When I started researching the ERP market in 1991 for Datapro, I quickly found there were over 100 ERP software providers even though most analysts only counted Oracle, J.D. Edwards, SAP and a dozen or so guys that are now part of Infor. (Some analysts even counted Hyperion's accounting software.) Similarly when I formally started researching business process management (BPM) 12 years later for IDC, I quickly found there were over 100 BPM software providers although most analysts were talking about a half dozen pureplays. This and other similarities between the maturation of the ERP and BPM markets--and the functionality of the two types of enterprise software--made comparing the two important information technology (IT) trends a foundation for my research methodology.
So I was happy to find that Garth Knudson of Handysoft, who recently provided ebizQ with this guest editorial on Transforming Email 'Noise' into Business Process Knowledge, shares a similar appreciation of commparing and contrasting BPM and ERP. He and I completed a podcast on June 11, which will appear on ebizQ shortly.
The necessary brevity of a podcast (how long do you want to listen to my monotone?) means we couldn't cover half of what we each wanted to say. For example, below are some of Garth's conclusions which are not included in the podcast:
- ERP provides very good embedded workflow, but poor enterprise workflow. BPM supports both functional and enterprise workflow scenarios.
- BPM is far more agile than ERP systems, where BPM requires on average 3 months to implement, ERP takes 20 months. Change management is also faster with BPM
- ERP often needs BPM to help realize its full value.
- If BPM isn't for use with ERP, why do so many vendors provide adapters?
If you read any of my blog posts on supply chain automation and BPM, you know I especially agree with his third point above. The podcast itself goes into:
- How does BPM compare with ERP?
- Does BPM compete with ERP, does it replace ERP, can it co-exist with ERP?
- Which should I do first?
Look for it on ebizQ somtime in June 2009. It will be referenced in a BPM in Action blog post.
And send in your emails and comments on how you think BPM and ERP go together. Or not!
-- Dennis Byron
Being an IT Manager with both of the program managers responsible for ERP and BPM as direct reports, I have found that BPM is the most powerful when it extends ERP.
Take the first point on Graham's list of concluding points,
“1. ERP provides very good embedded workflow, but poor enterprise workflow. BPM supports both functional and enterprise workflow scenarios.�
Our ERP system provides a good change management system for changes within the ERP system itself, but does not extend well for the rest of the systems in our landscape. On the other hand our change management system built in our BPM software (here is my shameless plug for Serena Business Mashups) is used for change management for our sales CRM program, our customer facing applications program, our internal applications program as well as our ERP program.
Now we don’t get in and try and have our BPM system try to manage the code and configurations within our ERP system. That functionality is the strong suit of the ERP system. We use each system for its strengths and let one system extend the other. What we do do, is we take change requests for our entire enterprise in through our Serena SBM workflows (our BPM system). We manage those changes with our business units all the way from approval by the change control review boards (CCRB) through to the deployment to production using these same workflows.
In the workflows, when a change is approved by the CCRB in our BPM process and we need to make a change in our ERP system, we call an ERP web service that creates the container for those changes in our ERP system and then send the notification from our BPM process that the change is approved to be worked on, that the container has been created, and the development team can proceed thereby extending our BPM change management process into our ERP landscape and vice versa.
To also reinforce Graham's other points:
“2. BPM is far more agile than ERP systems, where BPM requires on average 3 months to implement, ERP takes 20 months. Change management is also faster with BPM�. This was created in our BPM system in a matter of weeks and would have taken months to be created in our ERP system if we could have done it at all.
“3. ERP often needs BPM to help realize its full value.� We have extended our sales approval, expense reporting, and other process using BPM combined with ERP.
“4. If BPM isn't for use with ERP, why do so many vendors provide adapters?� The ERP vendors like to tell me that they are the magic silver bullet and I suspect that they only provide web services for integrations because they were loosing business to other vendors when they didn’t. As for the BPM vendors, I haven’t ran across them making statements that they aren’t for use with ERP.
An IT Manager’s thoughts….
Robert Mills | IT Manager, Worldwide Applications | rmills@serena.com
Certified Scrum Master | Certified Scrum Product Owner
Serena Software, Inc.