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.

With the introduction of Visio 2013 Microsoft has dropped the binary data format .VSS and the XML format .VDX for diagram file storage. VSDX was introduced as the new XML data format for storage of diagrams and consists of a ZIP archive with a bundle of XML files. The TransWare developer team added support (see Blog post about Visio 2013) to write and read native .VSDX files for the new data format. In 2015 Microsoft introduced the new Visio 2016.

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.