Rouven Morato, general manager of SAP Signavio, met with Acceleration Economy to address the top five buyer questions developed by our practitioner analysts representing the modern executive buying committee, as part of the vendor Q&A portion of the Process Mining Battleground.
Morato spoke in detail about the ways customers can benefit from the wealth of data and business process expertise available to SAP Signavio customers because of the parent company’s massive footprint in enterprise business applications. He positioned process mining as a component of a turnkey suite that helps manage application migrations, among other business functions. He spoke to customer experience benefits of using the company’s process mining, as well as its competitive differentiators and artificial intelligence (AI)/generative AI approach.
Top Customer Use Cases and Industries
The “North Star” metrics that SAP Signavio uses to deliver customer success are fast time to insight and fast time to adapt so they can realize maximum value from process mining.
These priorities play out across use cases including application-driven transformation, and Morato cites the ongoing wave of enterprise resource planning (ERP) transformations going on, including those among SAP ERP customers, as an example; the SAP S/4 HANA ERP cloud grew 74% in the fiscal second quarter, a figure that validates customers’ push to make this transition. The company offers an “end-to-end transformation suite in which process mining serves to identify strengths and weaknesses in the current implementation and automate the transformation process,” he says. Morato and other officials explained the company’s goal is not just to execute a streamlined transformation but to also help customers continuously optimize performance of the ERP system and the underlying processes.
Another major use case is applying process mining for operational efficiency in terms of how processes impact customers (as measured, for example, through the widely used Net Promoter Score) and how process mining can help effect changes to improve those processes. “Our mining solution allows customers now to bring these two together to really understand the process performance in conjunction with the impact on the experience of customers, suppliers, and also employees,” Morato explains.
From an industry perspective, SAP Signavio is experiencing strong demand across industries, but Morato points to industries that are experiencing the greatest demands for change, citing energy, automotive, and life sciences, as three prominent examples embracing SAP Signavio.
How SAP Signavio Addresses Shifting Priorities and Macroeconomic Conditions
In today’s challenging macroeconomic environment, customers need greater agility to react to market changes, as well as greater resilience, particularly within supply chains. To do so, they need to adapt at their “process layer,” he says. “It’s not about getting the next $500,000 out of a process and then stopping, it’s really about establishing process excellence as a discipline.”
Which companies are the most important vendors in AI and hyperautomation? Check out the Acceleration Economy AI/Hyperautomation Top 10 Shortlist.
With SAP’s more than 50 years in business and hundreds of thousands of customers — Morato says that “75% of the world’s GDP [gross domestic product] is touching an SAP system” — SAP Signavio has accumulated a treasure trove of data on business processes and process execution through its core applications, and can leverage that knowledge to provide best practices, benchmarks, and methodologies to customers to accelerate their transformations.
Top Differentiators
SAP Signavio positions process mining as an important component of an “end-to-end transformation tool chain” and as being vital to ensuring changes happen in IT systems that support processes. “We differentiate because we believe that we are the strongest offering in the market on that end-to-end transformation suite,” Morato says.
Speed to insight is also an important differentiator, and the company recently launched an approach it calls “Plug and Gain.” Because of its presence in many of the underlying applications, SAP can provide customers with fast insights and then focus on realizing the gains that are possible.
There’s also a focus on customer experience or what Morato calls “being able to blend process and experience analysis and being able to bring these two worlds together . . . Giving them tooling that allows them to analyze processes in the context of a customer experience has become extremely important.”
“We differentiate because we believe that we are the strongest offering in the market on that end-to-end transformation suite.”
Rouven Morato, general manager, SAP Signavio
A final differentiator is SAP Signavio’s relationship with parent SAP and its 300,000 worldwide customers. The vast amounts of data and insights this yields help customers benefit from resources including best practices, benchmarking data, and reference models.
Making It Easier to Adopt Process Mining
SAP Signavio allows customers to start small and scale up as they register wins with the technology. To that end, Plug and Gain brings the entire offering of SAP Signavio into one suite. Morato says there’s a transparent pricing structure that allows customers to know clearly what they do and what they buy, making use of the software “very reliable and very plannable.”
A set of accelerators provide customers with predefined content and connectors to realize value more quickly. One customer that started out with the company was siloed and lacking a strong process orientation. Working with SAP Signavio, that customer has identified more than $50 million in potential process improvements and now has a community of more than 50 process mining practitioners.
AI’s Role in the Product Roadmap
SAP Signavio aims to combine the power of generative AI with business process context to turn generic information into results that are tailored to the customer’s business. SAP Signavio calls this Process AI: It’s built on process models and large language models and then fine-tuned by leveraging SAP datasets, content, and knowledge of industry best practices from engagements with thousands of customers.
What differentiates algorithms such as OpenAI is the data underneath, and SAP believes it has the data to be a major differentiator. “Our engine will have exceptional capabilities to answer, in this case, specific process questions, process performance questions like ‘Where can I improve my procurement process in Europe?'”
AI can be used to predict future outcomes of process execution, leveraging data and the patterns that the AI can currently detect around execution. “We believe this will have a huge impact on the way process transformation, process excellence will be lived by our customers in the future, and not so far out,” Morato says, explaining that timelines for AI applications and use cases have accelerated dramatically this year.
