The next suite—an intelligent business performance platform—blends business intelligence, rules, and process management, linking knowledge with the processes that need it.
Improving business prospects is not easy. It fundamentally requires insight derived from a combination of knowledge about how business processes work and sound business performance measures.
This insight can lead to new and improved business processes, which then can encourage the creation of business value. In today’s complex, global enterprise, the needed alignment is rare.
Information technology can help. Vendors are developing and early adopters are implementing what PricewaterhouseCoopers calls intelligent business performance platforms.These platforms support and integrate applications, and they monitor and manage business processes and outcomes. The three core components of this emerging platform are:
Business intelligence applications, which collect
and interpret business events. The percentage of visitors making a purchase at a Web site is a
simple example.
Business process management applications, which monitor and manage the company’s workflow. The automated routing of claims at an insurance company is an example.
Business rules management applications, which automatically and consistently apply business policies. Exception handling in a financial transaction system is an example.
Today, with heroic effort, these applications can be stitched together to guide management and facilitate process enhancement. Enterprises that create value through rapid process changes are beginning to define a market opportunity for a preintegrated suite of tools that supports intelligent business performance management.
Drivers for improved business
process insight
IT departments in today’s enterprises are being squeezed by three important pressures from the business:
Internet business activities have real-time requirements that are crucial factors in maintaining customer loyalty, in supporting business partners, and in managing key business processes.
The constant pressure exerted by globalization means that any competitor—whether local, domestic, or abroad—poses a threat. As a result, organizations must compete effectively on service and product quality, responsiveness, and price—often, all three at once.
Integration with partners adds additional pressure for business efficiency. Companies that are part of a supply chain no longer have the luxury of improving business processes at their own pace. Because of the integration with systems belonging to partners and customers, operations must be performed as quickly as the external systems require.
To compete, businesses must be more efficient than ever, and the focus on efficiency must remain an ongoing priority. All competitors will be constantly upgrading their own abilities to run processes optimally in the context of changing market conditions.
One of the principal solutions to the need for optimized business processes has been the use of business intelligence (BI) and business process management (BPM). BI helps companies identify key events and developments in different areas of operations, while BPM enables companies to streamline their business processes. Done right, BPM increases efficiency and effectiveness—including the appropriate handling of exceptional events.
BI and BPM are frequently combined with business rules management systems (BRMSs), which perform analysis and help coordinate processes. BRMSs also provide complex decision making—that is, the ability to automate decision making on the basis of extensive sets of rules and constraints.
Figure 1: The IBPP stack
Source: PricewaterhouseCoopers, 2008
Taken together, the three technologies of BI, BPM, and the BRMS must be integrated with each other by an intelligent business performance platform (IBPP) and atop the enterprise IT infrastructure, as shown in Figure 1. Often, however, enterprises implement only some of the technologies and grow organically toward the adoption of the others, as needs dictate.
As Figure 1 shows, the IT infrastructure is the foundation for intelligent business performance applications. The IT infrastructure provides access
to information about business processes and outcomes. Enterprise Web applications, for example, provide necessary information for business
intelligence applications.
Enterprises that create value through rapid process changes are beginning to define a market opportunity for a preintegrated suite of tools that supports intelligent business performance management.
Distinguishing characteristics of IBPP
IBPP technologies have a set of common characteristics that define their role in the enterprise. Most often, they help organizations achieve better business processes. These characteristics include:
Better use of real-time data from business processes. These technologies use monitoring tools that watch business activities, compare performance against established thresholds and targets, and identify exceptional events. Real-time data can result from the minimal monitoring of performance parameters or from highly complex analysis that looks for meaningful patterns in enterprise data.
Reporting of the real-time data in user-friendly presentations such as portals or, more frequently, executive dashboards. These tools are designed to have straightforward top-level interfaces, so that users can tell at a glance the general state of a
given process.
Managers review the real-time data and regular reports to further optimize a process and enhance responsiveness. Organizations strive to establish a cycle of process optimization followed by monitoring and a new round of optimization.
When successful, an organization’s ability to execute this optimization cycle on a consistent basis will be a defining competitive advantage.
Implementation of IBPP processes as a series of loosely coupled, highly configurable services using common semantics. Taken together, they form a complete and efficient business process.
To achieve the component modularity as well as the needed integration, the business activities are implemented as Web services.
Usually, the IBPP architecture is service oriented. This is not an absolute requirement; however, the IBPP design works best when rigid, proprietary, command-and-control workflows are migrated to flexible, open, standards-based Web services.
These changes represent a significant shift for many organizations. Fortunately, BPM and BI technologies can be implemented slowly. They are not rip-and-replace solutions but approaches that can be added incrementally to an IT infrastructure and serve as targets for the migration of existing business processes at a pace determined by the company’s need for business process efficiency.
The focus on business performance is fostering the creation of a new management position: chief performance officer (CPO). The CPO is in charge of consolidating, analyzing, and presenting analyses to senior management and to the board regarding the current state of companywide operations and identifying where performance deviates from expectations and from industry benchmarks. In addition, the CPO has responsibility for designing
and helping implement key performance indicators
for a given business within the context of a specific industry.
Whether companies go so far as to set up a corporate performance office and appoint a CPO, they will need professional managers trained in the use of performance metrics to analyze the data and to recognize how the data tracks to specific events in the business processes. To do this, companies will first need to have good IBPP tools in place.
Business intelligence
Business intelligence (BI) is the discipline of gathering data about the results of specific business processes. BI is often combined with business process monitoring; however, BI does not so much relate to the management of the business process’s internal operations. It shows how a given process operates within the context of the larger business model.
For example, a BI product can track the sales of a certain item by region for a certain time period. In contrast, a business process monitoring product can track how long it took for an order to be completed.
Because BI products track metrics that relate to distinct areas of activity, they tend to be specific to various business departments and lines of business in an organization. Human resources (HR) and marketing are typical areas of focus for BI products.
According to analysis by Gartner, BI has represented one of the largest areas of investment in business improvement during the last few years. This surge is attributable to several factors:
Greater acceptance of the need for real-time metrics and dashboards to measure business activities
The growing importance of providing guidance for operations based on analysis of patterns in enterprise data (detection of fraud, money laundering, unusual customer patterns, and so forth)
Regulatory compliance (demonstration of compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act [HIPAA], and so forth)
Availability of better tools for data transformation and data mining
Another key reason for the greater adoption of BI is its own increasing maturity. For years, BI often was synonymous with expensive solutions that generated numerous reports containing little real value. However, improvements in the tools have made it easier to customize reports, view real-time data in dashboards and portals, and obtain relevant information in a
timely fashion.
IT departments can deploy BI solutions incrementally without disrupting existing systems. However, this flexibility does not imply that BI requires no changes. BI must have clean data to provide useful results, and the challenge of establishing single, consolidated, and clean (so-called gold version) instances of data records is a persistent issue that IT departments must tackle before they can consider BI.
The primary approach to this problem is master data management (MDM). According to a 2007 survey performed by InfoWorld magazine, IT managers reported that the two largest challenges to implementing BI were the problem of data quality and, to a lesser extent, integrating BI with operational system data sources.
Going forward, one of the biggest changes in BI will be the transition currently in progress toward active business management based on the use of real-time data. BI is evolving from a pull activity, in which data is obtained only when specifically asked for, to a push activity, in which constant updates of real-time business data are pushed to dashboards and portals.
As business line managers assume greater control of specific business processes and therefore manage closer to the business operations, this demand
for real-time data on a push basis is expected
to accelerate.
Whether companies go so far as to set up a corporate performance office and appoint a CPO, they will need professional managers trained in the use of performance metrics to analyze the data and to recognize how the data tracks to specific events in the business processes. To do this, companies will first need to have good IBPP tools in place.
BI market
The BI market is dominated by a few enterprise-tools vendors, which spent much of 2007 acquiring smaller, market-leading BI companies. These major vendors are Business Objects (acquired by SAP), Cognos (now part of IBM), Hyperion (now part of Oracle but with a
suite of products different from Oracle), Microsoft,
and Oracle.
A second tier of independent BI vendors includes Information Builders, MicroStrategy, SPSS, and to a lesser extent, SAS. As market consolidation continues during the next few years, these independents are likely to be acquired or to merge to remain competitive with the larger, established vendors in this market.
Demand for BI solutions is expected to expand the market for these tools at a compound average growth rate (CAGR) of 8.6 percent through 2011, according to Gartner. Reasons for this growth, in addition to those listed previously, include the following:
A newfound appreciation by senior management of the value of data derived from business processes and operations
Greater familiarity with quantifiable measures by business analysts within organizations
The projected adoption of BI by midsize companies
Some of the prospective midsize customers, however, might opt for open-source solutions, such as Pentaho’s Open BI Suite.
Longer term, BI may begin disappearing as a stand-alone product category. The acquisitions of BI vendors in 2007 have so far not resulted in any notable integration of product lines. However, that integration is almost certain to come to pass, probably starting with SAP.
At that point, BI products simply will be another module in a larger enterprise tools suite. This suite will be characterized by a common shared metadata that all tools can interact with intelligently.
This shared metadata design is sometimes referred to as a closed-loop approach. It’s clear, however, that closed-loop integration must not destroy the loose coupling between modules, so that organizations are still able to adopt parts of the BI or enterprise resource planning (ERP) suites without having the entire suite imposed upon them.
BI may disappear in another direction as well: BI tools may be subsumed by BPM suites. Already, BPM tool kits have strong reporting capabilities, including dashboards and portals. Integrating those technologies with the data management and data analysis strengths of BI would begin that cycle of consolidation.
Figure 2: A typical BPM activity life cycle
Source: Adapted from IDC, 2008
Business process management
Business process management (BPM) focuses on the optimization of business processes. Many organizations are actively pursuing BPM for two principal reasons:
The need for leaner business processes
The demand for agility in regulatory compliance
Although the need to be lean is well understood, the demand for agile compliance is less evident. As companies have been forced to tighten record
keeping and more closely manage their processes to ensure auditability and compliance (particularly with Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA), they’ve come to realize that existing processes are not easily adapted to the
new requirements.
Managers are increasingly targeting business activities impacted by regulation for increased transparency and control. Many regulated activities have been poorly documented and left to evolve without sufficient management oversight. BPM is one solution to
this challenge.
The foundation of BPM is the view that a business process is an asset—a single coherent and tangible entity that can be managed as a unit made up of numerous activities.
This view underlies the series of optimization-oriented activities that are the core elements of BPM.
These include modeling the process, designing and implementing changes that better deliver on the goal of optimization, monitoring the business process by using real-time data, and finally, using the derived data to create the potential for additional cycles of optimization.
This cycle is shown in Figure 2. Different BPM vendors and analysts have slightly different names for the various stages, but the basic cycle of activities is constant.
These BPM activities are frequently grouped into a higher-level cycle:
Business process modeling
Implementation
Business activity monitoring
Each of these three phases has its own set of tools. Occasionally, as in the case of Oracle, for example, these tools are integrated so that outputs generated by the modeling tool can be used as inputs directly in the implementation stage, and later, they can help dictate the monitoring stage.
Getting started with BPM
Organizations considering BPM as an optimization strategy need to take certain preliminary steps to ensure success. The first and perhaps most important is to have stable business processes that can be modeled and mapped. If a company has not reached this level of maturity and so does not understand its operations in terms of defined processes, it is not ready for BPM.
For this reason, many organizations begin by deploying BPM at the departmental level. In some cases, the deployments begin at subdepartment levels in which
a single business process is mature enough for modeling and can be isolated sufficiently to serve as a first deployment of the process. The intention is that if the project works successfully, it will be expanded to the full department and then to larger portions of
the organization.
In some organizations, the desire to implement BPM has provided the impetus to clean up business processes and make them amenable for modeling by defining them clearly and identifying activities that are nonessential. These activities, in theory, are among the items that the organization will remove in the BPM implementation process.
Once processes at an organization are mature, or at least well defined, BPM becomes possible. The first step is to model the process or processes using any one of several standard notations. The organization then analyzes the processes for inefficiencies, and makes changes to the process models.
After appropriate review, implementation begins, almost always relying on a Web services architecture to provide the underlying infrastructure. The shape of the implementation is determined by formal process definitions generated from the modeling stage, including the definitions of needed services and, in the case of Web services, the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) to make sure the services follow the proper sequence.
Demand for BPM tools is expected to exceed that of BI tools. Gartner predicts the market will grow from $1 billion to $2.6 billion by 2011, a CAGR of 23.8 percent. To put this number in context, IDC projects that of the $100 billion spent on process automation software in 2007, only $1 billion went to BPM tools. So, BPM is still a small niche, but as the projected CAGR indicates, it’s one that should grow quickly during the forecast period.
Thereafter, monitoring is installed to obtain real-time data that is made available using the standard reporting mechanisms portals, dashboards, and reports. Data gleaned from these sources then fuels a new cycle
of optimization.
It should be noted that few organizations today are sufficiently mature to repeat this cycle on a continual basis. More often, an organization completes the BPM process and a lengthy time gap ensues before a new cycle is undertaken.
As corporate performance becomes a defining aspect of a company’s competitive differentiation, cycle times will decrease. The role of a CPO is key to championing the changes necessary for this strategy to work successfully.
BPM market
The BPM market is dominated by a small number of vendors that have true end-to-end solutions. These include EMC Documentum, IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle. A large number of niche vendors provide key parts of the BPM solution for companies that have specific needs.
Vendors without end-to-end enterprise tools but that offer BPM packages include Lombardi Software (which recently began offering BPM software as a service), Pegasystems (which integrates a high-end business rules engine into its product), and Savvion.
In the open-source market, the leading BPM vendors are Intalio and the JBoss division of Red Hat.
Demand for BPM tools is expected to exceed that for BI tools. Gartner predicts the market will grow from $1 billion to $2.6 billion by 2011, a CAGR of 23.8 percent. To put this number in context, IDC projects that of the $100 billion spent on process automation software in 2007, only $1 billion went to BPM tools. So, BPM is still a small niche, but as the projected CAGR indicates, it’s one that should grow quickly during the forecast period.
One emerging trend that might fuel that growth is the closer collaboration between BPM vendors and enterprise content management (ECM) systems vendors. This trend is driven by the basic fact that much of the workflow in business processes today is based on the movement of documents. This trend is especially evident in the case of Documentum, an ECM vendor that is now the BPM division of the software and storage vendor EMC. Likewise, such alliances as the recently announced product integration between Intalio and ECM vendor Alfresco Software are further examples of this trend.
Going forward, one of the biggest changes in BI will be the transition currently in progress toward active business management based on the use of real-time data.
SAP’s vision of a business
performance product suite
PricewaterhouseCoopers sat down with Doug Merritt at SAP’s research labs in Palo Alto, California, to discuss the emerging category of business performance applications and how SAP plans to introduce the technologies to new and existing customers. Merritt is a corporate officer and member of SAP’s Executive Council.
PwC: How are you framing these new categories of applications that integrate process flows, business intelligence, and business rules to your client base so that they feel compelled to adopt a new suite of applications similar to the ERP [enterprise resource planning] adoption pattern?
DM: I don’t think that big, broad-based market categories like ERP start as big, broad-based categories. What we now call ERP began as a series of application modules in related but separate functional domains: financials, HR, manufacturing, materials management, sales, and distribution.
Over time, it made more sense to even more tightly package and integrate these offerings into a unified ERP suite, but for the first three, four, five years after we named it ERP, people were still buying the offering for specific functionality, such as financials or HR [human resources] or manufacturing. The way that we’ve framed our new category of applications—what we’re loosely calling business user apps or performance optimization apps—is by targeting specific pain points around knowledge-centered work that is relatively chaotic and unstructured today. We chose to start our focus on the “office of finance” within the organization, but that was simply based on our understanding of need and market opportunity. That is why you saw governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) first and then financial performance management next, which will quickly be followed by other performance management and new applications focused on a line of business. Within the performance optimization apps category,
we’re creating minicategories that are for
specific needs.
PwC: Do you anticipate an evolving
application suite?
DM: Absolutely. We’ve been trying to focus on discovery of the business-critical categories that are top imperatives within organizations. Compliance was pretty obvious. That wasn’t a hard one to pick. But the real challenge is understanding where, within compliance, is the burning platform? That is, what is the most ubiquitous and horizontal business pain?
We then have to choose the relevant package of complementary business solutions that we could assemble. It needs to have a high-level business purpose, so that the CFO [chief financial officer] feels strong value in buying an entire GRC suite.
Our starting point was our Access Controls offering. This was our primary value proposition. Almost every prospect we’ve approached says, “I have to have a way of understanding segregation of duties and conflicts within segregation of duties.” What makes the suite concept work is that closely tied to access-control issues are process controls, and closely tied to those is the need for a risk management framework.
And we broaden the suite a little bit and say, “What about trade compliance?” and “What about environmental compliance?” We wrapped that suite together and said, “Here’s our GRC offering.” And it has gotten great traction. We had more than $200 million of license sales just in that category last year, and it was only its first full year of production.
PwC: Where else have you used this approach?
DM: We took a similar approach with financial performance management (FPM)—again, trying to redefine the category. For a long time, the market has been focused on delivering budgeting and consolidations solutions, but very closely related to these is the need for profitability management and strategy management. So, we took a next-generation approach to a truly usable and fully integrated planning and consolidation solution, and we tied a profitability and strategy management message with it to create a bigger and more compelling bundle. The value proposition remains the pain point that planning and consolidation solutions don’t address for the business user.
PwC: What’s next at SAP?
DM: We’ve had a team working for almost a year on other integration scenarios between GRC and FPM—such areas as risk-adjusted planning, compliant consolidations, compliant close, and strategic risk management. And we keep looking for other line-of-business pain points where we can find a unique angle to meet an unfilled need. We are asking, “What is the compelling, must-have functionality needed to optimize performance for sales, marketing, supplier, procurement, and human resources management?”
The key point is that these are not highly scripted, standardized applications similar to ERP. To be successful with this next generation of applications, we are positioning the user as the control point, offering guidance and tools that anticipate the knowledge aggregation process. The next applications focus heavily on supporting collaborative, creative activities that leverage business intelligence and an on-the-fly ability to modify processes that support the teams that span the functional hierarchy of an organization, or even work outside of the organization.
Business rules
Business processes, in whatever form they take, depend heavily on business rules. Rules drive the activities, coordinate data movement and workflow,
and provide decision automation in complex situations.
In the past, business rules were hard-coded into applications by developers; today, rules are discrete components that encapsulate logic. They are commonly developed by business analysts—rather than IT staff—and they are executed inside a business rules engine (BRE), which is a high-performance tool that can test thousands of individual rules or rule sets that have been bundled for a specific business purpose.
Most BPM vendors commonly provide both a basic BRE and rules-development tools as part of their solution. And the design of modern BPM systems around a Web services structure typically extends to the BRE components. This makes the rules accessible to other software designed to make use of Web services.
The use of a BRE rather than hard-coded rules gives BPM tremendous agility. A change in corporate policy or a new regulation usually can be implemented quickly by simply adding or changing the rules, so that a process treats a business event differently.
Organizations that have complex process requirements, however, need rules support beyond what is found in BPM product suites. These companies rely instead on business rules management systems (BRMSs), which are comprehensive, standalone, high-volume, business rules design and execution systems.
Financial services companies, for example, use BRMS products to process loan applications. The data is analyzed via rules, and a decision is made regarding the applicant’s suitability for different loan products. The analysis, triage, and decision automation often involve the testing of hundreds of rules, sometimes thousands, before a tailored offering (including terms and rates that match the applicant’s situation) is formulated. BRMSs can make these decisions in a matter of seconds.
This automation of decision making provides significant benefits as well as guarantees that decisions are made consistently and impartially. Most BRMS products have built-in auditing functions so that in the event of a complaint or inquiry, the financial institution can show exactly which rules were applied and why. For this reason, BRMSs are also useful for ensuring and demonstrating regulatory compliance.
For enterprises, BRMSs provide great agility not only because they automate decisioning but also because they enable organizations to modify policies or implement new programs quickly. For example, to provide a new loan offering for select applicants, a financial services firm needs only to add rules to the rules repository. Likewise, heavily regulated industries can quickly implement new regulations and requirements.
Business rules market
The BRMS market is smaller than either the BI or BPM segment, and it is dominated by vendors of smaller size. The principal vendors of pure-play BRMSs include Corticon, Fair-Isaac, ILOG, and Pegasystems. In open-source software, the leading package is Drools, which was recently folded into Red Hat’s JBoss product line.
The incursion of the Web deep into the heart of corporate operations has already demonstrated that the rate of change of technology is increasing and that IT departments must keep up. To do so, they need lean processes coupled with infrastructure that is reconfigurable and adjustable, so that the overall organization can leverage the new technologies to respond effectively to customer needs and competitive pressures.
The small size of these vendors has led to continual speculation that they would be bought by larger BPM or enterprise vendors. However, that projection has not materialized, although as discussed later, the interest of acquirers might be satisfied through other means.
The BRMS market is a mature market with established vendors and solid products. In 2006, IDC estimated the market to be $230 million and projected it to grow at a CAGR of 19.3 percent through 2010.
Although most rules vendors sell BRMS packages as standalone products, they are increasingly working with BPM vendors to bid together on requests for proposals (RFPs) and to offer solutions that integrate their respective products. This has been particularly evident in the co-marketing between ILOG and EMC Documentum, as well as similar relationships between ILOG and other BPM vendors.
In the near term, the BRMS market segment is unlikely to be subject to the consolidation that has occurred in the BPM market; rather, BRMS vendors will continue as standalone companies. Most BPM tools already have rules engines, so a BRMS acquisition would provide only incremental lift.
The major BRMS vendors offer products and services unrelated to BPM—thereby making an acquisition expensive. In addition, the good prospects for growth in the BRMS sector, particularly in industries where decision automation is critical—banking, financial services, and insurance—suggest that the BRMS vendors would be resistant to acquisition overtures.
The quality of rules engines in BPM solutions will likely emerge as a competitive differentiator for BPM vendors; as a result, BPM vendors will pursue original equipment manufacturer relationships or other close alliances with BRMS vendors.
Effects on enterprises
For enterprises to improve business efficiency by using intelligent business performance products, they need to have achieved a specific level of IT maturity. Two milestones, in particular, must have been reached:
The organization, or at least the department, must have defined business processes. This step is the sine qua non for optimization to deliver much benefit Some industries—such as manufacturing, healthcare, and financial services—have attained this level. Other industries are still behind the curve and must address the lack of formal process definitions first.
The IT organization must be capable of deploying and using a service-oriented architecture (SOA). Even though SOA is not required, it is emerging
as one of the best technology architectures for designing a highly responsive and
efficient enterprise.
Most IT departments have some Web services experience and therefore have practice with Web services implementation. However, for some organizations, the shift to the new model and away from monolithic, highly integrated approaches represents a difficult cultural and technological change.
Until these organizations can move toward greater acceptance of services-based architectures,
business process-oriented solutions will not deliver
the expected benefits.
Most analysts say process-based business optimization will continue to grow because of a track record of effective implementation and because a process focus does not use technologies that require rip-and-replace change. Instead, software packages can be folded into existing IT infrastructure and, once installed, can lead to continually improved processes within the context of a single business process, a department, or even an entire enterprise.
For this reason, some departments have implemented some of these technologies without the participation of IT. Due to the flexibility of services-based implementations, integrating these projects—whether done by IT or the business units—is not terribly difficult or expensive.
The incursion of the Web deep into the heart of corporate operations has already demonstrated that the rate of change of technology is increasing and that IT departments must keep up. To do so, they need lean processes coupled with infrastructure that is reconfigurable and adjustable, so that the overall organization can leverage the new technologies to respond effectively to customer needs and competitive pressures. Intelligent business performance technologies provide exactly that capability while fulfilling the mandates for efficiency, agility, and regulatory compliance.
Outlook: Intelligent business performance platform
Enterprises use three key technologies to be more agile and more responsive in the face of changing competitive pressures and market vagaries. These solutions fit together naturally:
Both BI and BPM generate reports as a key benefit, although they report on different domains.
Both technologies also depend on business rules—BPM more so than BI—so there is an undeniable linkage between these technologies.
Moreover, in many scenarios, the same enterprise, or even the same division within an enterprise, would use all three technologies. Vendors of BI and BPM tools are well aware of these possibilities, so it is fair to expect that eventually, the major enterprise vendors—especially IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP—will formulate integrated, end-to-end product suites that contain substantial products from all three categories.
Although the IBPP will take some time to come together, its advent
is likely to push the constituent technologies into a much higher rate
of adoption.
Although the IBPP will take some time to come together as an integrated suite of software, its advent is likely to push the constituent technologies into a much higher rate of adoption. Likewise, in small and midsize businesses, a similar consolidation among open-source products will do much to introduce these technologies to companies unaccustomed to focusing their IT efforts on business process optimization.
For more information on the topics discussed in this article, contact Steve Cranford in the US (+1 703 610 7585) or Marcus Messershmidt (+49 211 981 4872) in Germany.
This automation of decision making provides significant benefits and guarantees that decisions are made consistently and impartially.
SAP’s vision of a business
performance product suite
