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.
This inefficient process of moving data between applications has been bearable to date. But now, Skanska USA is in a situation that may sound familiar to any company looking to do more with the information stuck in Excel. It wants to marry the comfort of the Excel interface with the powerful analytics of business intelligence (BI) applications. What it doesn't want is a separate system that requires importing and exporting data or needs an IT expert to interpret the data. The goal is to "bring BI to the masses," Emerick says. "Having Office as the front end is the way to do that."
Though Microsoft's Office has been the platform of choice for the majority of business users who rely on Excel, Outlook, Word, and PowerPoint applications to get their work done, traditionally it has been isolated and disconnected from line-of-business systems. Accessing information in any ERP, CRM, or BI system has meant logging into a separate application, which, to the average user, has an unfamiliar interface. Typically, only a handful of people in an organization have direct access to the back-end systems. But as more manufacturers embrace the idea of integration between the plant and the enterprise, it is becoming increasingly clear that seamless connectivity within the enterprise must happen first.
New Office Relationships
For a company to change its business processes, access to information must change. That was the driving concept behind the Duet project, an agreement inked in 2004 between Microsoft and SAP to integrate the Office environment capabilities — be they calendaring, contact management, or demand planning — with the data in the underlying system of record.
"There's a category of users we call 'information workers,' and they are not the typical SAP users," says Nir Kol, SAP's vice president for the Duet program. "They are not the subject-matter experts that are task-oriented and updating on day-to-day financial or HR systems. Rather, they are the decision-makers working on business processes, and they use Office more than anything else."
Duet for Microsoft Office and SAP, which began shipping last year, was the result of one of the first formal agreements to tie a large-scale enterprise application into the Microsoft Office technology stack. The collaboration took place with Office 2003, which required extensions to enable communication with SAP. Since then, Microsoft has rolled out Office 2007, which is designed with integration in mind. It is built around the concept of Microsoft Office Business Applications (OBA), which is not a product, but rather a category of emerging applications.
"It's the notion of putting human resources scenarios, time management, lead management, and project time tracking directly in an Outlook interface instead of having to go to another Web application," says Chris Bryant, Microsoft's senior product manager for the Office platform. Office 2007 incorporates new services, such as a workflow engine, in an XML file format that the regular end user can access. "By combining the power of the ubiquitous Microsoft Office system with ERP, CRM, or SCM on the back end ... it unlocks more value from the line-of-business application by making it more accessible and actionable," Bryant says. This is what he describes as "the next level of productivity."
Microsoft is delivering an OBA for its Dynamics ERP application, as well as its PerformancePoint BI portfolio — a product suite that Skanska's Emerick has spent a lot of time beta testing and is now implementing. "We've had components of Microsoft business intelligence for some time ... but what's been lacking is a comprehensive platform to bring together the front end with the business processes," he says.
Similarly, Duet user Resource Informatik, a Zurich-based IT consulting company working with manufacturers and retailers, notes that reporting on projects can now occur in real time, rather than at the end of the month. It saves time for the end user, it ensures data quality, and it produces easily accessible and accurate reports.
"When I get in every morning, I get a scorecard and know exactly what's going on without having to log into the SAP system and sift through everything to get the report I want," Resource Informatik CEO Bruno Schmid says.
Both PerformancePoint and Duet have sparked somewhat of an epiphany for end users. "When people see an OBA, they know that's what they want. They just never had a way to articulate it ... people are just not aware of the possibilities," Bryant says.
And now, through the OBA on-ramp program that Microsoft announced in July, more vendors are gaining access to the development kits to build OBAs.
ERP vendor Epicor, for example, offers Information Worker, an OBA that allows the use of Excel, Word, Outlook, and SharePoint Server to execute tasks within the ERP system. With Information Worker, a user could receive an e-mail inquiry about the status of an order. A simple right click on the e-mail accesses data from the ERP system, revealing the current shipment information.
"It blurs the lines between the traditional dedicated system and new end-user experiences," says James Norwood, Epicor's vice president of product marketing. "It creates a bigger community of stakeholders in the core business system."
QAD, another ERP vendor, is also integrating with Microsoft Office using ActiveX calls, but the company is careful to balance comfort and new capabilities. According to Gordon Fleming, QAD's chief marketing officer, Office should be used as an interface into the enterprise application, but not a control mechanism.
Duet for Microsoft Office and SAP, for example, is built around broad integration. "But we struggle with why an enterprise user wants to go much further than taking summary data and embedding [it] into a report or PowerPoint," Fleming says. "Being able to navigate and drive the application from within the Office environment doesn't seem useful for customers ... It's about looking at data and reporting, and in our opinion, not really about controlling the application."
Duet users, meanwhile, will see more capabilities very soon. SAP is adding integration with Microsoft's SharePoint for collaboration, and with Microsoft's Unified Communication Servers for presence control, which is a way to locate a person and find the most immediate way to contact him or her.
SAP also recently announced its acquisition of Business Objects, a BI provider with a long-standing relationship with Microsoft through its Crystal Reports, which are integrated into the Visual Studio environment. Business Objects has a technology it calls Live Office, which includes plug-ins that add a Crystal Report, or Web intelligence component, into an Office document. Business Objects also has Crystal Xcelsius, which lay out 'what-if' scenarios visually for the end user. These visuals can be tied to Office to obtain interactive analytics embedded within a PowerPoint slide.
When — or whether — this will become part of Duet has yet to be decided.
What is clear, however, is that Microsoft Office is the most pervasive desktop productivity tool on the market, says Gaurav Verma, BI product marketing manager at SAS, which has an Office add-in for its analytical tools. And enterprise applications integration is an important catalyst for the information worker in need of new ways to be productive.
"We need to co-exist with that large user base ... and tightly integrate with Office applications to give more power to the end user," Verma says.