Empower Your Business by Utilizing a Process-Driven IT Architecture and the Flexibility of the Cloud

Digitalization Is Changing the Market

Digitalization has not only affected our private lives in recent years but is more and more becoming a critical factor for companies around the world. Start-ups are ready to disrupt established markets with fresh ideas and new processes. In order to cope with these changes, companies need to find a way to adapt and compete.

From our experience, many companies invest a lot of time and money into implementing their standard processes but neglect their USP processes. Over the years many of their individual business processes have grown into inflexible black box IT implementations. This results in lengthy change procedures which prevent these companies from keeping pace with the markets.

Finding the Right Approach

As a first step in order to prevent this from happening, companies need to identify their USP processes. Business and IT need to interact collaboratively with each other in order to achieve the best possible results and start building flexible process-driven IT architectures. The key to success is to make use of micro-processes which are exchangeable in the future.

Figure: Micro-segmentation of processes enables flexibility for the future

SAP Cloud Platform (SCP) Workflow and Business Rules deliver the tools to achieve exactly that. Using SCP Workflow to model and deploy BPMN 2.0 based business processes lays the foundation of adjustable and quickly automatable business processes which are understood by business and IT. In combination with SCP Business Rules customers can enhance flexibility of their processes even further since this service enables them to maintain their process rules within the specialized business departments directly.

To have these services available in the SAP Cloud Platform lowers the initial hurdles for customers to get started with creating process-driven IT architectures enormously. In the on-premise world customers were required to make a pretty heavy pre-invest and have the infrastructure ready even for simple proof of concepts. Individual processes can now be automated much quicker and with less initial effort due to the easy and flexible service activation in the cloud.

Getting Started Step by Step

We first ask our customers to examine their processes and then think about where they want to invest their energy. Their unique and differentiating processes are usually the ones which will carry the most benefit when transferred to and automated in a process-driven environment.

In order to get started most customers typically start out with smaller processes and then work their way up to bigger and more complex process chains.

In addition to the development of individual cross-application processes we also see enhancements of existing cloud and on-premise applications as core use cases for SCP Workflow and SCP Business Rules (also independently from each other).

Be Ahead of the Market

We expect the cloud adaption to rise significantly within the next few years. If you combine this with the fact that more and more companies will need to invest into topics around digitalization and automation, you can see that cloud services like SCP Workflow and SCP Business Rules will play a key role on the IT-roadmap of many companies.

In order to stay ahead of your competition, now is the right time to look into your processes and your technology. Is your company prepared to start the journey into digitalization?

NTT DATA Business Solutions already supports several customer projects which make use of the new cloud-based workflow service component.

Interested into the capabilities of our methodology and the new SAP technologies? Don’t hesitate to get in touch with our expert Christian Breitsprecher.