FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

SAP Process Orchestration 2012 Tour

K5 ERP Solutions, in conjunction with SAP, Incture Technologies and triVector will be kicking off another SAP Process Orchestration tour in March 2012. As part of the South African tour, the trio will be presenting at the NetWeaver Special Interest Group on 13 March, and will be conducting various training courses and workshops around the country over a period of two weeks.

“Process Orchestration is something which the African market has not yet fully embraced – there are huge opportunities for medium and large enterprises to streamline their processes and literally save millions”, says David Bann, Operations Director of K5 ERP Solutions.

“Competition is getting tougher and tougher these days – an enterprise needs differentiating factors. They need that edge that sets them apart from others. Process Orchestration can do just that – Africa is waiting to be streamlined and optimized. Consumers are dying for better service, cheaper products, faster turnarounds…”, continues Bann.

The Process Orchestration tour is a sequel to last year’s tour which was a huge success in generating awareness of Business Process Management in the South African market.

Dina Jacobs, CEO of triVector has said that they are looking forward to the tour as it is a critical step in the development of the required capacity and capability for the support of process execution in South Africa.

Jacobs continues, “Process execution enables customers to increase their competitiveness in the market that is increasingly driven by mobile devices, in memory processing with faster response times, and processing of transactions in a cloud environment. With our comprehensive experience in the design of end-to-end business processes combined with SAP Application Life Cycle Management (ALM), we are well positioned to make a valuable contribution in providing solutions together with K5 ERP and Incture in the Process Orchestration space”

The tour brings new skill-sets into the country and is boasting a line-up of various training courses, presentations and customer specific workshops.

ABOUT K5 ERP SOLUTIONS
K5 ERP is a SAP Special Expertise BPM partner and provides various service offerings around SAP BPM. K5 focuses on streamlining and automating business processes, thus realizing improved process efficiency, reduced process costs, and increased profitability. Other SAP services provided include Basis support, technical development and SAP recruitment. For further information please visit www.k5erp.com

ABOUT TRIVECTOR
triVector is the partner of choice in providing value-adding Business Process Management (BPM) solutions, services and support. Focused on enabling business strategy, the company improves process agility and ensures operation efficiency while creating real value for customers. As part of its growth strategy, triVector focuses strongly on the management of information across the application life cycle of SAP related projects. A critical success factor is the management of information across the integrated toolset as determined by the customer and includes products such as SAP Enterprise Modeler (ARIS), SAP Solution Manager, HP Quality Centre, SAP GRC and SPP. triVector has established a Special Expertise Partnership with SAP South Africa. For more information please visit www.trivector.co.za

ABOUT INCTURE TECHNOLOGIES
Incture is a leading SAP NW BPM implementation partner in Asia with strong focus on TCO, time and risk reduction for BPM based innovation and transformation projects. Incture has demonstrated thought leadership in SOA-BPM, Mobile and SAP NetWeaver space and has pioneered in building “Business Process Optimisation” solutions for fortune 500 companies. Having combined advantage of deep skills and competitive cost, Incture has assisted customers to transform their business processes and increase competitiveness through remarkable process improvements. For further information please visit www.incture.com

ABOUT SAP
As market leader in enterprise application software, SAP (NYSE: SAP) helps companies of all sizes and industries run better. From back office to boardroom, warehouse to storefront, desktop to mobile device – SAP empowers people and organizations to work together more efficiently and use business insight more effectively to stay ahead of the competition. SAP applications and services enable more than 176,000 customers (includes customers from the acquisition of Sybase) to operate profitably, adapt continuously, and grow sustainably. For more information, visit www.sap.com

When it comes to process orchestration, SAP has a suite of products that are in use by more than 70,000 companies worldwide. From simple 2-step processes contained within a single SAP system, to 300+ step processes driven by thousands of business rules spanning multiple countries and integrating multiple SAP and non-SAP back-ends. SAP has done it all.

So how can process orchestration save you millions? Think of it this way: Your company currently has critical processes that are difficult to govern, difficult to enforce and difficult to monitor. People forget. People make mistakes – sometimes very expensive mistakes. People procrastinate. People go on holiday. People forget to tell other people when they’ve done what they need to do. People don’t like the process, so they don’t follow it. People leave the company and the process rules go with them in their heads. Automating these processes eliminates all of these problems – it forces the right people to do the right work at the right time. It cuts out unnecessary delays. It improves user adoption. It encourages working smartly. It monitors and escalates when people don’t do what they should. It provides beautiful analytics. It just does process right. Now imagine how much your company could save if you cut a business critical process time down by 50% or even 90%. Imagine how much you would save if you could automate more than half of the decisions made in a process. Imagine how much you would save if those expensive mistakes were no longer made. Ever.

It’s not just massive savings that process orchestration offers – it also increases customer satisfaction, frees up valuable resources for more productive use, enforces compliance and creates refreshing transparency in the business. It’s time for you to use process orchestration to ease your business pain points and drive huge value to the bottom line.

What BPM Means To You

BPM means different things to everyone – methodology, strategy, technology, analytics… What BPM means to you will determine how successful your process orchestration initiatives will be. It is vital to have a clear and common understanding between all stakeholder of what BPM is (or from which perspective you are looking at it) and what role it should play in your organization.

To some, BPM means the methodology and documentation of business processes – modelling, blueprinting, training material, operational flow charts, how one process effects another, etc. To others, it means the strategy like Total Quality Management (TQM), Six Sigma, Lean Manufacturing, Return on Quality (RoQ), etc. Other times BPM is referred to as the technology behind business processes – automated email notifications for assigned tasks, deadline monitoring, escalations and keeping track of key process indicators.

In fact, BPM encompasses all of the above – it is the “big process perspective”. It’s about business process centricity, improvement, optimisation, transformation and automation. BPM is not a tool, it’s not a methodology, it’s not a strategy – it’s more than any one if those. It’s all of them.

Your BPM Roadmap

BPM will mean something different to you depending on where you are in the process management journey. It is important that you have a clear roadmap laid out for your BPM strategy to ensure that your investments are well executed and the value is realised over and over again. Your BPM roadmap is the roadmap to your organizations success.

Focus on Your Pain Points

Business processes are more often than not over-complicated and weighed down with unnecessary red tape or political influence – this directly and indirectly causes business pain points. Customer centric optimization and automation of your most critical processes will save you millions and get rid of your biggest pain points.

SAP Process Orchestration

The SAP Process Orchestration Suite delivers a world class workflow automation system (SAP BPM), a rock solid business rules engine (SAP BRM) and a market-leading process integration system (SAP PI). SAP has now bundled all 3 of these products into the SAP Process Orchestration Suite, and you can get all three products for the same price that you would usually pay for SAP PI alone. Have a look at an Introduction to Process Orchestration for more details.

If you are interested in finding out more about SAP Process Orchestration and how it can help save your organization millions, give us a call – we offer various workshops, presentations and training aimed at different stages of the process orchestration journey. We have many fascinating use-cases that show the potential of how Process Orchestration can benefit you. and make your customers love you even more.

Business Process Management

Business Process Management (BPM) is the way in which you plan, implement, and ultimately improve the processes that run your business. BPM tools such as SAP NetWeaver BPM, help to model and enable the automation of business processes – these tools  offer a clear view into processes through graphical representations, in-depth analysis and testing, process tracking, and continual process improvement. The beauty and power behind BPM is the capability to deliver the right work to the right people at the right time – everything can be automated and monitored. Key Process Indicators (KPI’s) can be measured and Service Level Agreements (SLA’s) can be enforced with automatic escalation rules – all of this independent of the underlying applications. In other words, a good BPM tool can work seamlessly across all other enterprise applications – including on premise, web, cloud and mobile.

Process Integration

While BPM focuses more on the human interaction of business processes, there are application integration tools such as SAP Process Integration (PI) that bring together various enterprise applications through a unified integration approach. These tools focus specifically on the automated communication between software applications. As an example, you could use SAP PI to facilitate the integration between Oracle Business Suite running Financials and SAP ERP running Human Resources. A well thought out integration product should never be technology or application dependent.

Business Rules Management

A huge problem with most enterprise software is that very often the logical conditions for business logic (business rules) are “hard-coded”. What this means is that if the rules ever change, software developers are required to update all of the effected software components. Often complex rules are difficult to comprehend and implement – it can take days or even weeks for the business and developers to finally understand and correctly code the rules. Typically the developers understand the rules differently to what the business has tried to communicate and the change process takes a lot longer than it should. A risky but very common practice is that many business rules are only mapped out in the minds of specific business owners and very badly documented, if at all. If a key business owner leaves the company for any reason, the understanding of those rules go with him/her.

A solution to this is what we call Business Rules Management (BRM). Essentially, all business rules are stored in the business rules engine and enterprise software simply taps into these rules when required. The rules are managed centrally so that when they change, none of your software components need to be recoded. Once again it is very important that a BRM tool (such as SAP BRM) is not application dependent and that all of your software applications can tap into the rules engine and leverage its power.

A good example of a business rule is the calculation of a customer’s credit limit at banks. It may sound like a simple rule, but there are many aspects taken into consideration – credit ratings, transaction history, age, level of education, current financial commitments, current income, assets and more.

Process Orchestration

The orchestration of business processes can be a complex task – one has to consider human interaction, application integration, rules management, KPI measurement, SLA monitoring, continuous improvement, user experience, business involvement, exception handling, and much more.

The SAP Process Orchestration bundle includes SAP BPM, SAP PI and SAP BRM. These are enabling tools that pass process ownership on to the business and allow IT to support the technology. All of these tools are completely independent and work across any other applications – this bundle is something that even non-SAP customers should be considering.

SAP has built their BPM and BRM tools in a way that the business can design the processes and rules with graphic modelling. Once a BPM model has been designed, it is simply passed on to the developer who quickly ties up application functionality to the process. The processes and rules that the business designs are the processes and rules that are ultimately executed. No more miscommunications or misunderstandings – simple.

In speaking with K5 about the partnership and what it means for South Africa, Operations Director David Bann commented – “SAP BPM is relatively new to the South African market – up until now, most local companies have been slow to adopt BPM because of uncertainty and confusion about the benefits. Customers are confused as to where SAP BPM fits into the product suite, and how it can become a business enabler and drastically reduce operational costs”.

Bann continues, “Our focus is on generating a local awareness, and in building confidence in this extremely robust and feature rich product. We will work closely with SAP in delivering world class SAP BPM solutions, not only in South Africa, but in the whole of Sub-Saharan Africa”.

This is a big step forward for the South African SAP market – there have been very few skilled SAP BPM consultants available locally, which drives up implementation costs, and weakens confidence in the product. K5 have allied with Incture Technologies in bringing highly skilled resources into the country in order to achieve the impressive growth planned over the next 12 months. These off-shore resources will in turn be part of a skills development plan so that the South African market will benefit and develop.

Incture is a leading SAP BPM partner in the “Asia Pacific Japan” (APJ) region – Through working closely with SAP APJ over the last few years, they have been instrumental in evolving the SAP BPM suite into what it is today. “They know SAP BPM backwards – they have helped SAP iron out bugs in the product through multiple global BPM roll-out projects. They have really pushed the limits and produced inspiring results”, says Bann.

SAP South Africa is excited about this new partnership, as it is the beginning of an aggressive awareness drive aimed at enlightening the local SAP market on the features and capabilities of SAP BPM. It will catapult Sub-Sahara African enterprises into alignment with the rest of the world from a business process automation perspective.

K5, Incture and SAP will be conducting the first round of SAP BPM workshops across the country between 15 and 19 August 2011. Morning workshops will give an executive overview of SAP BPM, and include real world use cases. The afternoon workshops will cover more technical aspects of the product. Invitations to the workshops will be sent out over the next few weeks.

ABOUT K5 ERP SOLUTIONS

K5 ERP is a SAP South Africa Special Expertise BPM Partner, and Incture’s BPM alliance partner in the South African region. K5 focuses on streamlining and automating business processes, thus realising improved process efficiency, reduced process costs, and increased profitability. (Additional information at http://www.k5erp.com)

ABOUT INCTURE TECHNOLOGIES

Incture is a leading SAP NW BPM implementation partner in Asia with strong focus on TCO, time and risk reduction for BPM based innovation and transformation projects. Incture has demonstrated thought leadership in SOA-BPM, Mobile and SAP NetWeaver space and has been pioneer in building “Business Process Optimization” solutions for fortune 500 companies. Having combined advantage of deep skills and competitive cost, Incture has helped customers to transform their business processes and increase competitiveness through remarkable process improvements. In addition, being a member of SAP Design Partner Council, Incture helps SAP to build and improve SOA-BPM products. (Additional information at http://www.incture.com)

ABOUT SAP

SAP is the world’s leading provider of business software solutions. SAP® solutions are designed to meet the demands of companies of all sizes — from small and midsize businesses to global enterprises. Powered by the SAP NetWeaver™ open integration and application platform to reduce complexity and total cost of ownership and empower business change and innovation, mySAP™ Business Suite solutions are helping enterprises around the world improve customer relationships, enhance partner collaboration and create efficiencies across their supply chains and business operations. The unique core processes of various industries, from aerospace to utilities, are supported by more than 25 industry-specific SAP solution portfolios. Today, more than 22,600 customers in over 120 countries run more than 76,100 installations of SAP® software. With subsidiaries in more than 50 countries, the company is listed on several exchanges, including the Frankfurt stock exchange and NYSE under the symbol “SAP.” (Additional information at http://www.sap.com)

BPM is a new trend in the business world, and South African businesses have only just begun to understand the benefits and value that can be found therein. This partnership allows K5 to tap into a new pool of highly qualified and experienced SAP BPM resources with global experience.

In terms of SAP BPM resources available in South Africa, there is a huge deficit; Incture brings a strong team of experts that now form part of the K5 team. This partnership allows K5 the added capability of offering assistance to clients in reducing process related costs and risks, and to shift the utilisation of human capital to more business critical and revenue generating activities. Powered by SAP BPM and NetWeaver technologies, Incture provides a “Process Oriented” approach to achieve enterprise innovation.

As David Bann, Operations Director of K5 explains, “With K5 now acting as the South African territorial partner for Incture’s SAP BPM solutions, our target market has widened drastically. This makes us the local experts in SAP BPM – it will confirm our clients’ confidence in our ability to provide an excellent service, not only on the BPM front, but in our current offerings as well”

“K5 ERP and Incture are poised to grow together with this partnership” says Ritesh Menon, the lead NetWeaver Solutions Architect from Incture. “Considering that both the companies have largely complimentary skillsets, we are now able to cover any SAP technology platform in the South African region. We are now one point of contact for the discerning SAP customer and we have increased our value proposition by positioning ourselves as experts within the entire SAP stack”, continues Menon.

The strength of this partnership is to drive SAP NetWeaver BPM adoption as well as other allied technologies such as MDM and Web Dynpro at large to medium enterprises.

About K5 ERP Solutions

K5 ERP Solutions was founded in 2006 as a SAP resource provider. Since then they have grown into providing a range of SAP solutions including project management, support, training, consulting and 3rd party product development. For more details, go to www.k5erp.com

About Incture Technologies

Incture, established 5 years ago, is a SAP Partner, and is located close to SAP Labs and SAP Global Delivery Centre in Bangalore. With multiyear, deep collaboration with SAP and some of the leading innovation adopters, they have been delivering leading edge innovation success stories. They are powered by a strong team of ex-SAP employees with a singular and dedicated focus on innovation around SAP solutions; Incture offers pre-packaged portfolio of solutions and services for SAP customers to reduce time to value and risks for customers. Incture has a unique value proposition combining the advantages of process orientation together with agility and all customer relationships are supported by highest levels of management. For more details, go to www.incture.com

Gartner has published a forecast on the sales of mobile phones for 2010 – It is quite obvious that the future is in mobility. Mobile phone prices are decreasing and network service providers are having to compete more and provide extended services in order to get the edge on sales.

Mobile access to SAP introduces endless possibilities to an organization – Just to name a few, some use-case examples of accessing SAP through a mobile device follow:

- Empower managers on the move with the ability to action approval requests from their mobile phones
- Capture data directly into SAP using mobile phones – no more paper forms out on the field or on the road
- Provide SAP reporting to employees and managers
- Share SAP system data externally with extended multi-enterprise supply chains (i.e alerts, updates, reports, etc.)
- Provide mobile “proof-of-delivery” applications to your truck drivers
- Plant maintenance managers can use mobile inspection applications to feed SAP – this data can then be used for management reporting
- Allow employees to submit leave requests via mobile phones
- Allow employees to access electronic payslips on their mobile phones
- Allow customers to keep track of orders via their mobile phones
- Other areas such as security, asset management, inspections, compliance, job estimating, fleet management, engineering, construction, logistics, etc.

Without doubt, the above points have sparked some sort of an idea in your mind about how having access to SAP from a mobile phone could drastically benefit your business.

This is the age of information – To keep the lead in any market, your business processes need to flow smoothly; your corporate information needs to be available to the right people without delay; managers must be informed when quick decisions need to be made – they must then be given the ability to make those decisions on the spot; duplicate data capture must be reduced; legacy interfaces into SAP must be phased out. All of this will increase efficiency of processes and drastically decrease the total cost of ownership of your SAP systems.

If SAP mobility has not been considered yet, then it is time – Empower your managers, impress your customers, leverage your employees.

Traditionally SAP has been contained within the IT department. Break down the barriers and enable your business to do what it does best.

Contact K5 ERP Solutions if you would like an obligation free analysis of areas in your business that would benefit from SAP mobility.

Cliff McCormick, group IT Manager of Grindrod Management Services has decided to partner Northgate and K5 in order to implement a new SAP System which will be used to manage the company’s Human Resources.

This new partnership will launch  the first phase of the project which will migrate payroll for South Africa, Namibia and Mozambique from VIP and legacy systems into SAP.

Moving forward, McCormick plans to run the entire group’s payroll from the new SAP system. Phase two of the project will introduce Employee and Manager Self Service through an online portal.

“We are excited to work closely with Northgate Arinso – We have worked well together in the past and the success of this implementation is immanent”, comments K5 Managing Director, David Bann.

ABOUT K5 ERP SOLUTIONS

K5 ERP Solutions was founded in 2006 as a SAP resourcing provider. Since then they have grown into providing a range of SAP solutions including project management, support, training, consulting and 3rd party product development. For more details, go to www.k5erp.com

ABOUT NORTHGATE ARINSO

NorthgateArinso is a leading global Human Resources software & services provider offering innovative HR business solutions to employers of all sizes, including Global Fortune 500 companies and many Public Sector organizations. For more details, go to www.northgatearinso.co.za

ABOUT GRINDROD MANAGEMENT SERVICES

Grindrod Management Services is part of the Grindrod Limited group which specializes predominantly in freight movement and related industries. The JSE listed group employs 5000 skilled and dedicated people and controls assets in excess of R7 billion, generating annual revenue of over R12 billion and an annual profit exceeding R1 billion. GMS manages the overall IT strategy for all 25 of the subsidiary companies. For more details go to www.grindrod.co.za

Among 200 clients surveyed, 80% declared having minimum use of the basic contract. On average, clients are using their support services less than 6 times a year – to use this service they must obtain the full subscription to premium support even though it is not used very often.

To overcome this cost issue, some clients subscribe to external SAP support companies such as K5 ERP Solutions.

Your Support Could Be Better. And Cheaper.

It’s not uncommon to come across companies that are being taken advantage of with regards to SAP services  – The shocking thing is that usually these companies don’t really mind. Don’t be mistaken – they pretend to mind. They complain bitterly about all sorts of downfalls: the terrible support, massively over-zealous quotations for small jobs, lack of flexibility, lack of skills, lack of knowledge transfer, bad communication, and it goes on… Even though they complain so much, when it comes to contract renewal, they stick with the same SAP service partner. Why is that? Rather the devil you know than the devil you don’t, right? With all due respect, that is a terrible mentality to become victim of – Don’t let it happen to your company!

Many SAP service partners muscle their way into tenders by promising amazing solutions at premium rates that are very well motivated; fixed pricing is used to eliminate the risk on the client side; clients like big names because that should mean that the job will be done right. Once these support partners have won the tender, they implement the project by cutting corners wherever they can in order to increase profit margins and meet deadlines. They often play the blame game with their consultants when things go wrong, and project managers don’t take responsibility for much – This causes contention and the very consultants that are supporting you no longer want to be there. This has a huge effect on the quality of service provided.

Disturbingly, it has become more common for us to provide resources to other support partners out there. The question is, why? Well simply put, we have excellent consultants at very reasonable prices. We make our clients happy and they always come back for more. Very often, other support partners call us in to help them clean up the mess that their internal consultants have left behind after a project implementation. Of course they need to make a profit, so they add on an extra 20%-60% to the hourly rates of sub-contracted consultants.

The obvious problem with this model is that companies are paying a lot more for their SAP services than they need to. If you are not happy with your current SAP support or services, contact us – We will gladly provide an obligation free proposal.