Twan van den Broek

The SAP Build Roadshow visited SAP NL office again, this time with Enterprise Automation. Your hosts Jan Penninkhof and Twan van den Broek recorded a recap episode covering: What is Enterprise Automation? What are integration points between SAP Signavio, SAP Build Process Automation and Integration Suite? What are Business Orchestration and Automation Technologies? Enterprise Automation is the sh!t Use cases from partner LeverX Feedback from participants This episode's guests are: Laura Liardo (SAP) Evgeniy Gorbunov (SAP) Coen Sanderink (Amista) Ivan Dosaev (LyondellBasell) Nico Deleener (Flexso) Dmitri Buriak (LeverX) Alex Bogdanovich (LeverX)

Here we go again, this week I will visit my 11th (!) SAP TechEd so far and for sure I haven’t had enough of it ;-) Focus of my visit to SAP TechEd has changed over the years. In the early years I filled my agenda with at much hands on sessions as possible. Lots of ABAP, some MiniApps (early mobile aspirations), SOA and later BPM. But somewhere from 2009 on it has changed to meet as much peers as possible. Sure, hands on sessions are still really valuable during the event, but meeting and discussing with experts and peers to build your network comes in handy throughout the whole year. Next to that I also like to bring something to SAP TechEd. I’ve done some talks on applying scrum to the SAP world , participated in BPM hands on sessions and as an ultimate achievement: reached SAP DemoJam stage in 2012, together with colleague Leo van Hengel. Photo courtesy SAP TechEd 2012 If you want to meet up with me this year, you can find me : Sunday SAP InnoJam ...

What an experience - being on stage at DemoJam at SAP TechEd . So totally different than doing a talk here or there. Watch Leo and me doing our #GarbageCollector show: Last week in Madrid Leo and I had our 6 minutes of fame - and we enjoyed every minute of it ;-) Why? We were on stage ! As SAP NetWeaver enthusiast one of the highest things to achieve is being on stage at #DemoJam - really! It was not only geek stuff on stage, we really had a customer business case to replace a cumbersome paper flow process. But of course we gamified this a little bit. Everything worked out technically . The license plate picture got uploaded to the cloud, got analysed, our process was started, the UI5 screens worked out and ... We didn't forget our text :-D Which was quite the opposite compared to our first rehearsal that afternoon, I just couldn't remember my first line ... Just in time - we had all components working together on the Friday before DemoJam Tuesday. We managed ...

The Garbage Collector - A cloud solution that simplifies your waste administration process. Deliver a simplified waste administration process to truck drivers and weigh bridge operators. See how SAP NetWeaver Cloud with SAP NetWeaver BPM and SAP UI5 actually facilitate a process that usually is handled in all kind of paper documents. The Garbage Collector is a solution for waste companies that want to facilitate their administrative process with their customers. Within a customer self service portal a truck with cargo is pre-announced. At arrival the truck's license plate gets scanned and the appropriate details from SAP will be presented to the operator at the weigh bridge. After the truck is weighed, the weight will be entered into the application and sent to SAP. The process ends with sending an invoice to the customer. In the case a customer order is not present in the backend system, the application triggers a message that the truck is unknown and the customer de...

Some Demo Jam thoughts The Demo Jam is a very powerful event at SAP TechEd to show latest innovations by customers, partners and SAP. No sales pitch allowed. No powerpoints or prezis. Just your demo and a timer set at 6 minutes. I even remember some teams doing live coding on stage. The last few years a lot is said on the Demo Jam event. It has become a marketing event for SAP, the rules of the game have been changed, it's only SAP on stage, ... Maybe you can recall the lively twitter stream during and after last year's Demo Jam. Thorsten Franz already wrote a great blog on the Genuine Demo Jam Awesomeness and he refers to another great blog by Michael Koch , What Is Wrong With SAP TechEd Demo Jam 2009 . Please allow me to share some thoughts on the Demo Jam as well. What makes Demo Jam so great? Live shows on stage by fellow SAP NetWeaver enthusiasts , some very serious and others hilarious  Customers, Partners and SAP employees willing to offer spare (own) time t...

Last year I wrote two blogs on process implementation with SAP NetWeaver CE7.1: - Easy process implementation with SAP NetWeaver BPM. - Easy process implementation with SAP NetWeaver BPM / the BRM sequel. I was wondering how things have changed with SAP NetWeaver CE7.2 . So I picked up the expense demo process again and reimplemented it in CE7.2. The differences are described in my SDN blog .

It is SAP TechEd Season, every year it is the same story: how to select out of 256 session and build your personal agenda. While browsing through all the sessions I kept a small Top 10 of SAP TechEd topics (*): (1) SAP NetWeaver (88 sessions) (10) BusinessObjects (25) (6) ABAP (16) (5) BI (16) (4) BPM (15) (2) SOA (10) (9) Web Dynpro (9) (3) Java (8) (8) Composition Environment (6) (7) Enterprise Services (5) Between brackets the results from 2008 . So what can we learn ? Java dropped down to #8, ABAP raised to #3. Investments in ABAP paying off? Business Objects climbed to #2, with BI on #4 a lot of 'suit' sessions are entering the SAP TechEd schedule. BO and BI are not real 'geeks', they are suits playing with technology ;-) SOA is falling down to #6. The hype is over? BPM lost one place to BI. I would have thought that BPM would climb some places this year. Runner up topics: Xcelsius (3) and Sustainability (3) (*) Disclaimer: This Top 10 i...

On January 13th we gathered for our TopForce Knowledge Night: SAP NetWeaver CE 7.1 EHP1 install party . Goal was to get the CE installed and running on the participants (16) laptops. After installation we planned to build the demo scenario as described in my SDN blog Easy process implementation with SAP NetWeaver BPM . Quite a full program, and we almost made it to the end. As we had to leave the office at 21:30 sharp we ran out of time and could not deploy and test run the application. Despite that we had a great evening with a lot of fun, strange issues (with 16 laptops you can get 16 different error messages) and new SAP NetWeaver BPM enthusiasts . Temperature is rising, will it work or not? See Tim looking really seriously to his process composer "Great stuff". Conclusions of the evening: Without the install manual it is very hard, installing CE is not plug and play Installing the downloaded SAP NetWeaver Developer Studio is even more complicated. Lucky for...

It took some time to get the movie recorded and uploaded to the internet. Finally my demo scenario of the last two posts is visible available in a tutorial movie on BPM/BRM. I hope it will help you explore things in the new SAP NetWeaver BPM world, despite the fuzziness of the movie. I have added it to the SDN blog, Easy process implementation with SAP NetWeaver BPM / the BRM sequel .

Pff, thanks to Arti from SAP Product Management BRM I found out that my BRM troubles were caused by my download release of SAP NetWeaver CE 7.1. I was using: Build id: 200809132152, downloaded in October 2008. After a fresh download and a complete re-install of CE, I am now using Build id: 200811082206. Installation of both CE and the IDE is still nog plug and play. But fortunately a very well written manual is delivered with the download: Install&Configure_CE_Preview71EHP1-Dec2008.pdf. When you experience an error during the CE installation, just click 'Retry' somewhere around step 20. And do that again when the same error pops up. That did the trick during my installation. I started the installation at 11:06 and it was finished at 12:42, including starting up the CE environment. A new record , 1,5 hour! The new installation resolved my BRM issues and you can read more about this in my SDN blog: Easy process implementation with SAP NetWeaver BPM / the BRM sequel .

During SAP TechEd08 I really got enthusiastic on SAP NetWeaver BPM , formerly known as Galaxy and in 2008 again branded as Galaxy. Especially the integration of the Business Rules engine made me want to try this at home. Personally I feel that BRM is not optional within BPM, it is not a feature, it belongs to the total concept of process orchestration. Without it, BPM is not complete. So I built a BPM demo for the TopForce Learning Day. A recap of this demo can be found in my SDN blog Easy process implementation with SAP NetWeaver BPM . A simple process but effective enough to show the power of the concept. I updated this process to implement BRM: Now I want to implement a business rule with BRM. But unfortunately I can’t get this to work. What I want to do is extend the process with a mapping step in which the rule get called. Within this rule the expense amount gets checked: Under €25 the expense gets validated automatically and above that the manager needs to approve or reject. In ...

This years SAP TechEd was held in Berlin, the ICC . Nice complex, originally build in the late fifties. A challenging experience if you look at the logistics of the event. The building’s nickname was Starship Enterprise (however if you look at the scale model, the building resembled the Battlestar Galactica more). Anyway all the floors and staircases fed the feeling that the building’s basis was a very interesting architecture but was never meant to host an event like the TechEd where attendees switch from location to location all the time. Not once I walked in one line to the location where the session was held. Fortunately I was never late and I didn’t miss a session as well. Catering was very well organized, especially the possibility to grab a prefab sandwich in between sessions. Saves you a lot of time compared to standing in line for the buffet. Community day I started off with the BPX community day . A change to meet with the SDN/BPX soul mates. The sessions prepared me for ...

With only 13 days to go I need to finalize my TechEd schedule soon. But so many sessions to choose from, 309 in total and only 3 days to plan them in. I know it is a kind of luxury problem, it must be the same feeling as my kids have in the toy shop ;-) Remind me building a business case to attend TechEd USA next year. Then I have 5 days to plan sessions ;-) Past two years I focused on Composite Applications and the Visual Composer . This year it is time for the next level, the next big thing in SAP land: Business Process Management . I am signing up (reserving a seat) for: BPM160, Building Your Own Composite Business Processes From Scratch With SAP NetWeaver BPM BPM262, How to Use Business Rules With Business Process Management And I will get in line for COMP278, Service Composition with ES Repository and Composite Application Framework BPM260, The ABC's of Modeling and Using Business Rules in SAP NetWeaver CE IM264, Embedded SAP NetWeaver BI with SAP NetWeaver Visual Composer 7...