“But SAP Signavio solutions only work with SAP systems, right...?”
I’ve been asked more and more recently about whether SAP Signavio and SAP LeanIX solutions are truly system agnostic – or to put it another way, that soon, our solutions will only be usable within or in combination with SAP ERP. (The latest rumor said this policy would start in 2027.)
The simplest way to debunk this rumor and lay the topic to rest is to say that business transformation with SAP LeanIX and SAP Signavio is “great with everything, but better with SAP.”
What we mean by “system agnostic”
In the realm of software tools, being system agnostic means that a tool can operate independently of any specific software environment or platform. This flexibility allows the tool to integrate seamlessly with various systems, making it adaptable to different technological landscapes.
For businesses, this means they can leverage the tool without being constrained by their existing IT infrastructure. This ensures that organizations can adopt new tools without overhauling their current systems, saving time and resources.
And, when the time comes to add new capabilities or adjust existing ones, businesses using system agnostic tools are generally in a better position to maintain their existing workflows, with minimal interruption.
SAP Signavio and SAP LeanIX solutions
Fundamentally, our solutions are system agnostic – they work with both SAP and non-SAP technology stacks. You don’t have to be an S/4HANA customer, and you don’t have to build your process models or maintain your enterprise architecture in any particular system.
That said, if you are planning for the transition to SAP S/4HANA, it makes sense to invest the time required to figure out how you can take advantage of the benefits of integration. That’s why SAP Signavio solutions are embedded in RISE with SAP, as an additional benefit for those customers making use of existing SAP tools and capabilities.
Recent releases
In fact, 70% of the entire development budget for SAP LeanIX is directed towards vendor-agnostic features. This has paid dividends for our customers, since SAP LeanIX released 35% more vendor-agnostic features last year than in 2023. The same goes for SAP Signavio, where around two-thirds of the entire SAP Signavio development budget goes toward evolving and improving our core products.
Both funding mixes represent our commitment to building solutions that can be used by any company, regardless of the underlying tech stack.
To take a very recent example: in March this year, we released the Signal OData API. This application programming interface seamlessly extracts analytical insights from SAP Signavio Process Intelligence and integrates that information directly into your existing reporting or business intelligence tools – no matter which tools they are.
Tackling manual exports, spreadsheet wrangling, ad-hoc analysis and then manual uploading, just to share a simple end-to-end status update, is far from ideal when quick access to information can be the difference between leaders making the right or wrong call.
Instead, using this API provides a reliable, automated and secure way to access key analytical insights from SAP Signavio Process Intelligence, helping to streamline workflows, increase alignment and improve decision-making.
This follows our latest product update for SAP Signavio: the process modeler, text to process capability. This AI-assisted capability helps quickly transform textual descriptions of business processes into the standard language of process modeling – BPMN diagrams.
In other words, this new capability can simplify and expedite process modeling regardless of how the processes had previously been recorded, using other modeling tools or not, as long as the process descriptions are available. This agnostic approach helps customers accelerate the creation of process diagrams and even has the potential to redefine the way companies document processes.
Our customers agree
Talking of customers, our success stories show numerous examples of how our solutions can be used across all sorts of different tools and data sets.
We’ve had a global financial services firm that used SAP Signavio solutions to enhance its customer service processes, where integration with an existing third-party CRM system was a fundamental requirement; and one government department I know of uses SAP Signavio to mine data logs created by a different provider, to help streamline incident management and improve efficiency.
Plus, a large utilities company used SAP Signavio solutions to connect process information across multiple IT systems to analyze the interaction of applications, processes, and customer journeys. This integration allowed the firm to gain valuable insights into customer interactions and optimize its service delivery.
As these examples show, it’s a fact of modern business that just about every company has multiple data sources, a range of tools, and a technology landscape that has to be flexible and adaptable. If nothing else, it wouldn't make sense for SAP Signavio and SAP LeanIX solutions to only work with SAP data; it simply isn’t the way the business world works – and to be perfectly clear, it isn’t the way we work either.