SAP delivers next evolution of flagship ERP

SAP AG announced the global availability of mySAP ERP 2005, the latest version of its renowned enterprise resource planning application. The new version of mySAP ERP features more than 300 product enhancements to provide companies with better information access and decision support, including role-based, intuitive work centres that enable users with a single click-to-action. The service-enablement of mySAP ERP 2005 provides greater openness and agility to extend process capabilities with applications from SAP or its family of ecosystem partners. Industry-specific functionality is now also fully embedded in the core ERP application, and customers who have licensed SAP industry solution portfolios delivered with mySAP ERP will benefit from more timely availability of industry-specific capabilities, as well as simplified configuration and administration. In addition, SAP demoed an early version of a new, modernised user interface called "Project Muse." The announcement was made at SAPPHIRE '06, SAP's international customer conference, held in Orlando, Florida, 16 to 18 May.

The latest version of mySAP ERP is a milestone release with advanced capabilities that deliver greater value to new and existing customers and provide a cost-effective, low risk and evolutionary path to the industry's first service-enabled suite of enterprise applications. The new version of mySAP ERP enables customers to leverage its 300 available enterprise services, comprising the majority of the more than 500 productised enterprise services from mySAP Business Suite. SAP is service-enabling mySAP ERP to help customers innovate and adapt to changing industry requirements with greater speed and at lower cost than ever before. The widespread availability of the latest mySAP ERP application, built upon the SAP NetWeaver platform, provides a further realisation of the SAP road map for enterprise service-oriented architecture (enterprise SOA), marking the first application that connects all operations through an intelligent foundation of cross-functional business processes, combining software applications with the underlying infrastructure for greater flexibility and fluid communications with customers and suppliers.

"For enterprises to respond to competitive challenges, they must be able to implement business changes on an ongoing basis, providing insight in an intuitive manner to its knowledge workers," said Henry Morris, group VP, IDC. "With its release of mySAP ERP 2005, SAP responds to these requirements with more extensive verticalisation, better access to information and tangible progress towards its stated goal of adaptable, service-oriented software applications."

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To support all ways that people work, SAP demonstrated an early version of a new SAP GUI, called "Project Muse," that will provide a powerful new option for customers, and is one key element of SAP's effort to simplify the usage of SAP software while opening up its business processes to become ubiquitous and used through a variety of user experiences. This rich new user interface option delivers a simple, intuitive and highly interactive user experience, allowing users to access an SAP application directly from their Mac, Linux or Windows desktop and from integrated mobile devices and combines the benefits of a browser system (easy distribution of the SAP GUI over the Web) with benefits of rich clients (optimised network traffic and user interaction). SAP aims to make the new SAP GUI available to customers running mySAP Business Suite applications, delivering it with mySAP ERP 2005 in waves through a series of enhancement packages.

As announced on 2 May 2006, SAP and Microsoft have also delivered Duet software, a thought-leading software application that integrates the business processes and enterprise information driven by mySAP ERP with the Microsoft Office System. By leveraging the business environment of Microsoft Office, employees realise a seamless experience between Microsoft and mySAP ERP applications. Along with self-service capabilities, pre-configured, role-based work centres and SAP xApps composite applications for analytics provided with mySAP ERP 2005, SAP's innovative approach allows business users to connect to SAP applications in unprecedented ways-and through the user interface that is most well-suited to their unique requirements.

SAP dedicated significant effort in the creation of mySAP ERP 2005 to the simplification and acceleration of ERP upgrades at customer sites. Upgrades from SAP R/3 to mySAP ERP have been completed at unprecedented speed while customers start using mySAP ERP 2005 as the key milestone as part of their own ESA road maps.

"Orange County Public Schools hires more than 2 000 employees each year and needed a solution that would change the way we do business, improving how the administration recruits talented teachers and hires qualified staff," said Charles Thompson, CIO, Orange County Public Schools. "As an existing SAP customer, Orange County turned to the latest version of mySAP ERP because its e-recruiting capabilities will help automate steps in the recruiting process, giving the school district visibility into candidates and allowing hiring managers to post job descriptions."

"The move to mySAP ERP provides us with a strong foundation for excellence in our core business functions and supports our overall growth strategy as we continue to expand internationally," said Guillaume Bruyneel CIO at Dexxon Group Holding. "We completed our ERP migration on time and budget, and are now up and running with robust applications and technology that help improve our financial supply chain processes, enhance visibility for our managers and streamline sales and contract flow with our customers. The new architecture of mySAP ERP allows us to collaborate more effectively and operate more flexibly at a lower overall cost."

SAP has made many functional enhancements to its market-leading ERP software, including:

Enhanced financial management, analysis and reporting capabilities:
* A newly architected general ledger solution that lessens manual reconciliations and improves the ability to balance ledgers by multiple dimensions.
* Improved management dashboards that provide a complete picture of business operations and improve decision-making among managers and line-of-business users.
* New collections and credit management capabilities to accelerate cash collections and improve day sales outstanding metrics.

Enhanced human capital management capabilities:
* End-to-end talent management tools to improve recruiting, training, performance evaluation and retention of employees.
* Improved employee self-service capabilities to reduce administrative overhead of human resources (HR) departments.
* Improved employee expense and travel reporting to reduce the time and improve control over employee expense reimbursements.
Enhanced support for new business models and operations:
* Improved architecture to support outsourcing for payroll and cash management.
* New ability to support electronic procurement, invoicing, sales order management and documentation of internal controls for the US Sarbanes-Oxley Act.
* Enhanced enterprise services repository for system and instance consolidation and shared-service management.

Serving a broad business user community:
* Empowered users through enhanced capabilities to connect people directly to processes leveraging the specific role-based user interface.
* Improved business insight through expanded SAP xApps for analytics.

"mySAP ERP provides new and existing SAP customers with a rock-solid business foundation for future success, allowing companies to achieve and sustain excellence in core operational areas," said Shai Agassi, president of the Product and Technology Group and executive board member, SAP. "This new release delivers on the promise of enterprise SOA: the high levels of flexibility and adaptability needed to innovate and address today's business challenges, and the capabilities end users require to do their jobs effectively and efficiently."