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by Stephanie Neil, MA Editorial Staff Posted on Friday, November 30, 2007 2:10:56 PM   | Abstract: | The integration of Microsoft's ubiquitous Office suite with back-end enterprise systems means that everyday end users don't have to be IT experts to gain access to important business data. |
If you have anything to do with finance in your organization, there's no doubt that Microsoft Excel is the application within which you spend most of your time. For simple functions such as forecasting, budgeting, planning, and running reports out of ERP, "you dump data into Excel to do all the magic," says Allen Emerick, director of IT for Skanska USA Building Inc., an engineering and construction company that has designed and built innovative facilities for life science manufacturers, among others. That magic, however, is limited to the Excel spreadsheet. Once the data is extracted to repopulate the ERP application, for example, there is no control over the data integrity or business processes. At Skanska, in order for a department manager working in Excel to access information from the back-end accounting system, data must be exported from a JD Edwards ERP system and then imported into Microsoft Office. That's when data integrity is at stake, Emerick says, because of the potential for data loss or corruption when programs have to translate data from one form to another. Having a way to automate the data transaction — and making Office an extension of ERP, for example — would ensure that data properties don't change and make end users more productive. "It would take less time to enter information and get information back, which would help the end user do their job more effectively," Emerick says. [Click to continue] |