In many organizations most of the business processes Order Management, Manufacturing, Warehouse, etc runs in a single ERP and they mostly follow file based integration i.e. the middleware sends files to ERPs and vice versa.
Wondering whether there will be any benefit if we implement a BPM here. According to me BPM is used to model/orchestrate the business processes across different systems so that you get one holistic view of your business processes. If we take the Order Management process for e.g. the ERP does the inventory check internally while processing the order and I won’t be able model this in my BPM layer. Like these lot many business validations are done by the ERP itself. In this case I can’t even visualize how my Order Management process model will look like.
Also, how do we know which business logic should be modeled in the BPM layer and which ones should be left to the ERPs?
Let me explain a Purchase order process implmented in webMethods for a manufacturing customer
We have implemented Purchase Requisition (PR) validation and Purchase Order (PO) creation and the validation using BPM process.
The PR will be created by using a customers internal portal page which will then create PR in ERP system (in blocked state) and then a notification is fired to send the iDoc to webMethods.
In our model, we used to call SAP Functions to get the Purchase data. Then different tasks were queued (based on conditions) to perform validations, such as Functional validations, purchasing verifications etc. Based on results of validation, the PR will be either Unblocked in ERP or deleted from ERV (via RFC)
Once the PR is Un-blocked in ERP, a new notification will be triggered to start a PO workflow (2nd process model), this process will again has human validations before unblocking PO in ERP.
Deciding on which logic should be implemented in BPM layer would probably depend on what currently ERP system is capable of handling.
Apart from above narrated…it gives entire process visibility,tracking,validation (PO or delivery or logistics movement) and mainly work flow (human intervention/credit check approvals) etc…and in your case its single ERP which can be straight forward.