mySAP™ ERP For Dummies®
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2005927621
ISBN-13: 978-0-7645-9995-8
ISBN-10: 0-7645-9995-X
Manufactured in the United States of America
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Andreas Vogel joined SAP in the Corporate Consulting Team/Office of the CEO in 2003, where he worked on various projects related to SAP strategy. In the beginning of 2005, Andreas joined the Solution Management Team for mySAP™ ERP, where he lead the effort to service-enable mySAP™ ERP. Andreas now serves as vice president of Field Support for mySAP ERP, where he is responsible for the introduction of mySAP ERP 2005 into the market.
Before joining SAP, Andreas held various research, technology, and business positions around the world, among them principal research scientist at the DSTC (Brisbane, Australia), chief scientist at Borland (San Mateo, CA), and CTO and cofounder of Mspect Inc. (Sunnyvale, CA).
Andreas holds MSc and PhD degrees in computer science from Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany. Andreas previously published three books on CORBA and Enterprise Java Beans with Wiley.
Ian Kimbell joined SAP in the marketing organization in February 1998, where he held several positions in industry and solution marketing, which culminated in developing the SAP Solution Maps and marketing mySAP.com®. Ian then spent a two-year assignment in the SAP Chairman’s office as a board assistant before moving on to development as VP for mySAP ERP Strategy and Business Development for mySAP ERP 2004. He has now returned to marketing and is vice president of Solution Marketing for mySAP ERP.
Before joining SAP, Ian held various international IT and marketing positions during his 11-year tenure with DuPont.
Ian has become well known at the SAPPHIRE conferences in recent years, where he has regularly appeared in the keynote presentations, demonstrating the mySAP Business Suite.
Ian holds two business degrees, including a British Bachelor of Arts with honors in European Business and a German Diplom Betriebswirt.
We would like to thank SAP’s executive management team, Shai Agassi, Jim Hagemann Snabe, Peter Kirschbauer, Peter Graf, Archim Heimann, Stefan Schaffer, and Thomas Baur, for their support and sponsorship of this book.
Many thanks to the following individuals who tirelessly reached into their depths of knowledge in their specific areas of expertise and contributed to this book: Amit Chatterjee, Catherine Courreges, Bob Cummings, Ralf Dehos, Frank Eck, Steffi Eger, Stefan Elfner, Claudius Fischer, Markus Fischer, Joachim Foerderer, Amy Funderburk, David Grasso, Matthias Haendly, Christian Hastedt-Marckwardt, Markus Kuppe, Karolin Laicher, Jürgen Lindner, Salvatore Lombardo, David Ludlow, Thomas Mattern, Doris Moellgaard, Gordon Mühl, Angeline Ng, Tatjana Nikolic, Tsafrir Oranski, Boris Otto, Gunther Piller, Klaus Pohl, Michael Rademacher, Ingo Rothley, Janet Salmon, Christof Schmoll, Horst Schnörer, Tim Steinmayr, Jeff Stiles, Jeremiah Stone, Ralf Strassner, Kaj van de Loo, Karin Weis, Jens Weitzel, Harry West, and Jeff Word.
A special mention goes to contributing authors Andreas Frank (for his work on analytics) and Hanif Ismail (for his contribution on composite applications).
We would like to extend our special appreciation to Tesha Harvey, for all her support during the writing of this book: We couldn’t have done it without you, Tesha.
We appreciate the hard work and focused effort that was put in by the Wiley project team. Thanks to Katie Feltman for keeping us in line with the tight deadlines and ensuring this book was published.
Finally, this book would not exist without the tireless support and patience of Nancy Stevenson. Thank you, Nancy.
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Title
Introduction
Why Buy This Book?
Foolish Assumptions
How This Book Is Organized
Icons Used in This Book
Part I : mySAP ERP in a Services-Enabled World
Chapter 1: ERP: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow
Just What Is ERP?
A Brief History of ERP
What Early ERP Did Right
Where ERP Had Room to Grow
The New ERP: mySAP ERP at Your Service
Service-Enabled: The Foundation of Flexible ERP Today
Exploring the Benefits of Enterprise Services
Enterprise Services Provide Building Blocks
Where Does ERP Fit In?
Chapter 2: Differentiating Yourself with ERP
Start by Being Business Model–Driven
Differentiating versus Standard Processes
Bringing in Innovation
Meeting the Two Challenges of Innovation
Chapter 3: Raising the Bar on Productivity
Upping Your Usability
Integrating with Applications You Use Every Day
How Roles Make Life Easier
Self-Service for Productivity
Preconfigured Business Scenarios
Gaining Productivity through Industry-Specific Scenarios
Sharing and Outsourcing
Making Things Run Smoothly with Automation
Chapter 4: Gaining Business Insight
Tapping into the Potential of Analytics
Empowering Business People
Tallying Up the Analytics You Get in mySAP ERP
Analytics in Action
Chapter 5: Keeping IT Flexible
Creating a Common Language for IT and Business
How IT Works in a Service-Enabled World
Using Abstraction to Hide Complexity
Summing Up the IT Service-Enabled World
Part II : Getting Under the Hood: The Underlying Technology
Chapter 6: Meet SAP NetWeaver
So, What Exactly Is SAP NetWeaver?
Orchestrating a Technology Symphony
Giving SAP NetWeaver the Once-Over
Making Users Productive
Unifying Data
Managing Business Information
Customizing Development
Unified Lifecycle Management
Governing Applications
Consolidating All Your Systems
Service-Oriented Architecture Design and Deployment
Guided Procedures: Focus on Activity
Designing Processes and Managing Solutions: SAP Solution Manager
What Can SAP NetWeaver Do for You?
Technology and Data: The Great Equalizers
SAP NetWeaver Enables Business Process Evolution
Chapter 7: Bringing Services to Life with SAP NetWeaver
Working with Services
A Web Service Description Language Primer
Modeling with Enterprise Services
ESA Is Open to Working with Other Tools
Chapter 8: SAP NetWeaver Up and Running
Figuring Out ESA Run-Time Architecture
Business and Technical Protocols: Synchronous versus Asynchronous
Getting a Handle on the Transactional Behavior of Services
Simplifying Sessions
Seamless Security
Taking a Closer Look at Web-Service Run-Time Architecture
Discovering XI Run-Time Architecture
Chapter 9: Composites: Extending mySAP ERP
What Are Composites?
The Nature of Composites
Fitting Together Composite Applications
SAP xApps: Delivering on the Innovation Promise
A Case in Point: SAP xApp Cost and Quotation Management
The Composite Team
What Can You Do Today with Composites?
Part III : Implementing Change
Chapter 10: Knowing What to Expect: Covering Costs and Managing Change
The Financial Bottom Line of mySAP ERP
Exploring Costs with a TCO Model
Making a Plan with Value-Based Services
Tackling the Change Management Challenge
Chapter 11: Building an ERP Roadmap
Zeroing in on Business Goals
Understanding Your Industry
Finding a Roadmap
Getting the Most Out of SAP Solution Manager
Chapter 12: Following ERP into the Future
The SAP Roadmap for ESA and ERP
How mySAP ERP Will Change Going Forward
Part IV : The Part of Tens
Chapter 13: Top Ten Ways to Make People More Productive
Using Both Generic and User-Specific Roles
Work Lists
Active Alerts
Mobile Scenarios
Voice Technology
Embedded Analytics
RFID Technology
Form-Based Processing
Guided Procedures
Easier User Interfaces
Chapter 14: Top Ten Ways to Enable Innovation
Creating the Framework for Innovation
Composing Service-Based Applications Strategically
Offering Services to Others
Using Services from Others
Using Model-Driven Development Tools
Connecting Analytics to the World
Working with Composite Processes
Utilizing Composite Applications
Collaborating and Sharing Knowledge
Deploying Hardware Efficiently
Chapter 15: Top Ten ERP Resources
Your SAP Account Rep
ESA Adoption Help
User Groups
ERP Events
Web Sites
Publications
SAP Partners and the Ramp-Up Program
SAP Developer Network
Solution Manager
Industry Solutions
Glossary
E nterprise resource planning (ERP) and the world of enterprise computing in general are undergoing a quiet revolution. With the introduction of enterprise services, businesses now have more of an opportunity to differentiate themselves, adapt to change quickly, and provide a common language for IT and business people to communicate — and do it while reducing the overall costs associated with their IT systems.
mySAP ERP, beginning with mySAP ERP 2004, heralded the start of this new service-enabled functionality. Building on top of the traditional features of SAP® R/3®, this new generation of ERP software helps businesses do things they could never do before — at lower cost.
In this book, we help you understand this brave new world, and how it can benefit your enterprise today and in years to come.
To be part of the ERP revolution, you have to understand more than mySAP ERP’s features. You have to explore the world of Enterprise Services Architecture, or ESA, and discover how services work and how mySAP ERP embraces them. You need a basic understanding of the underlying technology, SAP NetWeaver, to see how flexibly you can work with out-of-the-box and custom business processes. And you need all of this in plain English that you can understand. That’s where this book comes in.
For Dummies books all share a common goal: to avoid complexity like the plague and make topics easy to understand. Throughout this book, we explain concepts, both technical and nontechnical, simply with examples that make mySAP ERP accessible even to the non-IT people among us. When we throw out a technical term, we define it in a way you can understand, and we provide great tools like the Cheat Sheet (that yellow card at the front of the book that you can tear out and use as a handy reference), a glossary of terms, and easy-to-digest Part of Tens chapters that give you ten quick hits of information apiece.
We even include information about things like building an ERP Roadmap with tidbits like TCO and ROI to help you justify the move to mySAP ERP to your powers-that-be. This alone could be well worth the price of the book!
This book assumes that you are somebody who works in the corporate world (large or small) and has some basic understanding of business methods and business technology. But we don’t assume that you know a thing about SAP or mySAP ERP. Although some of you may be from the world of IT, others aren’t, so we try to explain technology in simple terms.
From the very first chapter, we introduce you to basic concepts that you need to understand the world of mySAP ERP and services. But if you already have a handle on the basics, you can easily jump to a later chapter and dive right in. (We also provide cross references to send you back to the relevant chapter for a refresher course.)
mySAP ERP For Dummies is organized so that you can quickly find, read, and understand the information that you want. It’s also organized so that if you have some experience with ERP, you can skip some chapters and just jump to the parts that interest you.
Don’t feel that you have to read this book from cover to cover. We provide handy cross references so if you skip over something important in rushing to a later chapter you know where to go to bone up on it.
The chapters in this book are divided into parts that help you find the information that you’re looking for quickly and easily.
We start right off in Chapter 1 with a lot of the basic concepts you need to understand mySAP ERP, such as ERP itself, Service-Oriented Architecture, Enterprise Services Architecture, and more. Chapters 2 through 5 give you the lowdown on four key ways that mySAP ERP benefits your business: by providing the framework for differentiating your business, upping the productivity and efficiency of your people, providing business insight through stellar analytics, and giving your IT people the tools to be flexible and put technology to work to support your business strategy.
mySAP ERP has a ton of functionality, but it all rests on top of a technology platform called SAP NetWeaver. To understand the full potential of mySAP ERP, you need a bit of a grounding in SAP NetWeaver. The chapters in this part introduce you to SAP NetWeaver, tell you how you use it to design and run applications, and show you how SAP NetWeaver works with services. Finally, you explore the world of composite applications, where you can orchestrate functionality from several applications to make technology support your business processes.
If you read the book from cover to cover, by the time you get to this point in the book, you will probably have gained a great deal of knowledge about the benefits of mySAP ERP. Armed with this knowledge, you’ll probably be eager to find out how to get the thing up and running. Chapter 10 explores some up-front prep in the form of calculating your total cost of ownership, as well as preparing your organization for change. Chapter 11 lays out a roadmap for implementing mySAP ERP, including several useful programs and tools to make it relatively painless. Finally, Chapter 12 is where we pull out our crystal ball (with a little help from the folks at SAP) to tell you where SAP and mySAP ERP are headed in the future. This helps you understand how your investment today locks you into further advances tomorrow.
This part contains three chapters in the ever-popular top-ten list format. This is where you discover ten great ways to make your employees more productive using mySAP ERP, ten approaches to help you differentiate yourself and innovate in a services-enabled environment, and ten resources that can help you get going with mySAP ERP.
We’re a visual society, inundated with images from big-screen movies and computer games, so this book uses little picture icons to visually point out information that’s handy to know.
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In this part . . .
I n this part, you pick up a lot of the basic concepts that you need to be familiar with in order to understand mySAP ERP, such as ERP itself, service-oriented architecture, Enterprise Services Architecture, and more. Then we explain four important ways that mySAP ERP benefits your business: by providing the framework for differentiating your business, upping the productivity and efficiency of your people, providing business insight through great analytics, and giving your IT people flexible tools to put technology to work in support of your business strategy.