In business transformation projects like enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementations, a major part of the labor for consultancies is gathering information from clients, and analyzing business processes (BP) to streamline and cleverly improve BPs by IT support. In an ERP project one of the main deliverables created is a business blueprint document describing the BPs and their implementation in ERP solutions like SAP®, Oracle® or Microsoft®.

The  American Productivity & Quality Center (APQC) defines and manages process classification frameworks (PCF) for specific industries as well as cross industry.  The PCF allows for the efficient definition of processes, the benchmarking of performance and the structuring of knowledge and content. There is a remarkable number of organizations trying to benefit from the APQC PCF which are also huge SAP shops.  Surprisingly it does not seem evident how the APQC best practices can meet the SAP SLA requirements to document core business processes with the SAP® Solution Manager tool.

For BPA (business process analysis) many tools are on the market: ARIS®, CaseWise®, MEGA, IBM® Rational® System Architect, OpenText® ProVision and others. But you may say ‘this is well, fine and good, but the common siutation in industry and large organizations is that Microsoft® Visio® is used throughout business departments and project teams for business process mapping.’ This post reviews how Visio® process models can be leveraged for business-driven testing and the generation of test cases.

SAP® offers leading enterprise resource planning (ERP) software for comprehensive support of enterprise business processes. Organizations require powerful ERP functionality for their implementation of custom business requirements and company compliance. All in all this leads to huge ERP implementations with sometimes confusing complexity resulting in increasing challenges for governance of changes by IT departments.