iNet - The Only Platform in Existence for Creating True Composite MS Office Business Applications

ERP-Link

The iNet Business Optimization Platform enables SAP users working in MS applications to execute fully interoperable MS-SAP processes

SAP-.NET Distributed Business Processes:

Unique business processes define an enterprise. They can provide the cornerstone of competitive advantage. Business Processes enable the ability to satisfy and retain customers, to maximize partnerships with other businesses, and to out-execute competitors.

Key processes involve decision points at critical stages; take, for example, approving a requested extension of additional credit to a customer during the course of processing their purchase order. Embedded business intelligence available at that key decision point with instant linkage to relevant documents means that the business doesn't sacrifice responsiveness to the customer or delay the process while all relevant facts are gathered to support a quality decision on the extension.

Truly efficient processes are enabled through readily available documents and business intelligence, on demand, and, most importantly, within a familiar, easy to use user experience, thereby enhancing, not encumbering, the user's productivity. Current business climates demand optimizing processes and ensuring user efficiency and productivity, while leveraging existing IT assets and avoiding large scale capital IT projects.

Efforts to increase efficiency and enable new, enhanced business capabilities may reveal Legacy systems that repeatedly block modernization and optimization initiatives.

For enterprises running SAP faced with a productivity gap between desired ERP efficiencies and the need to extend and enhance system functionality, a likely first consideration is leveraging their already deployed Office Productivity applications with the Portal, BI, Collaboration and Document Management services incorporated in Microsoft servers.

Historically, the challenge is that SAP and Microsoft technologies are different worlds, separated by large areas of incompatibility and lacking instant interoperability at points where businesses often most need it. The two solution suites represent a significant IT asset base for companies. In the quest for optimized processes in today's business scenarios, leveraging the economic, functional, and technical value of that asset base is imperative.

Optimized and enhanced Business Scenarios - iNet Links the Best of Two Worlds

The iNet Business Optimization Platform (BOP) supports the rapid extension and enhancement of SAP systems by letting information workers use the familiar Microsoft tools in support of SAP business functions, while enabling the enterprise to leverage Microsoft's frameworks for .NET, Web Services and Business Server platforms.

Business processes involve transactional, monitoring, informational, analytical and decision-making functions as sets of single users or collaborative activities are linked together into logical flows that meet business requirements. Those function-based activities are constructed around combinations of actual object types:

1. Information Objects
2. Business Objects
3. Document Objects

Business process optimization is the automation and coordination of the assets and tasks that make up business processes to yield optimum productivity and efficiency across the enterprise.

With the iNet Platform, SAP business functions can be extended and enhanced for greater functionality, efficiency and worker productivity when they are leveraged by the Microsoft knowledge worker, office tools and from within .NET business platforms.

Value to the Business:

• Increased operational efficiency
• New business process functionality
• Users with the right tools and business insights making informed, timely management decisions

The iNet Platform includes ready-to-run capability for SAP-.NET business functionality. Incremental optimization scenarios can be implemented individually as determined by the enterprise with no need to first invest in middleware systems, data warehouses or systems upgrades. No "Big Bang IT Project" required. The enterprise can be impacted within weeks with:

• Business Performance Dashboards leveraging Microsoft BI tools and Performance Point Server
• SAP-.NET Distributed Workflows & Processes
• SharePoint hosted SAP based e.Business Transactions
• MOSS2007 Hosted SAP document centric Processes
• MOSS2007 Document management and archival for SAP processes
• MS Office Applications linked to SAP Business Scenarios

Business Payoff

Ability to leverage the best of both worlds. Fully interoperable SAP-MS business functions yield:

• Enhanced user productivity
• Freedom of SAP business information
• Extended business reach
• Business Intelligence (BI) on demand, anywhere, anytime
• BI embedded inside transactional and workflow-based business processes
• Expanded usability beyond SAP super users

Extended and enhanced business processes. Optimized processes, in familiar user environments, enables the enterprise to increase performance management for improved performance; streamline processes for competitive and operational efficiency; and support new business functions with the agility demanded by today's business environments.

Maximized Return on Current Investments. iNet BOP's ability to reuse SAP business and information assets and the avoidance of data replication combined with no requirement for expensive middleware  accelerates the business impact of creating new business processes. The iNet platform's integration with all releases of SAP, without requiring modifications or costly upgrades allows the enterprise to truly optimize return on its IT investments.

A Customer Success Story

When document-centric SAP business process scenarios demand greater functionality, flexibility for distributed eBusiness processes, or a common document repository is needed for more than just SAP originated content, ERP-Link's iNet Business Optimization Platform efficiently extends and optimizes SAP Business processes with add-on solutions that leverage Microsoft Office SharePoint Server's (MOSS2007) Document/Content/Collaboration facilities.

A large scale utilities Client's DM system supporting SAP document-centric processes was impeding process optimization and its TCO untenable. They looked for a way to migrate millions of documents, each with its own metadata and annotations, to MOSS2007.

The deployment of their SAP integrated, MOSS2007-based Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solution and migration of millions of documents using ERP-Link's iNet Platform was completed in less than 6 months, and without workflow interruption.

The Client's document management requirements were varied and complex. Specifically, accounting documents (e.g. invoices) included annotations, providing a digital paper trail containing the document's revision history and comments. With 1.3 million documents with varying retrieval frequencies to be migrated to the MOSS2007 environment, A comprehensive migration strategy was developed to ensure that all documents would be migrated in a thorough, timely manner.

The legacy system received invoices from the SAPgui interface and stored them on a dedicated storage device. In addition, the platform enabled the addition of visual metadata to the invoices, stored as image files. It was essential that the new system contains the same functionality and retains all existing document information and annotations.

Utilizing MOSS2007

SAP documents needed to be archived using MOSS2007 and accessed using SAPgui, demanding full interoperability between the two environments. ERP-Link's iNet Platform, including the iNet.DM module, achieved this by enabling MOSS2007 to act as a fully functional Content Server, leveraging the workflow and business document tracking facilities of SAP ArchiveLink with support for documents of different types for near-line storage, archival or document management.

The Results

For the Client, the implementation of MOSS2007 with SAP and the migration of existing of documents drive the following business value:

• Substantial savings for cost of ownership
• Substantial savings for future custom development
• Consistency with enterprise-wide strategy for document management
• Extensive migration without business operations impact
• An Open Platform for future eBusiness initiatives

The iNet Impact - Documents range from "documents" in proprietary SAP format to documents created, viewed and/or edited by non-SAP applications, though they may integrate with business processes within the SAP system itself.

A unified architecture provides a common set of services such as the Web Part framework, integrated search, integrated user management and rights, digital rights management, workflow, security model, and collaboration. Ensuring integration and consistency across the ECM components, it supplies a unified storage infrastructure for storing ECM objects of all types and sizes. New functionality is easily added without the need to re-architect underlying infrastructure.

Users can re-use applications, code, and site content, enabling common development and deployment, achieving rapid deployment, low training costs, and a minimal burden to deploy and maintain multiple solutions for different business functions.

With iNet.DM and MOSS2007 there is support for optimized Business Processes based on a flexible front-end for SAP document centric processes for:

• Federated Policy Management
• Compliance Solutions/Certifications
• E-mail archiving
• Taxonomy Management
• Document Assembly
• Content Viewing

Composite SAP-MS Interoperability

The iNet platform supports document management-based SAP to MOSS2007 interoperability, and also BI, informational, transactional, and workflow-based interoperability. Combined, the iNet Business Process Services (iNet.BPS), iNet Business Information (iNet.BI) and iNet.DM modules open an unlimited range to enable full SAP to MS interoperability at any level, in support of any business function, in any composite profile.

SAP-based Document Centric Business Processes hosted in MOSS2007 are within easy reach and can easily and rapidly be deployed using the iNet platform modules.

Another Customer Success Story

Background
RadiSys Corporation is a leading supplier of advanced embedded systems. RadiSys relies on SAP and numerous other systems to manage its worldwide operations. Due to informational complexities and lacking integration between SAP and other systems, the RMA handling process was highly inefficient.

In 2007, the iNet Business Optimization Platform was used to deploy the RadiSys' automated RMA and Customer Self Service Portal. Together, RadiSys and ERP-Link built and deployed the first RMA Self-Service system that enables Microsoft ASP.NET, Microsoft SQL Server, SAP and Front Range HEAT Help Desk to execute real-time RMA processing across all systems, with end-Customer access via MOSS2007.

RadiSys now has an automated RMA handling system that insures correct and complete information across multiple applications, delivering reduced workload and increased end-to-end efficiency that would not have been possible without the iNet Platform.

The RadiSys RMA application is a custom ASP.NET application that enables customers to return 1 ~ 1000+ products simultaneously. What was previously a 2-day business process requiring a dedicated company headcount of one person was optimized to a business process requiring less than 1 hour and a headcount of .25 people.

The RMA User front-end utilized Microsoft ASP.NET technologies and ERP-Link's iNet to interface with SAP and other systems. The system gathers RMA information from RadiSys customers, resolves against HEAT and SAP records via web services, and ultimately generate SAP RMA's and HEAT Help Desk Support Incidents for follow-up by RadiSys staff.

The Results

The RadiSys RMA application encompasses 15+ unique business process steps including accepting user login information, calls to SAP to: gather multiple information records, validate data status, and resolve multiple data values, resulting in ticket generation.

In 3 months from design to production deployment, the cost of the project was $48,000. This represents a cost savings of $50,000+ over alternative approaches. These calculated savings versus a standard .Net Connector based project were due to:

• Fewer developer hours required
• Re-use of existing SAP Info Objects
• Ability to use a .net developer and not a specialized SAP Interface developer
• Lower license cost for iNet Platform

Phase II expanded the application to a MOSS2007 Portal. RadiSys was able to reuse application assets, shorten time to deploy new use scenarios, and not implement separate parallel frameworks and applications. This saved $21,000 in development/deployment costs and over $30,000 per year in estimated TCO costs.

Enhancements are planned to create distributed workflows incorporating WCF and the ability to re-use the SAP Business Objects created with iNet and leverage SharePoint BI Tools for Business Activity Monitoring and score-carding related to the RMA processes. Significant savings, many factors times the iNet Solution cost at a minimum, are expected. The expected avoided cost of implementing SAP XI/NetWeave is in excess of $240,000.

The iNet Impact

• Increased Customer Satisfaction
• Reduction of RMA errors by 95%
• Reduction of headcount expenses by 75%
• Project Savings of $72,000, TCO savings of $30,00 annually and potential avoided costs over $240,000

ERP-Link, ERP-Link logo, and ERP-Link iNet Business Process Optimization Platform (BOP) are trademarks of ERP-Link Corp.

SAP, SAP NetWeaver and other SAP products and services mentioned herein as well as their respective logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP AG in Germany and other countries.

Microsoft SharePoint, MOSS2007, Office, Windows and other Microsoft products and services mentioned herein as well as their respective logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and other countries.

All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.