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.

The SAP Solution Manager is the standard tool to blueprint and document SAP ERP solutions.  It concentrates on standard SAP transactions and the scoping and customizing of ERP solutions. On the other side SAP BPM is the SAP tool to automate and execute business processes. Both tools are based on SAP NetWeaver, but they are not linked directly together. You may wonder how to customize your SAP solution and to combine them in a project with the new approach of BPM automation. BPM-X is the tool to link modeling tools, repositories and BPM tools. Different tools can be plugged into the BPM-X model exchange bus by specific adapters.

Zephyr® is a leading test management software available as Zephyr® Enterprise Edition and as add-on for JIRA® on-premise or JIRA® cloud solutions. With Zephyr® on JIRA Cloud companies can create, plan, and execute tests right inside of their JIRA® cloud instance. The BPM-X® team has developed an integration link for a project between BPM modeling tools such as ARIS®, CaseWise, SPARX Enterprise Architect, Microsoft Visio® and many others to generate test-cases and scripts right out of the business process models and diagrams and to instantly load them into Zephyr® on JIRA®.

The support of business by IT and applications is preferentially described by business process models as part of a solution blueprint. Typical requirements are the demand for more efficiency, lower production costs and compliance with different policies, standards and regulations. Hence IT applications are increasingly interwoven with business complexity. “How to ensure the level of correctness needed for customized applications to avoid impact on the business due to insufficient quality assurance?” is one of the major questions on this matter.In agile projects the key issue in terms of testing methodologies is indeed the setup of a valid and plausible metrics scheme that permits to measure and compare the quality of a solution continuously over a period of time.

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.