SAP Solution Brief

BUSINESS PROCESS MANAGEMENT WITH SAP NetWeaver

The SAP NetWeaver platform has business process management capability that allows companies to continuously adapt their processes to new business strategies and meet the demands of todays business environment. SAP NetWeaver enables IT organizations to react quickly to new requirements and, at the same time, optimize the systems landscape without impacting business processes.
CLOSING THE GAP BETWEEN BUSINESS AND IT

In todays rapidly changing, competitive business environment, your organization needs an IT landscape that enables executives and employees to effectively manage the processes they work with: designing, configuring, executing, monitoring, and analyzing. And they must be able to quickly adapt to changes whenever necessary. The business environment you operate in is extremely dynamic. The people and organizations you support are a constantly varying mixture: they include internal users working alone or in collaboration with external parties such as customers, suppliers, and service providers. To further complicate matters, your IT landscape is constantly changing as you add and upgrade systems and applications, outsource functions, and respond to new and sometimes unexpected demands. To meet these challenges, the underlying business logic and IT infrastructure that supports your companys business processes must be highly adaptive and dynamic. When called upon to support a specific business process, you need the flexibility to select and use the most effective system and application. At the same time, IT involvement should be totally transparent to the user, whose main concern is doing, executing, and controlling the business. You can only be successful in your day-to-day operations when you consistently address the pain points of real-life business processes, using the common language of business owners and IT experts to describe and document business processes. You need a coherent implementation methodology that does not disrupt business logic and technical implementation. You need process control across applications and enterprise boundaries.

THE SOLUTION: SAP NetWeaver

The SAP NetWeaver platform provides the technologies and tools you need to support your companys business processes. SAP NetWeaver is the open integration and application platform that reduces total cost of ownership (TCO) across the entire IT landscape. With its business process management (BPM) capability, SAP NetWeaver allows you to respond quickly and effectively to new process requirements while optimizing your systems landscape. With its BPM capability, SAP NetWeaver: Exploits business-process efficiency by giving your business users the ability to directly model, manage, monitor, and analyze business processes Enables continuous process improvement and the dynamic modification of business processes Extends the value of your companys core business investment and maximizes the return on its strategic assets by providing the ability to change process rules without additional IT investment Provides greater visibility into critical business operations for better decision making by delivering the right information at the right time Allows the integration of people, applications, and internal and external resources Features and Tools SAP NetWeaver provides a modeling environment that allows users to visually design and model business processes for execution within and beyond enterprise boundaries. It supports a wide variety of business processes, ranging from unstructured and flexible, collaborative workflows to highly structured longrunning transactions that occur across multiple systems owned by different business partners.

SAP NetWeaver provides: A central messaging instance that is responsible for orchestrating message flows between business systems and applications A business workflow system that triggers predefined actions based on linking business objects with organizational structures Ad hoc workflow functionality that helps each user organize and personalize tasks Cross-Component Capabilities SAP NetWeaver offers cross-component functionally for BPM that deals primarily with structured processes running across multiple software components. The platform contains all the necessary functionality required to design, execute, and monitor business processes that involve multiple components and systems. Components can be internal or external to the enterprise. With SAP NetWeaver, you can explicitly orchestrate the flow of business documents in processes that span disparate business systems according to specific business rules and events, regardless of message type or originating system. This ensures that all documents belonging to a specific process are handled appropriately. For example, a purchase order and all follow-up documents, such as advanced shipping notifications (ASN), confirmations, and invoices, are correlated and can be treated as interrelated parts of a larger purchasing process. Business Workflow System Structured processes within an application are supported by a business workflow system in SAP NetWeaver. It delivers the tools and functionality needed to define pockets of flexibility within an applications process flow. You can make use of business workflows to interrupt a continuous process and transfer the responsibility for further execution to resources outside an application whenever necessary.

Ad Hoc Workflow Functionality Ad hoc workflow functionality in SAP NetWeaver supports informal or one-time processes, typically handled in an unstructured fashion using traditional productivity tools. Ad hoc workflow leverages the strengths of both workflow and productivity tools to incorporate flexibility and structure within the same environment. Ad hoc workflow enables you to control workflow creation, tracking, participation, and completion. In addition, ad hoc workflow lets you collaborate more effectively with your counterparts, using workflow structure to manage person-to-person interactions.
IMPLEMENTING BPM WITH SAP NetWeaver

Cross-component BPM features in SAP XI include:

A graphical process editor as part of the integration builder Flexible state-of-the-art modeling to design process orchestration in accordance with business process execution language (BPEL) Process-pattern and business-scenario templates within the integration builder Wizard-based configuration of processes in the integration builder Stable and secure process execution by the BPE embedded in the integration server Integration and interoperability with human-based workflows, either structured (business workflow) or unstructured (ad hoc workflow) Deadline and exception handling Process monitoring and alerting to expedite process optimization SAP NetWeaver and SAP Business Workflow SAP Web AS is the common application server used by SAP NetWeaver and all its components. SAP Web AS features business workflow capabilities that are used by the mySAP Business Suite family of business solutions to drive intraapplication processes in a flexible and consistent manner. Workflow templates, delivered by mySAP Business Suite solutions, can be used either off-the-shelf or as a starting point to prototype customer processes and accelerate implementation. SAP Business Workflow automates businesses processes within mySAP Business Suite solutions by: Integrating business rules and people Coordinating roles in a business process Enabling and controlling access to knowledge and information Controlling and monitoring processes within an application

SAP NetWeaver and Cross-Component BPM If business processes extend beyond your internal applications or beyond your enterprises boundaries, message-based process control and a stateful interaction model are required. These features are delivered by the SAP Exchange Infrastructure (SAP XI) component of SAP NetWeaver. SAP XI provides open integration technologies that support process-centric collaboration among SAP and non-SAP components both within and beyond enterprise boundaries. SAP XI provides an integration broker and supports cross-component BPM. It runs on top of the SAP Web Application Server (SAP Web AS) component of SAP NetWeaver. The business process engine (BPE) embedded in the SAP XI integration server controls complex and collaborative business processes and provides the necessary stateful management of messages exchanged between any involved components. Process logic is implemented in the central-process integration layer, rather than in a decoupled BPM system.

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Processes are either triggered manually by users or, more typically, triggered by an application or by other processes that span networks of components and business partners that are integrated with SAP XI. SAP Business Workflow supports open interfaces and includes an extensive application program interface (API) library. It is integrated with mySAP Business Suite solutions and the SAP Enterprise Portal (SAP EP) component of SAP NetWeaver. SAP NetWeaver and Ad Hoc Workflow Targeted to the end user, ad hoc workflow is delivered by SAP NetWeaver through SAP EP, an interactive gateway for users. Ad hoc workflow allows your users to organize their day-to-day work with far more efficiency than they can by using only e-mail or telephone. With SAP NetWeaver, your users have the freedom to design and track ad hoc processes based on their specific needs and preferences. They work with the highly intuitive SAP EP browser-based interface. Wizards allow users to quickly and easily generate ad hoc business processes. SAP NetWeaver: Common Services SAP NetWeaver provides a service infrastructure that offers monitoring and support capabilities for the execution and operation of your business processes across the entire IT landscape. This includes computer-center management system (CCMS), a common alerting framework, SAP Solution Manager, and a runtime workbench in SAP XI.

All SAP NetWeaver components run on top of SAP Web AS, enabling BPM functions to use a common alerting framework. Alerts can be configured to reflect the needs of specific business processes. The universal work list (UWL) in SAP EP acts as the central inbox for work items, tasks, notifications, and alerts, involving users directly with business process execution.
SAP NetWeaver MEETS THE CHALLENGE

In todays business environment, your company must continuously align its business strategies with market requirements in order to remain competitive. SAP NetWeaver, with its BPM capability, helps you optimize communication between business owners and IT by providing the procedures, methodology, technology, and business content to meet these challenges. It leverages the full power of SAP XI, SAP EP, and SAP Web AS and elevates IT from an enabler of work to an enabler of change.
FOR MORE INFORMATION

For more information about SAP NetWeaver and its BPM capability, see www.sap.com/solutions/netweaver www.sap.com/xi http://service.sap.com/xi http://service.sap.com/bpms

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