Rouven Morato, general manager of SAP Signavio, delivered his company’s perspective and answers to the top 5 process mining buyer questions for the Process Mining Battleground taking place on July 31.
In the discussion, Morato emphasized SAP Signavio’s “end to end transformation suite,” the role of process mining in optimizing ERP cloud migrations, and the company’s “Process AI” approach to generative artificial intelligence.
Below are highlights of the discussion.
Highlights
Prevalent Customer Use Cases and Industries
01:07 — One of the main use cases for SAP Signavio customers is application-driven transformation. There’s a big wave of enterprise resource planning (ERP) transformations going on, and SAP Signavio sees a lot of that with SAP ERP customers. SAP Signavio offers an end-to-end transformation suite in which the process mining component is an important part because it helps customers understand where their strengths and weaknesses are.
02:12 — Another big use case is an operational excellence play, with one dimension in operational efficiency (e.g., the customer wants to get the next $1 million of efficiencies out of their procure-to-pay process); this use case is not application-led but is really about the process itself. This impacts customer experience — specifically, what is the customer’s perception of the SAP Signavio customer’s processes? If a company wants to improve its customer satisfaction, such as through its Net Promoter Score, what processes need to change to affect those external perspectives?
03:16 — From an industry perspective, SAP Signavio sees demand “all over” but particularly in those industries that are experiencing the greatest disruptions and the greatest pressure for change: energy, automotive, and life sciences are three big examples.
How SAP Signavio Supports Shifting Priorities and Macroeconomic Conditions
04:34 — The company sees a big need among customers for greater agility so that they can react to market changes, especially in supply chains. Driving agility, resilience, and efficiency requires them to react at the “process layer” in order to change things quickly. SAP Signavio provides process observability on a data level that allows customers to look at what’s going on and define what kind of change is needed. It’s not about getting the next $500,000 out of a process and then stopping, but about establishing process excellence as a discipline.
06:25 — SAP Signavio provides all the knowledge accumulated over the last 50 years about business processes and process execution in SAP’s core applications, and it provides that back to customers with best practices, benchmarks, and methodologies in order to accelerate their transformations.
07:15 — SAP is sitting on a treasure trove of data — 75% of the world’s gross domestic product (GDP) is touching an SAP system. That provides business process context to ensure customers can drive their transformation forward during these difficult times. SAP’s end-to-end suite is well suited to help them on that journey.
Top Differentiators
08:18 — SAP Signavio sees process mining as one component of a bigger picture that also includes managing processes and process governance. “We believe in the notion of that end-to-end transformation toolchain, where process mining and the process analysis capabilities are a very important component. Now we differentiate because we believe that we are the strongest offer in the market on that end-to-end transformation suite.”
09:15 — SAP Signavio recently launched what it calls the “Plug and Gain” approach for fast time to insight; the company knows many of the underlying applications in the SAP world extremely well and can provide customers with fast insights and then focus on realizing the gains. It also does this for many non-SAP applications in the classical process mining way.
10:22 — Another differentiator is SAP Signavio’s ties to SAP, which has 300,000 customers across the world. The company leverages this wealth of data to help customers make decisions smarter and faster.
Making It Easier to Adopt Process Mining
11:38 — SAP Signavio offers a transparent pricing structure that allows customers to know clearly what they do and what they buy — it’s very reliable and very “plannable” for them, Morato says. The plug and gain approach brings the entire offering of SAP Signavio into one combined suite that allows customers to start small and scale.
12:16 — The company offers accelerators with predefined content and connectors that allow customers to realize value quicker. One great example is a customer that, within 12 months, advanced from having a divide between IT and business and a non-process-oriented culture. Since working with SAP Signavio, the customer has identified more than $50 million in potential process improvements.
AI’s Role in the Platform
14:18 — SAP Signavio aims to combine the power of generative AI with the context of business data and then apply fine-tuning and prompt engineering at scale. That uses business process context to turn generic information into results that are tailored to the customer’s business. SAP Signavio is using large language model (LLM) technology, deep learning, and machine learning to bring this to life. The company calls this Process AI, which builds on process models and LLMs, which are fine-tuned by leveraging SAP data sets and unique knowledge.
15:05 — While there are great AI algorithms from OpenAI and others, SAP Signavio thinks it has a true differentiator with its data. “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?'”
16:38 — AI could be used to predict future outcomes in process execution, leveraging all the data and the patterns that the AI can currently detect around execution, and that day may be coming sooner rather than later. “I must admit, one to two years back, we probably would’ve said this is five to 10 years out but with the changes we saw in OpenAI, ChatGPT, and the like, things have now come much closer,” Morato says.
