Cordys, the provider of business process management (BPM) software that was founded by Jan Baan, co-founder of 1990s ERP market leader Baan, appointed Janet Heppner-Jones to the position of President, Cordys Inc. on May 20. In this role, Heppner-Jones will be responsible for driving the company’s North American expansion. We caught up with Janet to wish her well and, given her previous experience at leading application suppliers, to talk about my pet theories about the relationship among BPM, ERP and supply chain management (SCM).
Janet ran product management and marketing for the manufacturing sector at SAP America in the 1990s with previous experience at IBM and ERP provider Cincom, and subsequent time with Convey Software, product lifecycle management software maker MatrixOne (acquired by Dassault in 2006), and financial-services software supplier Syndera, a startup emphasizing business activity monitoring.
In other words, Janet appears to bring a lot of industry-specific experience to the market. I called her for an interview because of the ERP/SCM connection but the industry angle is probably more important. I believe industry specificity is key to BPM taking off (just as it was key to ERP taking off a decade ago). She says her industry diversity is needed at Cordys because it already has customers in North America in financial services, telecom and mobile, and SaaS firms as well as manufacturing sites with which Baan himself was most familiar.
As for my connecting the dots between ERP, SCM and BPM, she also agreed (maybe being polite). She says to think of Cordys “as a suite, an integrated toolkit or framework for putting together packages for ERP and SCM.” The alternative is to use expensive consulting time to integrate the ERP and SCM software point to point but she says even the SI’s like a Cordys-like BPM framework product because it lets
“users quickly change business processes” without a complex integration engine and that’s as good for the consulting business as it is for the end users.
So the $64,000 question was: Doesn’t it look like SAP has figured this out too with its recent BPM announcements? Her answer: SAP will probably begin to compete after the new NetWeaver BPM products become generally available near the end of 2008 but Cordys hasn’t seen them in the market yet.
Michael Dortch has been an analyst, 'information entrepreneur,' speaker, and writer about IT and 'the real world" for the past 30 years. After almost 10 years at the Robert Frances Group (RFG), Michael begins a new position with Aberdeen Group in September.
