Although the promise of e-business across company boundaries is excellent, the reality is that most businesses struggle to create a homogeneous environment within their own companies. The complexities of then implementing a single process across multiple independent companies can be staggering.
This is the opinion of Simon Carpenter, general manager: mySAP components, SAP Africa. "What is required is a means to enable businesses to transcend the borders of an individual enterprise to truly engage in e-business."
To enable this, SAP has introduced solution blueprints called Collaborative Business Scenarios. "Through c-Business Scenarios, SAP's Internet solution mySAP.com, helps businesses to seamlessly integrate customer relationship management (CRM), e-commerce, supply chain management and business intelligence processes to perform e-business with customers and business partners in an extended value chain," says Carpenter.
This is achieved through the exchange of XML (eXtensible Markup Language) based business documents and execution of shared tasks between two or more enterprises. Essentially, SAP is enabling heightened levels of co-operation between business partners by creating a methodology for identifying and defining inter-enterprise business processes while leveraging the Internet through universal standards such as XML.
"c-Business Scenarios add significant value for companies by enabling them to accomplish the hard work of e-business - creating linkages between all the disparate, many-tiered systems of buyers and sellers, and of consumers and suppliers - thereby creating a collaborative value chain for all parties that ultimately improves customer service and enhances profitability.
"With c-Business Scenarios, SAP is demonstrating continued thought leadership by helping companies conduct sophisticated, real-world business in the Internet economy. These blueprints act as a road map, identifying the points at which a given business process and the corresponding systems within one enterprise mesh with the business process and systems of other enterprises," says Carpenter.
He adds that from a business standpoint, the blueprints outline the quantifiable and non-quantifiable value potential associated with implementing c-Business Scenarios providing the basis for ROI calculations. From an interaction standpoint, c-Business Scenarios detail what roles are involved, what features are used and what documents are exchanged throughout the various process steps.
The latest offering contains broad advances across the range of mySAP.com components.
"SAP has quickly emerged as an Internet solutions leader over the past year, delivering mature e-business products under the mySAP.com umbrella," says David Alschuler, vice president of e-Business and Enterprise Applications at research house Aberdeen Group.
"SAP is uniquely positioned to provide a complete range of e-business applications that integrate customer-facing processes, supply chains, order fulfillment and business intelligence to create an integrated chain of commerce," he adds.
Meanwhile mySAP.com has amassed more than 1 million licensed users since it was originally introduced last May
"The proof of the mySAP.com concept has always been in customer acceptance. Being able to deliver this solution to one million users in less than a year is an impressive achievement," said analyst Josh Greenbaum, principal of Enterprise Applications Consulting. "I fully expect this momentum to continue as more functionality and services emerge under the mySAP.com umbrella."
To date, more than 400 companies have made the decision to leverage mySAP.com functionality,
Hasso Plattner, co-chairman of the executive board and CEO of SAP AG, says SAP has done something really quite remarkable in a very short period of time.
"It was only a year ago that we first announced mySAP.com as our far-reaching solution for collaborative, one-step e-business. Now we have more than 1 million licensed users. This is real-ware from which our customers are deriving value."
Plattner described a not-too-distant view of an interconnected e-business world that will require companies to develop and deploy "thousands of business relationships, perhaps hundreds of application components, heterogeneous technologies and multiple standards".
The level of co-operation necessary among customers and across solution suppliers is unprecedented, and no single vendor can hope to develop everything that business customers will need. Last month SAP announced a preliminary agreement with Commerce One, a leader in global e-commerce solutions - the 2 companies are to jointly deliver next-generation e-business marketplaces for the Internet economy.
Commerce One will provide the marketplace infrastructure that enables companies to establish and develop trading portals while SAP will provide functionality in the areas of supply chain management, product life-cycle management, customer relationship management and business intelligence.
The resultant joint offering will include the best technologies and applications of both companies for e-business marketplaces.
"SAP is making rapid progress on all fronts in transforming the potential of the Internet into real business profits for customers," says Plattner.
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