Why did SAP Acquire One of our Favorite Partners, Signavio?

Lima Consulting Group

Just last year in Orlando at Signavio Partner Day, we got a good view of the exciting progress that Signavio is making in their roll out of their operating model after they had a very large B Round. And true to their roll out, they continued to invest in the North America. We did two customer webinars to show how we’re using Signavio at a leading financial services firm who serves nonprofits, and Tyson Foods. (See links to webinars below)

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But why would SAP be interested in a Business Process Management Notation 2.0 compliant platform?  Well, it’s the vision. Signavio isn’t just a BPMN tool anymore. They are going after Celonis in Process Intelligence. Just look at how they position themselves in the press release as a Process Intelligence Company.

What is process intelligence?

Process intelligence is logging what’s going on with your ERP and overlaying that with the desired business process. So, once you connect the log files from SAP, you’re going to be able to see exactly what happened vs. how the process was intended.

Geography

It doesn’t hurt that SAP and Signavio are headquartered in Germany; Walldorf and Berlin, respectively. The collaboration to interconnect the Signavio PI capability with SAP makes sense given that so many of the Signavio senior executives grew up in SAP.

SAP is also trying to do more in enabling the customer experience and the employee experience.  Consider their acquisition of Qualtrics for a massive $8 billion in November of 2018. In that same month, they acquired Contextor, a Robotic Process Automation solution, and Emarsys, an omnichannel marketing solution based in Austria. It’s clear that SAP is trying to take a back-office path towards providing winning customer experiences.

SAP Intends to Take a Backoffice Path Towards Providing Winning Customer Experiences

We will provide more insights as we learn more, but since Signavio has recently announced their rollout of the Customer Journey Mapping module, and with their continued investment in their innovative Process Intelligence capabilities, it’s clear to see why SAP picked a great acquisition to bolt onto their ecosystem.

Connecting the back-office with the front office is part of any digital transformation. Organizations are needing to connect teams that have never worked together before to create seamless customer journeys. If that’s not enough, everyone is working remotely. The collaboration hub helps organizations to document desired business process so that they can be digitized. Without the proper documentation, the builders don’t have the necessary business requirements documentation. Since we’re not able to walk down the hall for the daily stand-up, its’ imperative that the details for processes are well understood across the enterprise.

We think this will be a win for any organization that wants to scale their business, standardize their processes, and gain operational efficiencies.

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