SAP Process Control Simplifies uses continuous control monitoring, and streamlined testing, and reduces risk with real-time insight into control status and key issues. It can be deployed on premise or in the cloud.
BizTalk is well suited as middleware. Where you wish to translate an input file into an output file and send it to some endpoint. In our case, we used it to convert and send files to SAP. In many ways, it very flexible, and you can do almost anything you want with it. In many ways, it's a better solution than your SAP XI or PI as middleware, since it's much less expensive, and allows you do interface with non-SAP systems.
In my opinion, SAP Process Control is well suited for bigger companies with an already mature Internal Control System as well as for bigger companies who want to completely new/redesign the internal control system. The size of the company, as well as the budget, is quite important when thinking about the implementation of SAP Process Control. A smaller company with e.g., 150 people should think more about implementing SAP FCM.
It is very user friendly. Users can change rules during run time and change workflow.
Huge capacity for queueing messages. It supports all types of adapters like Oracle, Salesforce, SMTP, FTP, etc. Also users can built custom adaptors.
If users want to dynamically deploy their solution without any downtime, this is a perfect solution. BizTalk will be a good fit, especially for public-facing websites.
Well-proven in the market. I used it when developing a website for Virgin Trains, catering more than 800K user requests per day.
BizTalk Server has been supported for more than 15 years. It is well proven in the market. Microsoft has provided excellent support with technical issues.
BizTalk was selected here mainly because it is easy to integrate to a .NET application (most of them are Web Service, WCF SOAP, WCF REST and Web API) and many backend databases are Microsoft SQL Server. Another benefit is that the monitoring job is easy to set up and centralize with other .NET application monitoring jobs.
The connectivity with other SAP products out of the SAP GRC suite, like Access Control and so on, was key for the decision. Also we had an already mature SAP System landscape as well as having internal processes that were similar to the SAP Process Control standard processes helped us with the decision to implement SAP Process Control.
A positive impact has been the quicker turnaround time of a part request and that part showing up in SAP using Biztalk as middleware.
A somewhat negative impact has been the somewhat insufficient error logging/message capture settings that Biztalk provide. This has caused occasional delays when attempted to create parts for the business.
A somewhat negative impact has been the need to have a specialized developer who understands Biztalk to troubleshoot issues with the Biztalk and SAP interaction when creating parts, and when adding new fields to the parts.
