (or whether) all these great analytics are being used to generate events that feed back automatically into business processes; although there was recognition that there’s some interesting potential, it was a bit of a blank. This is the same question that I posed at last year’s SAPPHIRE about creating a link between their sustainability initiatives and BPM – I’m seeing this as a critical missing link from analytics through events back to processes.

A good opportunity for Q&A with Aboud and Stuart about what’s happening with SAP in Canada. Since most of my focus with SAP has been through the US conferences, it was nice to see what’s happening closer to home.

SAP Run Better Tour Toronto

SAP is holding a Run Better Tour to highlight some of their new releases and customer success stories, and today it’s in Toronto which allows me to check it out without having to get on an airplane. I attended the Women’s Leadership Forum breakfast this morning, featuring Amanda Lang of CBC News, and she’s speaking again in the general keynote, along with Mark Aboud, Managing Director of SAP Canada.

To go off on a tangent for a moment, Lang had an interesting anecdote at breakfast from an interview that she did with the ambassador from Norway. Apparently, Norway mandated that there be equal representation of women in senior government and corporate board positions; all of the cries of “but there are no women to take these roles” turned out to be completely untrue once they were actually required to look for them. Very reminiscent of the brouhaha around women speakers at tech conferences that inevitably arises several times per year.

In her general keynote, Lang focused on the economy and market forces (after making a quick joke about economists getting laid), and the factors that could impact a return to prosperity: world instability, a repeat of the financial crisis due to mismanagement, and a decrease in productivity. In the relatively small Canadian market, we have no control over the first two of these – a financial crisis that impacts us is unlikely to come from our conservatively-run banks, but from US or European financial institutions – but we can be more productive. However, our productivity has declined in the past 20-30 years, and we are at risk of leaving our children worse off than we are. This started when our currency was so cheap, and our exports were selling at $0.60 on the dollar: no need to increase productivity when you can keep doing the same old thing and still make money at it. However, the past 8 years or so have seen an exchange increase such that our dollar sits near par with the US, which makes our exports much less competitive. Since we haven’t increased productivity, we don’t have better widgets to sell for less in spite of the exchange leveling. Productivity and innovation, although not identical, are highly correlated: we need to have more people inside organizations who challenge the status quo and bring forward better ideas for how to do things.

Mark Aboud started his presentation with the idea that you can’t just get better, you have to get better faster than your competition. Some of this is based on taming the explosion of data that is resulting from the digitalization of human culture: all that needs to be gathering and analyzed, then made available to a variety of constituents via a number of different channels. Another contributor is social media, both in terms of the power that it has a platform, but also in raising the expectations for user experience: the consumer experience is very powerful, but the typical employee experience is pretty lame. He moved on to talk about SAP, and particularly SAP Canada, where only 40% of their business is based on ERP: much of the rest is business analytics. This stress on analytics became obvious as he talked about one of their customers, Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario, and how they’re using a graphical real-time dashboard as their key interface in the emergency department to indicate how well they’re operating, and highlighting problem areas: a great analytics-in-action example, although it’s not clear where the underlying data is coming from. He also talked about CN Railways, and how they’re using Business Objects analytics to reduce their fuel costs.

Last up in the keynote was someone from Maple Leaf Foods (missed the name) talking about their ERP implementation, and how they use it to manage a company that has grown by acquisition and has very different types of operations in different regions, with 200 different systems and islands of data. They are trying to standardize their business processes across these units at some level, and started rolling out SAP in all of the business units early in 2011, with a planned completion date of early 2013. They’ve done 35 go-lives already, which necessitates a minimum of customization and, sometimes, changing their business processes to match out-of-the-box SAP rather than spending the time to customize SAP.

Good balance of keynotes; I’m now off to a bloggers’ briefing with Mark Aboud.

SAPPHIRENOW Day 1 Wrapup

Not a lot of blogging yesterday; a couple of good keynotes (but I’m not going to blog about Richard Branson, Al Gore and Colin Powell), a press conference, the sustainability roundtable, a couple of other short meetings and networking at Blogger Central. Some links to items of interest:

Today, I’ll be getting a briefing on NetWeaver BPM, what’s happened in the last months and what’s coming up in future releases; I haven’t heard a peep since TechEd last fall.

Can We Make A Sustainability-BPM Connection?

Peter Graf, SAP’s Chief Sustainabilty Officer, and Scott Bolick, VP Sustainability, spoke to a group of bloggers and analysts at a sustainability roundtable today. Graf started with SAP’s definition of sustainability: increase short and long-term profitability by holistically managing economic, social and environmental risks and opportunities. Sustainability changes business processes drastically, especially those processes that span multiple organizations. SAP is leading by example, improving their own internal efficiencies by enacting sustainability measures such as reducing carbon emissions, but also see their software as an enabler for other organizations to implement sustainable solutions. SAP has a number of customers that are using SAP solutions across five general areas of sustainability: carbon impact, environmental compliance, people health and safety, product safety, and sustainability performance management. In addition to cost savings, sustainability can become a recruitment factor: younger people, in particular, want to work for a company that shares their environmental concerns.

They have made sustainability a focus of presentations at this conference, but also have made a number of sustainable logistics choices at the actual event. They have a new sustainability report that has already become hugely popular for fostering stakeholder dialog, and a sustainability map structured by line of business and business case. They are the first technology company to join the Sustainability Consortium, and we heard about acquisitions, customers and partners that are all focused on sustainability.

SAP sees Business Objects Explorer as being a key tool for helping to identify areas for sustainability; for example, providing an analytical view into office and plant costs to determine where unusual electricity consumption is occurring. SAP uses this internally for their own sustainability data analysis, and had a nice spiffy iPad version to show us, since you can’t have a conference these days without showing an iPad at least once. Analytics, especially real-time dashboards that allow for drilling into data, have been gaining popularity in a number of areas lately: we’ve seen everything from academic papers to mainstream reports in The Economist discussing analytics, and this is just one more high-profile example.

Bolick then took the stage to talk about their new sustainability report in more detail; if you want more information on everything from the basic definitions of sustainability to measuring performance to more complex solutions, check it out online. This is not a static PDF that you’ll never read; this is an interactive website that includes up-to-date SAP sustainability news and social content, as well as their own analytics tools allowing a drill-down into performance (e.g., carbon footprint reduction) numbers. The sustainability map is pretty interesting (under the Solutions tab), showing all the different targets for sustainability, organized by who is responsible for solutions in that area.

SAP Sustainability Map

There’s a pretty strong commitment to corporate transparency from SAP: they show both positive and negative performance measures in the report, such as the significant drop in employee engagement. This would make a great tool for other companies to measure and publish their sustainability measures; Tom Rafferty asked when they planned to productize a sustainability report generator for their customers, but since this is currently pretty specific to SAP’s operations, it’s not clear how easy that would be to do; they spoke about the potential to provide at least part of this as an on-demand solution, as well as providing benchmark performance data to help companies measure their “return on sustainability”.

The conversation came back to business processes, and the impact of IT in enabling more efficient and sustainable processes. There’s a key piece missing, however: their focus today was on analyzing sustainability performance data for human consumption, but I’m not hearing anything about using those analytics as events to feed back into any sort of automated process optimization, where optimization in this sense would be sustainability performance optimization rather than the usual type of process optimization that we do. I suspect that much of this sort of optimization is still fairly manual due to the nature of the measurement and what is required to optimize it (e.g., number of women in the workforce in order to create a more sustainable workforce), and also since many of these are such high level measures that they don’t relate to just a single process: optimizing sustainability performance is up in the first row of your enterprise architecture, and over in those columns dealing with motivation, and we haven’t yet worked out all the transformations needed to map that down to the nitty-gritty of actual business processes and rules.

Credit to Jon Reed for the title of this blog post; I was in the blogger area of the communications center (did I mention that SAP’s treatment of media in general and social media in particular really rocks?) and I told him my impressions of the roundtable and how I thought they should have more of a focus on a round-trip push back to BPM, and he popped out the phrase “the sustainability-BPM connection”. Thanks, Jon!

Conference Season Begins

It’s been quiet for several months for conferences, but things are heating up again for the next four weeks. Here’s my upcoming schedule:

  • This week, I’m at PegaWorld in Philadelphia, including chairing a workshop on Wednesday morning on case management
  • The week of May 3rd, IBM Impact in Las Vegas
  • The week of May 10th, TIBCO’s TUCON in Las Vegas
  • The week of May 17th, SAP SAPPHIRE in Orlando

If you’re attending any of these events, be sure to look me up. I’ll be blogging from all of them. You can find these, and many other BPM-related events, at the BPM Events calendar. If you have an event to add to the calendar, just let me know.

Disclosure: each of the vendors pays my travel expenses for me to attend their user conference. They do not, however, have any editorial control over what I write while at the conference.