Editorial from the December 2007 issue of Managing Automation

Building Office Bridges

by Stephanie Neil, MA Editorial Staff

Posted on Friday, November 30, 2007 2:10:56 PM                                     

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.

Page : 1 2 3   ... NEXT