More often than not, an organization has multiple I.T. solutions. This is primarily either due to different needs arising out at different situations or due to inherent strengths of these packages. For instance an enterprise solution may have strong features in Human Resouce Management but may lack in Production Planning.
However various business process of the organization may cut across multiple solutions. Hence for real time and synchronized information, it may be required to integration these systems for real time or batch update.
Various open source applicatoins like Jitterbits are capable of integration different applications so that they can talk to each other. Most mature applications like SAP, SugarCRM have concepts like APIs and webservices which can also be used for this purpose.
The integration is one of the key challenges for external systems as well. EDIFACT AND ANSI standards are followed in Europe and USA respectively for communication across organizations.
Author is a consultant with Veon Consulting Pvt. Limited.
Over the years SAP and Adobe have been two matured and popular applications in their respective domains. Whereas SAP is “the” solution in the Enterprise Resource Planning area based on the Industry Best Practices, Adobe Flex solution gives the users a very rich and intuitive interface which helps them understand and comprehend information in an easier and more meaningful way.
Over the past few years there has been a conscious effort by SAP to become more web based rather than being limited to the traditional SAP GUI. The Netweaver suite by SAP has been conceived as a base in this direction.
SAP now also supports various third party applications integration due to the in-built J2EE engine. Adobe is one of these. From ECC 6.0 version SAP supports seamless integration between SAP and Adobe forms. You can for example design an interactive form for your Sales Force to capture orders from the customers. You can also impose the validations as appropriate (Example dropdown for materials).This will however require you to purchase an add-on.
Integration between SAP and Adobe flex based application is much easier. For this you can create a web-service around the suitable RFC enabled business objects or BAPIs and make an online call to it within SAP. However in this case the validations need a bit more of coding rather than just drag and drop in the earlier example.
Veon Consulting can help you in achieving an internet rich Adobe flex applications with SAP backend. Please contact us for some sample charts built on Adobe Flex at info@veon.in.
P.S.-
• The author is technical SAP Adobe consultant at Veon Consulting, Hyderabad
• SAP is a trademark of SAP AG, Germany.
One question that baffles most of the CTOs and CIOs is the question on what tangible value does an IT project bring.
Certain leading companies have brought about ways to move in the direction of objectively moving towards a way of measuring the business value of an IT initiative. Most often than not, this involves measuring the performance of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) with help of historical data.
The article defines an approach the businesses can take towards valuating the IT initiative.
(i) Define your KPIs
The first step in defining the performance indicators, which, truly indicate the performance of the business. Following are some typical KPIs which have been used in multiple organizations. However the actual KPIs may differ from business to business. For example a Milk Distribution Company can have Logistics cycle time, Demand Forecasting and Delivery Accuracy as KPIs. An automobile repair workshop can have Average Service Repair Time and Spare Part availability as KPIs.
·Order to Delivery Cycle time (Days)
·Average Inventory Level ($)
·% On Time billing
·% Payments within Payment Terms
·% Accurate Invoicing
·% Accurate Shipping
·Logistics Cycle time from Factory Gate out to Customer Gate in (Days)
·Manual FTEs required to run the business
(ii) Measuring New Versus Historical KPI Values
As a pre-requisite to measuring the business benefit for an IT initiative, the business will require to compare the KPI values after the IT initiative versus the values before the IT programme was implemented.
(iii) NPV value of the initiative
This is the most difficult and crucial step of the calculation. For all the KPIs benefits in step (ii) and assuming a life of 5 years of the IT program, the business will require to give the net present value of these benefits. For example, if the KPI improvement is that IT improvement brings about 5 FTEs saving (assuming 1 FTE = 60,000 USD / Yr ), then the
NPV= Business Benefit 1st Year / R + BusinessBenefit 2nd Year / (R*R) + Business Benefit 1rd Year / (R*R*R) + Business Benefit 4th Year / (R*R*R*R) + Business Benefit 5th Year (R*R*R*R*R)
Where R = 1 + Interest Rate / 100
Assuming Interest rate as 5 % then NPV works out to be = $ 259,768.
The NPVs summed over all the KPIs gives the total business benefits for the IT initiative.
As a thumb rule the NPV for the project should be greater than the implementation cost of the project.
The author is Seeta N., who is a consultant at Veon Consulting, pioneers in open source CRM consulting. For enquiries drop a mail at info@veon.in. For having an online demo visit www.veon.in
