Articles

Content management on SAP platform In recent years the matters of content management automation have been of ever greater interest to the public. The automation in Russia started with docflow and record-keeping, and was mainly implemented by domestic developers. Today it has evolved to enterprise content management (ECM) automation, and is widely offered by foreign companies. ECM represents an infrastructure which allows for rapid and efficient creation of business applications for document, digital media assets and web content management. The leadership on this market belongs to such giants as Documentum, IBM, Hummingbird, etc. Let us skip the details and focus on a basic asset of ECM systems, i.e. the idea of splitting the tasks of structured and unstructured data management. The first kind of tasks is solved with the help of solutions like ERP, CRM, SCM, etc., while efficient unstructured data (content) management implies the use of absolutely different systems based on different ideas and technologies. Such splitting sounds reasonable, but it brings about a number of headaches for the client. First of all, one will need to tightly integrate the functions of content management into already introduced automated systems (mainly ERP systems). Although most ECM developers already offer tools for integrating ECM and ERP/CRM systems, there are lots of problems to solve. These are basically matters of ensuring data integrity and interrelation; upgrading to newer versions of software; providing access to authorized users, and so on. Anyway, these matters result in extra costs for administering server hardware and databases, synchronizing common master data, supporting user accounts in different systems, and such-like. The entire solution costs, including the impressive cost of the basic software, can therefore rocket incredibly. So, it’s high time to weigh whether such decision is worth contemplating and possibly to look for a workaround. Indeed, there are offers to consider! From ERP to a unified integrated platform for business applications development. A recent concept of business applications development and integration offered by the German company SAP AG is known as SAP NetWeaver. The core idea is to integrate and align people, information and business processes within a unified open platform, which is the foundation for all the applications of SAP Business Suite software bundle. The key advantage of SAP NetWeaver is the ability to manage structured and unstructured data within a unified information framework using common technologies and instruments, which leads to lower integration and overall costs. Knowledge management For SAP NetWeaver developers knowledge management means organizing and classifying unstructured information (office documents, e-mail, web content, etc) which comes from different sources, and providing access to the accumulated information to all the enterprise employees. These tasks can be successfully solved with the help of SAP Enterprise portal, which offers tools for collaborative authoring and publishing documents, version control, advanced search and document classification services (SAP TREX — Text Retrieval and Information Extraction), building hierarchical taxonomies, and so on. Besides, it ensures a transparent access to all sorts of data repositories (file systems, web servers, external content management systems), supports the mechanism of real-time collaboration (discussions, chats, messaging). Business process management Support for business process automation is a key demand for all today’s document management systems. Throughout its lifecycle, from creation and till archiving, a document can circulate inside as well as outside the enterprise, so there’s a need in tools for modeling, controlling and monitoring the document flow in accordance with the demands of a certain customer. SAP offers advanced tools for workflow management within a stand-alone system (SAP WebFlow), as well as a full-featured solution for cross-application business processes integration — SAP Exchange Infrastructure (SAP XI). It supports open standards and technologies like Wf-XML, WSDL, BPML, BPEL4WS. Master data management Master data management within a distributed IT infrastructure is one of the most difficult problems for enterprises today, but still it is of vital importance. This is also true for the problem of document management, which is impossible to automate without adequate and consistent master data. SAP Master Data Management, a SAP NetWeaver component, is specially designed to manage, consolidate and harmonize master data. It makes the data available to all the applications and systems across an enterprise. Basis instruments and technologies Alongside with full-featured solutions and business applications aimed at unstructured data management, SAP NetWeaver involves a bunch of low-level tools and services designed for document management. First of all, this is SAP Knowledge Provider infrastructure. It helps to administer and store documents in external repositories and e-archives. Among these repositories one can use not only SAP own document storage system (SAP Content Server), but also third-party systems (e.g., Documentum, IBM Content Manager, IXOS, Saperion, etc). SAP ArchiveLink interface serves to integrate the document management functions with SAP applications (R/3, CRM, and so on). It enables one to link documents with SAP business objects. Apart from that, you can use a number of applications and components that help to integrate with CAD applications (CAD Desktop), GIS systems, and so on. Special solutions on SAP platform In Russia, speaking about the problems of document management, one usually means certain problems related to the automation of register-keeping, archive-keeping, contract management, etc. Of course, one can make use of already existing solutions (CompanyMedia, «Delo», DocsVision and others) or even purchase a full-featured ECM platform (Documentum, DOCS Open). Yet, if an enterprise has already implemented any SAP products (R/3, CRM, BW, SEM or any other), it will have to deal with integrating the functions of document management with SAP business processes. Another way out is to develop an ERP/CRM application on the SAP NetWeaver platform. What are the advantages? Firstly, it is the use of up-to-date technologies and programming languages (ABAP/4, J2EE, .NET) and ready-to-use interfaces and API for document management and integration with third-party products. Secondly, it is good scalability of solutions provided by the abilities of the base platform. There is a tangible progress in this field already. For instance, GazIntech (www.gazintech.ru) offers a whole complex of integrated solutions built upon SAP NetWeaver platform. They are designed for the automation of register-keeping, archive-keeping and contract management. The key advantage of all the three solutions is a tight integration with SAP applications (first of all, with SAP R/3) both in using common master data and introducing document/contract management functions into SAP business processes. Besides, all these solutions can run independently from R/3, using the wide abilities of SAP NetWeaver platform. Conclusions On analysing the above-presented information, one can decide that SAP NetWeaver is able to solve any tasks related to unstructured data management. Well, it is not 100% true. For example, SAP has no support for HSM (Hierarchical Storage Management) technology, nor does it feature native means of integration with mass document capture systems, nor does it work with streamed audio/video content. All these features are available with modern ECM systems. Most of them have certified solutions for the integration with SAP NetWeaver platform and can be used to efficiently store huge amounts of unstructured data. Meanwhile, end users can keep on working with their documents: they use their old instruments and graphical interfaces and never care where, how and in what system the necessary information is stored at the moment. Dmitry Kozlov (d.kozlov@gazintech.ru)

Pages:1 |

Go Back