From the feed to the interplay

SAP understands this to mean the administration program of its Solution Manager (SolMan). Intellior, one of the solution partners, on the other hand, understands it as a tool for actively modeling business processes.

For the Walldorf-based company, this is primarily a business management support and improvement that has been developing since the early nineties. Back then, in cooperation with the Saarbrücken-based company IDS Scheer, the company began to use standard modules to put a large number of transactions in a completely new, process-based order.

The SAP standard was not built as a model for process control, of course. But a new arrangement of modules and transactions brought together entities that could be used to make a whole new process-driven SAP implementation.

The demand was for business management solutions, not so much for software development. The subsidiaries of the DAX companies (these had "only" R/2) were seen as the target, and their tendency towards a certain independence was met with R/3.

The idea of business processes turned into business models that did not deny their corporate strategy core. Software solutions had to learn to think in business terms.

A new concept of the company emerged: companies were now to be strategically organized systems whose administration was taken over by a special tool: the Solution Manager. Here, the processes should at least be documented, but so simple that every administrator could work with it.

The process idea continued to develop, even quite independently of SAP. Although there was and still is a wealth of possibilities to influence business processes.

Specialists for business process management (GPM) grew into the market, for example, 25 years ago the Stuttgart-based company Intellior with its flexible tool Aeneis, currently with an integrated interface to SolMan.

The message was now: use the company's own circumstances more freely. If you have a flexible tool for modeling business processes, then it's best that SolMan can take up these models, administer them sensibly, and integrate them so that the whole thing fits together.

From a purely administrative task arose a solution competence dedicated to the active modeling of processes. A challenging field of work that was no longer to be located at the level of lower management.

It becomes clear what significance the business processes from SAP can have in the company if they are also used as the basis for a uniform, integrated company design. The user brings the complete solution documentation from Solution Manager 7.2 into the BPM tool Aeneis.

This has extended its own schema by that of SolMan and thus enables a lossless import. In addition to the structures, libraries and business processes, all BPMN diagrams and documents are also available, both from existing solutions and from the best-practice models of SAP or other providers.

But who is now playing to whom? Intellior plays its modeling jobs into SolMan via the interface, and SolMan in turn responds not only with a professional docu-work, but with a lively exchange program.

In this interaction, the SAP inventory customer has one tool instead of several and one screen with access to his task areas. Two worlds grow together in this interaction: the diverse modeling practice of the business processes and the enriched tool SolMan, regardless of whether this is in ERP/ECC 6.0 or in S/4, BW/4, C4 or on the Hana platform.

This text is based on a press briefing by Professor Frank Morelli with Klaus Neugebauer.