Top-down meets Bottom-up - How Business Flows and msgFIT helps prepare for your SAP HANA initiative

How Business Flows and msgFIT helps prepare your SAP HANA initiative

In our release party last week (Business Flows 4 Process Driven SAP HANA) one breakout session focussed on the ‘Discover & Prepare’ Phase of the SAP Activate methodology. I was joined by Christian Reiter (msg treobis) and Dr. Ike Allen (bpExperts). We agreed that the biggest challenge during this phase is setting the various aspects of your initiative into a structured business related context.

In a ‘top-down’ approach these elements are

• Company Strategy and Business Drivers

• Operating models

• Enterprise Structures and principal designs (Hub-Spoke Production/Warehousing/Sales, Centralized Purchasing)

Ascending ‘bottom-up’ you may have existing documentation on

• Processes and

• System capabilities (Legacy SAP & non-SAP Systems)

Additionally SAP provides a lot of ‘food for thought’ by providing

• SAP HANA capabilities

• SAP Best Practices (Scope items)

Business Flows sets all these elements into a joint business context using it’s E2E architecture. The framework is compatible with SAP’s Activate methodology and SAP Solution Manager Structures such as SAP’s model companies, SAP Best Practices & Scope Items and Process Steps libraries.

If additionally, you already analyzed your SAP R/3 landscape you may have gained a good understanding of how your business currently uses their ERP but the questions relating to the approach (‘brown’, ‘green’, ‘yellow’ or ‘blue’ field) can’t just be answered from a technical perspective but they become part of the business case.

Concerning the analysis of existing systems we therefore see the necessity to put the results into a business context

• System usage (transactions, reports)

• Business roles/authorizations

• Developments (‘Z transactions’, user-exits, reports)

• Performance metrics

We believe that being able to offer a technical ‘redocumentation’ (combining the technical analysis with mapping to business processes) is highly beneficial for an SAP HANA initiative. Therefore we are proud to announce that we are now partnering with msg treorbis - the market leader in technical redocumentation with their product msgFIT.

In combination we can now accelerate the prepare phase substantially by providing the best of the ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ approach in a consistent framework. An additional value of the partnership is that jointly we are capable of providing the content in various BPM platforms (ARIS, Aeneis and Signavio) as well as the SAP Solution Manager.
Looking at the work packages of our Business Flows 4 Process Driven SAP methodology (which is closely aligned to the SAP Activate methodology) as depicted in the following figure we have marked which benefit strongly from the reference content and results of the discover phase.

If you are interested in getting to know more about this unique offering please reach out to us. We’ll gladly walk you through the approach and content we offer.

Kind Regards

Russell

RELEASE PARTY - Business Flows 4 Process Driven SAP - Updates

SAVE THE DATE - 26th November at 09:30 AM CET

Key Note Updates - Release Party

BE OUR GUEST

Sign up now

"Release Party - Business Flows 4 Process Driven SAP ahead!"

Finally! We have now set the agenda for our “Business Flows 4 Process Driven SAP” Release Party. We will have 2 breakout sessions held via Zoom.

Breakout Room 1: Discover & Prepare

“How does a Process Driven approach help align transformation objectives with the Scope and Design of your SAP initiative?”

Breakout Room 2: Explore, Realize & Deploy

“Business Readiness and Change Management. A guided transformation of systems, processes and people.”

Due to the positive feedback we had from our Open BPM House Party we will avoid the ‘frontal-webinar’ approach but rather focus on key notes and dialog. This leaves room for an honest, practice-oriented discussion and direct exchange of experiences. So, pick a room and join the conversation which interests you most or switch anytime you feel like it!

Guest speaker at the Release Party will be Mr. Christian Reiter, from msg treorbis, our longstanding partner, friend and the best man for the job to get you FIT for your S/4HANA Transformation.

Face your Challenges! Find Inspiration!

The doors to the breakout rooms will open on 26th November 2020 at 09:30 AM CET.

View fullsize

What you only have to do is:

Register today to reserve your virtual place and receive all the exciting updates!

Come along and join in the discussion with all of us.  

I am looking forward to seeing familiar and new faces.

Sincerely,

Gülsüm Ucuran

RELEASE PARTY - Business Flows 4 Process Driven SAP

SAVE THE DATE - 26th November at 9:30 AM CET

"Release Party - Business Flows 4 Process Driven SAP ahead!"

Face your Challenges! Find Inspiration! It's time to swing into Action. Step up your SAP related Business Transformations. Starting right here. Right now.

We are thrilled to announce the Release of "Business Flows 4 Process Driven SAP". We created Business Flows for Process Driven SAP as a Business Transformation methodology aligned with SAP Activate, but with the addition that it sets a more consistent context to Business Processes across the whole transformation lifecycle.

We open the doors again (virtually) and give you the chance to participate in an honest , practice-oriented discussion with like minded people who experienced the same hurdles as you.

There is something for everyone, for now, this much I can reveal.

To join, please add yourself to the guest list.

Further event details to follow.

Sincerely,

Gülsüm Ucuran

BPM Open House Party – Report from the GARAGE

While Russell and Caspar spent time with our guests preparing some meals in ‘Hell’s Kitchen’, we were in the garage playing with heavy tools: ‘how operating models and value flows can be used for effective business steering’ (see following figure for definitions).

It is no light matter to dive deep into verbal exchanges with top managers on strategies for establishing effective business steering based on operating models and value flows. 

Our discussions began with a short introduction of our guests and then went along some guiding questions we had prepared. 

A variety of insights were shared among our growing number of guests in the garage. For example we learned about the difficulties in industries whose competitive advantage lays in product development (R&D, PLM). 
The timespan between resource inputs and outputs is long resulting in a challenge for the top management when deriving strategies for business steering in such a context.
Another guest drew attention to his experience struggling to get buy-in from management to use a Business Process Management (BPM) methodology as the basis for deriving performance metrics for business steering. On this topic many participants shared their approach on linking KPIs to business processes, some more mature organisations even derived KPIs from their enterprise process models.

For us as hosts it was an amazing experience to see the dynamics within the meeting. Over long periods, our guests took turns in leading and facilitating the conversation. So handling the heavy tools wasn’t so hard after all; We could just lean back and listen into this exchange of thoughts. So thank you to all the participants for your engagement and openness.

Also we would like to thank the party host Gülsüm who helped in the background to make this afternoon such a rewarding and exceptional event.

Ike and Markus

BPM Open House Party - Report from Hell's Kitchen

Our first Virtual Customer Event - What a ride!

I had the honor to occupy ‘Hell’s Kitchen’ and prepare some meals. As you may have read I invited Caspar Jans to join me. We have a long history of discussing our passion for BPM on an enterprise-level so we chose the subtitle: „EMS - perfect nutrition for your business transformation combining best ingredients from strategy to process mining” where EMS stands for “Enterprise Management Systems” and collected some questions to stimulate the dialogue with party guests:

Not knowing where this would lead us we prepared a vast collection of slides on all aspects of an integrated BPM setup covering Business Strategy, Operating Models down to Execution. Additionally we had a demo system to show-case the methodologies and tool capabilities.

So yes, we were well prepared, but it all came slightly different:
In the course of the next 2,5 h ‘Hell’s Kitchen’ was at all times occupied by a minimum of 7 people and although - or maybe just because - we were in constant dialog with the guests we only presented 1(!) slide:

The Big (BPM) Picture was all we needed and astonishingly - as far as I remember - nobody questioned the benefits of working on an integrated approach for the Big Picture. It was interesting to hear the different stages of implementation from the guests and their approach on introducing new topics such as Process Mining and RPA into their given BPM setup.

The most striking point for me was the intensity in discussions revolving around the importance of ‘Ownership’ to make BPM successful.

• Which level of sponsorship is required?

• How can Process Ownership be established in an otherwise hierarchical organization?

• How to create business engagement (and ownership) if the BPM was set up as part of IT?

• How can successful pilots be anchored sustainably into the organization?

Just to mention a few questions we elaborated. This clearly shows how far the topic BPM has evolved in a corporate setup. I doesn’t seem so long ago that the discussion would have been focussed on “EPC vs BPMN”, or “Which tool is best for BPMN modeling.” !

Many thanks therefore to all guest which made this party special by sharing their experience and thoughts and last but not least a special thanks to my Co-Host Caspar.

Hope to meet you soon again - hopefully in ‘real’.

Yours

Russell Gomersall