As the economy slows and as more companies look at managed services and Software
as a Service (SaaS), IDS Scheer AG says business process modeling and optimization
is becoming ever more strategic to businesses.

A German business process modeling (BPM) vendor, IDS Scheer produces the ARIS
platform of BPM tools. It's used by consultants and partners to ease and lessen
the risk of BI implementations and upgrades, and the company has relationships
with the major BI vendors, including SAP, Oracle and Microsoft. IDC Scheer also
has a strong SAP implementation business, and was recently named SAP's 2007
Channel Partner of the Year.

At the company's annual Americas user conference in Orlando, Thomas Volk, IDS
Scheer's president and CEO, said companies are facing more pressure to change
and be ready to adapt to changing business demands, but they don't always know
if the proposed changes will lead to the desired results. BPM, said Volk, can
help companies make the right changes.

"Processes are the key element to change because that determines how the
change will happen," said Volk. "The ability to continuously improve
your business...has proven to be critical to customers with the changes they
are facing."

In a slowing economy long-term projects and investments that don't have an
immediate ROI are often the first to go, and for companies in non-process intensive
industries investing in BPM may not be seen as a priority. It's in just these
situations though, said Volk, that BPM can play an important role.

"Fine-tuning your existing infrastructure and using it more efficiently
without buying more IT is a good value proposition," said Volk, noting
a new product from IDS Scheer can help businesses better leverage their existing
infrastructure. "It looks at how do you link your IT assets with the business
processes and leverage them more, so some of the investments you'd planned maybe
we don't have to do anymore."

Companies are also increasingly turning to managed services and SaaS as a less
risky way to upgrade their IT infrastructures, but Volk said moving to one of
these models doesn't make modeling, understanding and fine tuning business processes
any less important, and isn't impacting IDS Scheer's business.

"This introduces a change in the business and how you do things, and from
that perspective we don't see it hindering us," said Volk. "It's another
reason to make sure, when moving to a new environment, that they're actually
getting the benefits and you can link the change to the result you want."

With the ARIS platform, businesses can define their business processes, examine
proposed changes, and test and simulate the outcome to see what works well and
what needs to be tweaked. It's important to not just look at how the business
model will change, said Volk, but how the changes will impact the business from
end to end, along with the underlying technologies that will need to be adapted

"All these elements are becoming more and more critical to executives
and businesses," said Volk.

On the SAP side in particular, the business is changing as with SAP 6.0 the
vendor changes its upgrade cadence from major upgrades to regular enhancement
packs designed to be less disruptive. Jim Shepherd, a senior vice-president
with Boston-based AMR Research said as companies become able to decide which
enhancement packs to implement, the enhancement packs will likely be more closely
linked to process improvement.

But while IDS Scheer would like process improvement to be a continuous exercise,
Shepherd said for most companies that's just not the case.

"You'd like it to be continuous but the reality is process improvement
tends to be in a project basis," said Shepherd.

» posted by abennett

ITBusiness.ca

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