O'Connor: Certainly. The profile of a BPX, or Business Process Expert, extends from C level right down throughout every area of the company - maintenance, engineers - so you've got all the business processes all along the way in all aspects of the value chains that just need to be linked with their respective compliance needs.

Reed: The BPX community continues to help SAP and TechniData define these specifications of further development efforts using the BPX community wiki. For those who haven't used a wiki - it's a word that's almost hard to wrap your head around in a corporate setting - what are the advantages of this type of collaboration versus more of a traditional development model?

O'Connor: Well, wiki itself is an incredible development in the use of the online tools. First of all, if you're talking about community, then communication is integral to any community. Unless people are communicating with each other, they can't really say that they're part of the community, so the wiki enables this because you can have collaboration at a level that was not possible before.

For instance, if you wanted to establish a project a couple of years ago, then you'd be relying heavily on, if you're dealing with a global organization, email traffic. You can now efficiently manage your project by having a wiki because you're not sending documents to different locations; you're encouraging people to just to visit the one wiki document and if they have uploads to make, if they have versions to change, they can do so very efficiently.

But even in the social sphere, I think a lot of these Web 2.0 developments are taken for granted by kids: they're using different web sites to share photographs and share videos, and really these industries are just catching up with that because you can use these tools to effectively share documents, set milestones, set timelines and deliver on it. It saves us.

Of course, in doing so, you're not going to rule out the need for face-to-face meetings because you can have as many virtual meetings as you like, but you will, at some point, have to have a face-to-face meeting. But what wiki is doing is expediting projects; it's encouraging people to think in a different manner because they're able now to share to a broad audience and get feedback - their ideas, their views, their thoughts on different topics.

It's accelerating areas of top leadership in the industries that I'm looking at. It also facilitates collaboration between different companies on specific projects, which I think is good for all because it enables everyone to leverage expertise that may not be within their own firm, and deliver value for customers, deliver compliance for the general public, which is obviously a good thing.

Reed: So, let me make sure I have this correct - you're saying that if I learn how to collaborate on a wiki, I can not only improve my development process, but I might actually be able to get less email?

O'Connor: You certainly could do that because you're not only cutting down on the number of emails that you need, but I think it's even more difficult to run a project by email. It's almost impossible, because the only way you can check back on the latest version of a document, for instance, is by going to the dates the emails arrived. Depending on your positioning, if you're working on a project that is involving a team in India and the U.S. and Europe for instance, then with the time zone differences, people may be sending in their versions of the document and people in another location are updating a previous version of the document, so you can't effectively manage things via email.

You transfer it to a wiki, and people are able to go in and make their changes, make their updates, give their comments, give their views and you can create different versions of a document that are dated online so you've got the information you need at the right time.

Reed: One phrase I saw to describe this trend we're talking about today is the "customer-focused SAP ecosystem in action." Do you see other ways this ecosystem can help SAP customers?

O'Connor: Certainly, one primary area of the customer-focused ecosystems within the SAP industry setup is called the Industry Value Network initiative. Industry Value Networks are specifically designed to address customer needs within one industry area. Within process industries, for instance, we've got separate Value Networks or IVNs established for oil and gas, for mining, for chemicals, and also within the mill products area for forest and paper.

Now, the whole drive behind Industry Value Networks is to ensure that we can provide end-to-end solutions for customers by leveraging the expertise from a broad range of software vendors, system integrators and technology vendors. This has been the IVN initiative, which has been running for the past two years, so it's quite well established. We work also closely with key customers in these industries to ensure that we're on the right track and they provide a steering influence for us.

The idea is to give a single point of entry to best practices and business processes, and also access to solutions where you can lower the TCO or the Total Cost of Ownership for customers within that industry and also accelerate and increase the return on investment.

I suppose one key thing to mention is that TechniData, who worked with SAP on this REACH compliance solution, are members of a number of the Industry Value Networks in the process industry area. The expertise, the experiences that a company like that will bring from the chemicals arena, they can also give the benefits of that expertise to other areas such as oil and gas and the mill products arena.

Reed: Kieran, there's a lot more we can say about these issues, but we're running out of time and we've covered a lot of good ground today. Is there anything we haven't covered that you'd like to touch on?

O'Connor: I touched earlier on the Roundtable for REACH, which has been established in an area called the Collaboration Workspace from SAP. The Collaboration Workspace is yet another new development from the BPX community, and it's available on a sister platform to the BPX community. But the REACH Roundtable is a public area, so those interested in the topic or those who have something that could be shared with the community are more than welcome to dive into the Roundtable, see what's high on the agenda there and start a discussion or comment on any of the blogs that are in there.

Reed: Well, Kieran, it's time for us to wrap. Thanks for your excellent comments. I appreciate you joining us today and we'll continue this conversation on the SAP BPX web site for sure.

For those of you who haven't joined BPX yet, it's free to register and if you're already an SDN member, you can join BPX by checking the BPX box on your SDN profile. I'd like our listeners to note that in our text description of this podcast, we will include relevant links, including a link directly to the BPX chemicals industry as well as the REACH Roundtable link, so look for that online.

On that note, I'd like to thank our listeners for joining us today for this BPX community podcast. Thanks again to Kieran O'Connor for joining us and sharing his insight on how BPX is enhancing the value proposition for SAP customers. With that, this is Jon Reed from JonERP.com signing off. We'll see you online soon at BPX.SAP.com.