Johannesburg, 24 Mar 2009
Under the prevailing tight economic climate, organisations that use SAP as business ERP systems are making significant cost savings and productivity improvements by using the SAP Document Management System to manage their documents.
According to Abie Spies, Managing Director of Engineering Informatics, Melbourne, Australia: “Many organisations are unaware that the standard SAP system includes a very powerful and full function document management system that can be switched on with no additional SAP license cost.”
Spies say using the SAP Document Management System (DMS) has three major benefits for organisations using SAP.
1. SAP has full document management functionality
The SAP DMS is robust and fully scalable with all the functionality expected of a modern document management system. It is widely used by major organisations worldwide and on functionality compares very favourably with any standalone document management system.
2. The SAP DMS is fully integrated in business systems
The one area that really sets the SAP DMS apart from the competitors is its natural integration into the SAP business systems. Using the SAP DMS, documents can link directly to virtually any SAP object. This means that business users in finance, HR, logistics, engineering, plant maintenance and virtually all business areas can access the latest relevant released version of any document they need to perform their tasks - directly from the SAP screen that they do their normal work in - without ever having to interrogate the document management system. Most organisations find the productivity benefits from integrating documents with business systems the most compelling driver to use SAP DMS.
3. The SAP DMS is essentially free with SAP
In the current economic climate, the biggest driver in considering the SAP DMS is without doubt the massive cost savings it can bring to companies already using SAP.
As the SAP DMS is a core part of SAP, it leads to the following savings:
* No DMS license fees, because the SAP DMS is part of the standard SAP system and every SAP licence owned by an organisation contains the rights to use the DMS.
* No DMS maintenance fees, because the SAP maintenance fees cover maintenance of the SAP DMS.
* No interface or middleware cost because the SAP business systems integrate fully with SAP DMS. Using an external DMS system often requires interfacing with SAP, and although interfaces are available for most DMS systems, they are generally expensive and temperamental and require maintenance.
* Data duplication eliminated, because the SAP DMS makes extensive use of standard SAP functionality and data entered in other functions like workflow, authorisations, chart of accounts, classification fields and the HR structure without the need for duplication into a DMS system.
* Minimal hardware requirements: ECM systems are notoriously hardware intensive, requiring many expensive servers and an extensive network to operate efficiently. The SAP DMS, being part of the core SAP system, requires minimal additional system hardware, as it runs on the existing SAP infrastructure.
* No additional document viewers required: The standard SAP GUI contains a document viewers that can view a very wide range of standard document formats, including most popular CAD packages. For example, this means all users of SAP will be able to view and redline CAD drawings on their local machine, without a license for the expensive CAD package or viewer.
* Limited network requirements: The SAP DMS system operates through standard SAP metadata searches and movement. Implemented efficiently, it has very low bandwidth and computing power requirements. SAP DMS fully caters for the intelligent usage of content- and cache servers. This mitigates and minimise the network impact of moving large document files.
* Low additional skill requirements: The DMS being a native SAP module, the additional skills required by an organisation using SAP are very low. The DMS uses standard SAP functionality like basis, authorisations, workflow, HR, classification etc, for which organisations normally already have skills working in other modules. Other interface GUIs that are Web-based and MS Explorer-based are also available.
* Low training and re-training requirements: Because the system builds on the standard SAP skills that employees gain through their normal work, the additional document management system training requirement for SAP workers is very low, and skills retention very high post training.
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