The only constant in business is change. Simply driving cost and delay out of core operations no longer guarantees success. Efficiency remains vital, but to compete in today's business environment companies also need to be agile, flexible, and innovative. They need to take a holistic view of the enterprise, across organizational and geographic boundaries, product boundaries, and system boundaries. In fact, the business's "value chain" is no longer even confined within the company walls. Customers, suppliers, and third parties have become an integral part of the end-to-end business processes defining the new extended enterprise.

Business process management is an attempt to provide that holistic view. It provides a new management discipline, a new suite of software technologies and tools, and a new IT implementation style based on concrete links between strategy and execution. This white paper explains SAP's place in the BPM landscape and describes its new offering in that arena, NetWeaver BPM.