Bridging the Gap

Internal collaboration is a challenge all companies face. While many organizations may have the necessary systems in place, often the more difficult hurdle is making sure that all users are able to access the system and gain value from it. This month, CGT sat down with executives from two industry leading organizations, SAP and Microsoft, who have come together to provide the consumer goods market a solution to meet this challenge. Dennis Moore, general manager, Emerging Solutions for SAP, and Parichay Saxena, general manager on the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server team provide insight into the challenges organizations traditionally face and how this combined offering could be the solution.

 

What challenges do organizations face when employees do not have instant access to critical enterprise system information?

 

 

Moore: A common challenge for companies worldwide today, including those in the consumer goods industry, is empowering their employees with easy access to critical business processes and data from enterprise systems. This data, including financials and human resources, mainly resides in back-end, enterprise applications that can be challenging for typical "information workers" to access and leverage. Currently, such information is mainly utilized by SAP power users, leaving the rest of the employees disconnected from current and accurate data and business process insight. This creates an environment of diminished productivity and increased compliance risk.

 

 

Saxena: Duet software for Microsoft Office and SAP was designed to address this need by increasing the visibility and use of business processes and information by linking SAP and Microsoft Office applications. Duet is a solution that any Office user can leverage in their familiar desktop environment with little or no additional training. It helps information workers quickly access critical corporate information while diminishing costly duplication of efforts, and limiting the need for specific training on disparate systems.

 

 

What are the key deliverables organizations should expect from a solution in order to extend the power of business applications to all employees?

 

 

Moore: Duet is the only product on the market today that effectively brings together the worlds of business productivity applications and enterprise applications. This is a revolutionary product, which we jointly developed with Microsoft. Duet helps organizations increase corporate compliance, improve user productivity and save time and money. By providing simple and timely access to relevant, contextual business information, Duet can increase corporate policy compliance. Leveraging the ubiquitous Office environment, Duet dramatically simplifies employees' ability to interact with business processes and data. Also as Duet is simple and intuitive, organizations can save time and money from reduced employee training costs and accelerated user adoption.

 

 

Collaboration is something all companies struggle with. How can a solution help employees collaborate and make decisions?

 

 

Saxena: Duet fosters collaboration by bringing information and processes from SAP applications directly into the Microsoft applications that they use everyday for collaboration. For example, Duet's Leave Management scenario surfaces directly in Outlook and all of the workflow and approvals are accessed through Outlook. By bringing information and processes in context into the users' familiar collaborative environments, collaboration becomes a natural extension of core business processes.

 

 

Consumer goods organizations are challenged to accurately plan demand. How can a solution help meet this challenge?

 

 

Moore: Duet's Demand Planning capability enables consumer goods companies to use Microsoft Excel to create planning sheets, as well as analyze and manage demand planning data from the mySAP Supply Chain Management application. Once the user has completed the demand planning modeling in Excel, Duet will automatically synchronize the updated information with the back-end SAP application ensuring that the remainder of the planning process is based on the most up-to-date information.

 

 

Another huge issue is analytics as companies struggle to make sense of the large volume of downstream data they receive. How can a solution help companies better analyze their data?

 

 

Moore: Executives today rely on having the most current, critical business information and analytics at hand when making decisions that affect the company. With Duet accurate and up-to-date reports are delivered right into users' Outlook environment. For example, scheduled and event-driven data reports are available to users through Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Excel. Personalized views that support their role in the organization also allow executives to probe further into key performance metrics. This is important for consumer goods companies where decisions are made daily that impact advertising budgets, demand forecasts and sales campaigns. Duet brings tremendous value to any organization by arming these executives with the most relevant information available in order to enable the best business decision possible.

 

 

Saxena: Since modern executives are on the road a large portion of the time, Duet's advanced offline data capabilities empower them to have secure access to the relevant data and enable the analysis of the data within the organization's firewall connected to the network as well as at the convenient time at the airport or on the plane.

 

 

What type of return can organizations expect with this solution?

 

 

Saxena: There are a number of areas where customers can expect to see significant ROI with respect to Duet. Just consider the task of finding information in an enterprise. Today users spend a significant amount of time and energy just searching for information. Duet puts more, relevant information in the hands of users, allowing them to make better decisions faster. Consider also, the time saved by not having to do redundant tasks. Our time management scenario allows users to enter time and billing information into Outlook and have it flow directly to SAP's cross application time system (CATS). A consultant working in this system will save an hour or more every month by not having to re-renter information. If they have a billing rate of $250/hour, the savings are great. Another area is in compliance. By having more users interact with best practice processes within SAP, the ability to remain compliant increases dramatically. Clearly, the costs of being found non-compliant can be staggering.