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German software giant SAP hopes to bolster its capacity to help its customers quickly understand, improve, transform and manage their business processes at scale after striking a deal to acquire business process management software vendor Signavio.
Also headquartered in Germany, Signavio has made a name for itself as a major player in the global business process intelligence and process management space.
With offices in the US, UK, France, Netherlands, Switzerland, Sweden, Canada, Singapore, Japan, India and Australia, the company claims over a million users in more than 2,000 organisations worldwide.
Signavio’s integrated cloud-native process management suite “perfectly complements” existing business process intelligence software from SAP, the vendor said.
It is hoped that with the addition of Signavio, SAP will now be able to provide a holistic suite of flexible process transformation solutions for customers to transform their business processes, end-to-end.
This includes business process design, benchmarking, gap analysis, improvement and process change management, the company said.
It is claimed the combination of SAP and Signavio will bring together standardised process key performance indicators (KPIs), broad benchmarking data, process mining, user behaviour mining and customer experience analysis to give customers a 360-degree view of every business process.
“In today’s dynamic world, companies of all sizes need the ability to rapidly adapt their business processes to fast-changing market conditions,” CFO and executive board member Luka Mucic said.
“I cannot overstress the importance for companies to be able to design, benchmark, improve and transform business processes across the enterprise to support new capabilities and business models.
“The combination of business process intelligence from SAP and Signavio creates a leading end-to-end business process transformation suite to help our customers achieve the requirements needed to gain a competitive edge.
“SAP and Signavio are a great cultural fit and share the same values, and we are excited about joining forces with them to deliver on our Intelligent Enterprise strategy,” he added.
It should be noted that, by SAP’s own admission, business process intelligence is a key part of the vendor’s new offering, the ‘RISE with SAP’ package – a kind of business transformation-as-a-service offering underpinned by its SAP S/4HANA product.
This offering, the company claims, helps its customers perform a holistic business transformation that makes them resilient, agile and intelligent. It includes support for an accelerated move of core enterprise resource planning (ERP) processes to the cloud.
“Signavio’s capabilities in making business processes intelligent are highly complementary with our own,” SAP Business Process Intelligence general manager Rouven Morato said.
“While we are providing insights using our deep understanding of business processes running in our applications and based on that can provide unmatched benchmarking capabilities, Signavio’s approach to transformation is process model-centric.
“Signavio’s process modelling and management functionalities, and its process governance and collaboration solution, are among the market leaders in the industry and are the missing component for providing our customers an end-to-end process transformation suite.”
For Signavio co-founder and CEO Gero Decker, by joining SAP, the company gets to tap into its soon-to-be parent’s business application software portfolio.
“Considering the positioning of SAP, its geographical coverage and financial muscle, SAP is the biggest and best platform to bring process intelligence to every organisation. For us, it’s a massive jump start and a major opportunity to help SAP become a key player in the business process management and intelligence space,” Decker said.
SAP and Signavio have agreed not to disclose the purchase price or other financial details of this transaction. The transaction is expected to close in the first quarter of 2021, subject to regulatory approval.
