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.

Run transaction RZ04 – Double click on the “DUMMY Self-Configured Operation Mode” line. Click once on the line (probably the only one) that contains the incorrect host name. Now click on the “Delete Instance” icon. Confirm when asked if you want to delete all the instance data. Now go to the “Settings->Based on Current Status->New Instances->Generate” menu item. Click the save button, and you are done.

Ok now you have gotten the hard work done – on to the easy part!

It’s actually very simple – Everything you need to do has been nicely packaged into transaction SWU3. If you go there, you will see a whole lot of red crosses indicating that the configuration has not been done. In the transaction, you will see 5 top level nodes:

• Maintain Runtime Environment
• Maintain Definition Environment
• Maintain Additional Settings and Services
• Classify Tasks as General
• Guided Procedures

All you have to do is highlight each node, and then click on the “Perform Automatic Workflow Customizing” button or press F9. As you go through this, you will notice that most of the red crosses turn into green checks. If any of them do not change from the red cross, you can simply highlight the individual offender to see the corresponding documentation on the right side of the screen. There are a few items that need to be manually process like “Maintain Prefix Numbers” and some others. Then there are some of the entries that you don’t need to get to a green check because, for instance, you won’t have a J2EE server for “Maintain Guided Procedures Gateway”.

Just go through all the entries to make sure that they are configured, or confirm that you don’t need to configure them. As mentioned earlier, the documentation for each entry is listed on the right side of the screen and it is extremely helpful in guiding you through problems.

Once you are done you can click on the “Start Verification Workflow (F5)” button. If the system asks you to activate event linkage, say yes. If need be, enter transport details. It will then tell you “Verification workflow started”:

1. Go to the Business Workplace.

You will find a user decision work item in your workflow inbox.

2. Execute this work item and select a decision.

You receive two mails. These are the notifications of completion for this user decision and the subsequent background step.

You should now have successfully tested the workflow environment – If all went well then you have set everything up correctly, and you can begin to develop and test your own custom or SAP delivered workflows.

I followed a very useful blog by Manfred Lutz called ABAP Trial Version for Newbies: Part 8 ‘Exporting development objects from SP8′ which along with the comments and other forum posts, helped me to get the TMS working.

I suggest you follow Manfred’s blog first to see if his approach works – If so, you’re in luck. If not, I’ll help you out… My problem was that I got a TP_CANNOT_CONNECT_SYSTEM error when tryin got distribute the settings.

If you have a closer look, there is an ABAP RFC connection called TMSADM@NSP.DOMAIN_NSP (Transaction SM59). When you look at the settings, it refers to a host called ‘PWDF3101′ – This is incorrect but we cannot change it here because the RFC is locked for editing. This is a system generated RFC. Here’s how to fix it:

You need to make sure that your host file is configured correctly. Go to C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts and open it with notepad. Either make sure that it exists, or add an entry to map your computer name to the correct IP address:

K5ERP-SERVER   localhost

Note that K5ERP-SERVER should be replaced by your computer name. Save this and restart the computer.

After restarting and firing up the SAP server using MMC console, go to transaction STMS and click on the “Overview->Systems” menu. Highlight the NSP line and go to the “SAP System->Change” menu. Go to the “Communication” tab and enter your computer name as the target host. Go to the “Transport Tool” tab and enter your computer name as the DBHOST. Also change the TRANSDIR to match your computer name like \\k5erp-server\sapmnt\trans\ where “k5erp-server” is the computer name. When done click save and it should all now be working!

Now you can follow the rest of Manfred’s blog to find out how to save your development objects to transports and then export them from your system into another SAP system.