Enterprise management tool vendors in the enterprise architecture (EA), business process analysis (BPA) or application lifecycle management (ALM) domains offer built-in integrations for standard formats such as XPDL or Microsoft® Visio®. The reason for these features is that vendors are compelled to have “tick-the-box” integration capabilities in order to smoothly align their offerings with schematic requests for information (RFI) or quotation (RFQ) from prospects.

Business process models created in the blueprinting phase of an SOA or ERP project can be leveraged for managing and improving the end-to-end integration, user acceptance and non-regression testing. The blueprinting exercise can deliver you much more value than just documenting and scoping of a new IT solution.