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HP to Help Manufacturers Manage SAP Apps

by Jeff Moad, MA Editorial Staff

Posted on Monday, May 14, 2007 5:20:00 PM       Sign Up to receive Daily News Alerts in your E-mail Inbox                               

Hewlett-Packard Co. today unveiled a collection of system management software components and services that, the company said, can help manufacturing and distribution users of SAP's applications to test, change, and monitor enterprise systems and the underlying business processes they support.

The offering, called HP Manufacturing and Distribution Industries Business Services Management (MDI BSM), debuted at SAP's annual Sapphire customer conference being held in Vienna, and is available now. MDI BSM integrates with SAP supply chain management, ERP, and other applications, and with SAP's Solution Manager tool, a 6-year-old lifecycle management software product for automating application patches and upgrades and monitoring system performance.

HP's offering extends Solution Manager's capabilities by allowing users to easily establish and monitor business process service levels, understand the impact of IT changes and breakdowns, and head off IT performance problems before they can harm the business, said Peter Gibbels, global solutions lead for ERP/SAP services & solutions, manufacturing industries, in an interview with Managing Automation.

MDI BSM includes existing software tools from HP's Business Technology Optimization for eSOA suite, including software for SOA governance, quality, and management, as well as business process monitoring, change management, test management and optimization, and integrated incident management. MDI BSM a "Powered by NetWeaver" product and has achieved SAP xApps certified status, HP said.

The new offering also includes a range of services provided by the HP Services group. These include assessment, deployment, and integration expertise, as well as training for line-of-business users working with SAP applications and operations teams attempting to monitor and change business applications.

While many of the software tools that make up the MDI BSM suite could be used by a wide range of manufacturing and non-manufacturing companies to manage their SAP environments, the product's supporting services are focused on the needs of manufacturing and distribution companies, according to Gibbels. Pieces of MDI BSM, such as HP's Quality Center software, also include manufacturing- and distribution-specific implementation methodology templates.

The ability to monitor and manage enterprise applications and associated business processes is becoming increasingly important as manufacturers must implement systems and business processes globally, touching a wider range of partners and customers, said AMR Research analyst Derek Prior in a recent report. Prior wrote that implementations of SAP's Solution Manager have been hampered by a lack of consulting expertise available from SAP.

HP expects manufacturing and distribution customers to use the MDI BSM offering in a couple of ways. Organizations that have not yet service-enabled their enterprise applications will most likely use pieces of the MDI BSM suite, such as HP's Quality Center, to automate software change management and implementation processes.

Manufacturers that have service-enabled their enterprise applications can use the MDI BSM software tools and services to gain visibility into how well their systems and underlying business processes are working. The business process monitoring piece of the MDI BSM offering is able to pull from business process management tools — from SAP partners such as IDS Scheer — information about how specific business processes are supposed to operate. For example, manufacturers that use business process management tools to design and deploy processes, such as vendor-managed inventory, could use the MDI BSM tools to gain visibility into and control over those applications and business processes, Gibbels said.

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