Business objects, the relevant data of a business application, usually possess a life cycle that specifies how a business object (eg. a customer record) is created, maintained, modified, deleted or archived within a business application. In an SAP system, business object life cycles are handled by an approach called status and action management (SAM), which specifies the operations that are available on a business object within an SAP system. The authors of this publication show how SAM descriptions of business objects be be used to synthesize business processes by an automatic planning system. The planning system is used to automatically combine SAM operations such that a set of business objects is manipulated to achieve a specific business goal (e.g. to pay all open bills). Using this approach, automatic planning systems support the typical tasks of developing new business processes or extending, redesigning, and customizing an existing business process.