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Photos: Google Waves hello to a new way of doing business

SAP bring Gravity to Google Wave
By Nick Heath, Contributor
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SAP bring Gravity to Google Wave

Since Google launched its Wave collaboration platform this year businesses have been testing how they can make use of the system.

The Wave platform offers users a chance to chat and work together in real-time within a window in a web browser that Google calls a 'wave'.

People can exchange real-time IM, photos, videos, maps and documents within the wave but it is the wave's ability to handle custom apps that promises to be the most useful for business.

At the recent TechEd conference in Vienna, ERP software specialist SAP showed an application called Gravity it has designed for Google Wave that allows staff to draw flow charts to model business processes, as seen here.

Each person who is working within a wave will see the same image, so as each person adds new parts to the business model the image is updated in real-time for everyone on the wave.

This allows staff from different departments and working in different locations to collaborate on designing the model.

Photo credit: SAP

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In its demonstration at the TechEd conference SAP demonstrated how the tool could be used to model business processes following the merger of two companies.

In the example a fictional bank and insurance company have merged and need to plan how they will start offering insurance to customers who are taking out home loans with the bank.

Photo credit: SAP

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The wave is opened by a home loans manager and a business analyst who use Gravity to design the business process model for selling insurance on mortgages offered by the bank.

They start by using the drawing tools within Gravity to create a flow chart showing the different checks the bank will carry out on an individual before giving them a mortgage, such as a property valuation, a credit check and identity check.

Each user can design parts of the business process model and each contribution is colour-coded to track who has done what.

Now the pair have mapped out how the bank will award mortgages they need to start modelling how insurance can be sold on these mortgage deals.

Photo credit: SAP

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To help design the process for selling insurance on the mortgage deals a business insurance analyst is invited to join the Wave.

Once the business insurance analyst has joined they can watch a replay of the Wave, which allows them to view how the business model was built and all the communications between staff building the model.

The analyst expands the model, adding in additional steps so bank staff offer mortgage protection, contents insurance and life insurance alongside the mortgage.

Alexander Dreiling, programme manager with SAP, said: "In the old world you would have to call a meeting where they would generate those models. What Gravity enables the business to do is to start modelling those business processes straight away."

Photo credit: SAP

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After completing the business model the people who created it decide to get a technician to check over the model, as is discussed within the wave here.

An IT technician called Tom is then invited to join the wave who, after playing the wave back, alters the business model to allow mortgage and insurance deals to be sold online.

Tom also adds an automated program or robot called Marvin to analyse the model, which realises there is a problem with the syntax used in the model and automatically adjusts it.

Photo credit: SAP

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Later in the day a manager is able to check the team's progress on building the model by accessing the wave using a mobile device, in this case an iPhone.

When it is complete the business model is then exported from Gravity into an SAP business process management tool called Netweaver BPM, where it will be refined before being put into action.

Google Wave is currently in a testing phase but when it goes live towards the end of next year SAP hopes to start offering Wave-based tools such as Gravity to its customers.

Photo credit: SAP

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