E3 Roundtable: Business Process Management and End-to-End Processing in SAP Cloud ERP with Signavio.

The process illusion: Why SAP's BPM dreams are shattered by E2E reality For many existing customers, the dream of a seamless end-to-end process (E2E) in the SAP world is like a mirage that dissolves into a fog of technical debt and integration gaps as it approaches. While SAP board members conjure up the „Intelligent Enterprise“ on glossy stages, companies are struggling with the bitter reality of fragmented processes in the trenches of their historically grown system landscapes. Business process management (BPM), once the dry domain of Aris process stacks, is now set to be revolutionized by the billion-euro acquisition of Signavio and the massive use of generative AI. However, a critical look behind the marketing façade reveals cracks in the foundations of the Walldorf strategy. Signavio, praised by SAP as the panacea for business process transformation, has been accused of selling old wine in new bottles. Critics were quick to point out that the celebrated „process intelligence“ was partly a fraudulent label, as process mining is not a modern invention and competitors such as Celonis have long dominated the market technologically and defined the benchmark for performance and depth of analysis. The integration of Signavio into the complex SAP ecosystem, especially in conjunction with SAP Cloud ALM, remains a major technological construction site. Although the „Process Navigator“ promises orientation in the jungle of best practices, the operational reality in hybrid landscapes - a wild mix of on-premise legacy systems, private cloud instances and public cloud islands - makes true E2E transparency a Sisyphean task. Artificial intelligence, embodied by the omnipresent assistant „Joule“ and generative functions such as „Text-to-Process“, is now set to bring about a breakthrough. The vision sounds tempting: business users describe processes in natural language and the AI automatically models them in BPMN diagrams. But caution is advised, because an AI is only as intelligent as the data it is fed with. However, many SAP systems lack the clean and complete event logs required for valid process mining. Without these digital footprints, AI runs the risk of hallucinating optimization potential where, in reality, master data chaos prevails. For SAP customers, BPM therefore remains a balancing act between the compelling need for modernization and the risk of getting lost in the complexity of new tools that often promise more than they can deliver in tough everyday practice.