Issue No: 34
DIRECTIONS FOR ERP, CRM,
SCM, SRM
Printable
PDF Version
By Clive Finkelstein
October 25, 2006: This issue of TEN
follows the announcement of availability of my latest book:
"Enterprise Architecture for integration: Rapid Delivery Methods and
Technologies", which was published by Artech House, Norwood, MA on
March 31, 2006. You can
read the review of the book by Karen Lopez of InfoAdvisors, Inc
in Toronto, Canada in the last issue:
TEN#32. Links are also provided in the review so you can order
the book online now, if you wish.
Previous issues of TEN have been
based on extracts from the first edition of the book. This issue
continues the new focus of TEN started in the July issue:
TEN#33. I will use TEN to provide you with early
availability of material that will eventually be published in the
second edition of the book. This will enable you to keep updated on
the latest methodology developments, products and technologies
relating to Enterprise Architecture, Modeling Tools, Web Services,
SOA and BPM.
If you do not want to receive future
TEN mailings, please email
unsubscribe@ies.aust.com with “Remove” and your email address in
the Subject line.
Clive Finkelstein
Publisher, The Enterprise Newsletter (TEN)
This
issue we celebrate an important anniversary.
-
Since its establishment, IES has made an important
contribution to the IT industry, through the development and
continuing refinement of Information Engineering (IE).
Today, the latest version of IE is Enterprise Engineering
(EE): which is used for the rapid delivery of Enterprise
Architecture (EA).
-
White
Papers are at
http://www.ies.aust.com/.
Click on the Papers link from any page.
Back to Contents
I will be presenting two courses in
London:
Rapid Delivery of Enterprise Architecture for Business Integration
on Nov 13-15 and
Rapid Delivery Technologies for Enterprise Integration on Nov
16-17, 2006.
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Purchase the
Book
You can purchase the book from the
publisher's Online Store by clicking the links below: from the front
cover mage of the book; from the book title; or from the Purchase
Book link below.
At the publisher's Online Store, use
"Enterprise Architecture" to search for the book Title, or "Clive
Finkelstein" to search for the Author. When you add the book to
your shopping cart, click on your country in the world map that is
displayed, to calculate the cost of shipping the book to you.
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To
answer the many questions that I receive by email, I have now
set up an EA Blog so that people can ask me questions more
easily, following their purchase of the book, or related to
White Papers or past Issues of TEN. This will also enable others
to see these questions and answers. Hopefully it will lead to a
dialog that benefits many more than do isolated answers to
individual emails.
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I was
recently invited by the BEye Network in the USA to write a
series of articles on Enterprise Architecture. The first series
of four articles, to be published over the next few months,
cover:
-
Introduction to Enterprise Architecture
-
Strategic Modeling for Rapid Delivery of Enterprise
Architecture
-
Enterprise Architecture in Banking
-
Enterprise Architecture in Government
When
these articles have been published by BEye Network, I will
upload them as PDFs to the IES web site, so you can download and
use them within your own organization. Their availability
on the IES web site will be announced in a future issue of TEN.
At that time, use the following link:
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Please
contact me if you feel I may be able to assist you with an
upcoming EA project or with EA training at your organization. I
am happy to help. You can get more information from the IES web
site as follows:
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This issue
of TEN covers directions and products to address the problems of
inflexibility that have previously been associated with Enterprise
Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM),
Supply Chain Management (SCM), Human Resource (HR) and Supplier
Relationship Management (SRM) product suites from vendors such as
SAP. We will examine the capabilities of SAP NetWeaver in this
issue, for transformation of the SAP product suites into highly
flexible application support environments.
The success
that SAP had through the 1990s with SAP R/3 highlighted its
vulnerability to the rapid change environment of the 21st Century.
It had to change so that its customers could use its ERP, CRM, SCM,
HR and SRM software products more flexibly. The emergence of SOA and
Web Services in the 21st Century today offer it a capability to
support rapid business change.
With its
purchase of TopTier in 2001 as the SAP Enterprise Portal, SAP now
has a flexible user interface (UI). This enables it to change its
product direction to support SOA. The catalyst and foundation for
SOA support is provided by SAP NetWeaver. We will examine SAP
NetWeaver in some detail in this issue, as it offers comprehensive
SOA capabilities.
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Figure 1:
SAP Enterprise Service Architecture [Source: SAP]
Figure 1
illustrates the SAP Enterprise Service Architecture. According to
Woods and Mattern, commenting in their recent book on SAP’s use of
this term:[1]
“Enterprise Service Architecture (ESA) was created to satisfy the
needs of modern businesses that are interested in process
innovation, which means being able to automate new processes as well
as improve and optimize stable processes to take advantage of new
challenges.”
“The
demand for flexibility to automate new processes and improve
existing ones changes the landscape dramatically. The standard
processes of enterprise applications explode into smaller bundles of
enterprise services built to execute proportionally smaller tasks.
So now, for example, one service might accept a purchase order and
another one might validate that order to a defined set of rules. A
metaservice might control the handoff of data from one service to
another as it’s passed along a string of orchestrated processes
designed to reflect how the real-world business process actually
works.”
“ESA
preserves the gains of the previous generation of enterprise
applications while introducing flexibility. All of the standard
processes that made ERP, CRM, and other enterprise applications so
vital to efficient operations will stay in place. Instead of being
powered by monolithic architectures, however, they will be powered
by services. The existence of services is the engine of flexibility.
It’s not important where those services originate – whether in ERP,
CRM, or SCM – because it’s now possible to orchestrate them
independently. The Enterprise Services Repository (ESR) incorporates
a central tank of services that SAP has created for customers, and
it will include services that companies create on their own. All of
these services will be stored for use and reuse, subject to the
rules and standards implicit in ESA.”
Figure 2:
Enterprise Services through MySAP Business Suite [Source: SAP]
According
to Woods and Mattern, Enterprise services (see
Figure 2) typically fall into one of four main categories:[2]
Process
services
"Trigger
a process and manage its consistent execution."
Component services
"Keep
track of the context—the relationships, data, and external
information—related to an important business function. Commonly,
this context takes the form of a set of rules applied to the
operation of other services. When one service inputs data to a
purchase order, for example, a second component service
determines—based on the identity of the supplier and corresponding
contractual relations—how the purchase order should be handled."
Entity or engine services
"Provide
access to a business object or a discrete piece of functionality,
such as a pricing engine, and manage all of the necessary events and
activities triggered by the service."
Utility services
"Perform
a common function for other services. A service providing the
required values for a specific field—the "value help service"—is a
classic example of a utility service.”
The diagram
in Figure 3
shows some of the NetWeaver architecture. Enterprise Services from
SAP, independent software vendors (ISVs), business partners and
other process components are managed in an Enterprise Service
Directory, where they are utilized in Composite Applications
(XApps): used in the Composite Application Framework (CAF).
These can be accessed by the SAP Enterprise Portal UI from a variety
of devices as shown in Figure 3.
Figure 3:
SAP NetWeaver Architecture [Source: SAP]
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Duet by
Microsoft and SAP
As an
example of some of the User Interfaces that can be used by
NetWeaver, SAP and Microsoft have released Duet (see
Figure 4).
This is a jointly-developed product that enables SAP products to be
accessed from within Microsoft Office: Word; Excel; PowerPoint;
Outlook; and InfoPath for example. It was designed to leverage
investments in SAP and Microsoft: Office users can also become SAP
users, working within a familiar Office environment.
Figure 4:
Example of Duet by Microsoft and SAP [Source: SAP]
At the time
of writing, the following enhancements were planned for Duet:
Duet 1.0 (Released June 2006) supports the following
scenarios: Time Management, Leave Management, Budget Monitoring,
Organization Management in English through access to MySAP ERP 2004
and MS Office 2003, Professional Enterprise Exchange Sever 2003 and
Windows 2003 Server.
The
screenshots in Figure 4
show Microsoft Outlook and InfoPath being used to access SAP ERP
products through Duet for Budget Transfer.
Duet Value Pack 1 (Q3 2006) supports Recruitment Management,
Travel Management, Analytics and Reports with additional languages
(French, German, Japanese, Spanish, Portuguese) through access to
MySAP ERP 2005.
Duet Value Pack 2 (Q4 2006) supports Sales Management,
Purchasing Management with support for Microsoft Office 2007.
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SAP NetWeaver Visual Composer
SAP
NetWeaver uses the NetWeaver Visual Composer as shown in
Figure 5
for visual process modeling and rapid application development. This
runs on the J2EE engine of the SAP Web Application Server. It
supports Adobe Flex / Flash and provides connectivity to non-SAP
environments such as PeopleSoft and Siebel. It connects to web
service repositories to discover and incorporate web services into
Visual Composer models.
Figure 5: SAP NetWeaver Visual Composer [Source:
SAP]
As we have discussed, SAP is
structuring its product suites around an Enterprise Service
Architecture (ESA). It is service-enabling all of its products[3]
for use with Enterprise Services. While a web service may be defined
as Cancel Order, an enterprise service also includes within it other
required services, such as: Cancel Shipment, Cancel Invoice, Update
Inventory and Update Account Balance.
The diagram in
Figure 6
shows the environment for web services and enterprise services,
which are accessed through the SAP XI (Exchange Infrastructure).
Woods and Mattern state that:[4]
“The architectural challenges of
ESA stem from the violation of the implicit assumptions
referenced earlier: the ideas of the database as a point of
integration and the application as a process boundary no longer
apply.”
“The first challenge is
flexibility. Once services are created and processes are
automated, optimization and innovation depend on a company’s
ability to not only implement processes, but also be able to
change and improve them based on experience. This is a huge
challenge, considering the average optimization cycle of today’s
custom application projects, which may range anywhere from 9 to
18 months – a timeframe that is no longer acceptable. Companies
need to implement a new IT system within weeks and months in
order for it to have an impact. The tradeoff for flexibility has
traditionally been cost – it’s easier to make changes to a
system when development costs are no object. But that implies
the system was never very flexible in the first place. Inherent
flexibility implies a corresponding reduction in cost to make
changes because flexibility has to be affordable in order to be
meaningful.”
“The second challenge facing ESA
is data consistency – how to unify and synchronize all of the
information and process flow in an automated process where data
is stored in lots of different databases and lots of
applications are supplying services.”
“The third challenge is
heterogeneity. The modern enterprise can’t assume that all of
its software and systems will always come from a single vendor.
A heterogeneous computing environment is a given in today’s
world. In fact, it is inevitable. Even if management consciously
set out to choose a single vendor, mergers and acquisitions
would make it inevitable that systems from a different vendor
will arrive from some acquisition down the road. And even if the
company is an island, homegrown applications or specialized
tools from a niche vendor will ultimately introduce complexity
at some point.”
Figure 6: SAP Web Services Overview [Source:
SAP]
“The
fourth challenge is the user interface (UI). Now that companies have
the ability with ESA to combine and recombine enterprise services in
any manner they wish, designing the most efficient and the most
appropriate interfaces for the delivery of the right functionality
to the right person becomes extremely important. As processes are
developed, roles must be developed in tandem for the employees
charged with collecting information, evaluating that information,
and making a decision based on that analysis. … Previous generations
of enterprise applications had been built as reflections of the
database’s internal structure rather than as reflections of the
roles people play in the application’s process. In practice that
meant that performing a simple real-world task required using 4, 5,
10 or even 15 UIs reflecting different aspects of the database
structure instead of accessing a single screen specifically created
so that person could perform the task. The UI challenge is one of
bringing together and making affordable the creation of many
role-based interfaces for the convenience of human users.”
“All of
these challenges point to a tremendous impact and change in IT
development. The need for inexpensive flexibility, along with the
demand for customized interfaces throughout the organization,
implies that development must become cheaper and faster in a hurry.
That will require the demystification of IT. Development must become
simple enough that not only will highly trained programmers and
information architects but managers outside of IT will as well. SAP
has envisioned the role of the business analyst, a manager versed in
IT but lacking traditional development skills, though she has a much
deeper understanding of the actual business processes being
automated than the developers in IT do. While IT focuses on exposing
services and maintaining the architecture, business analysts will
receive the tools to create the necessary applications and
interfaces to extend process automation even further.”
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The steps
involved in generating web services from SAP are illustrated in
Figure 7.
Woods and Mattern say that:
[5]
Figure 7: Creating a Web
Service from SAP [Source: SAP]
“An
enterprise service is a web service designed as a reusable component
in process automation.”
“It
exists within the larger context of ESA, and it contains metadata
about its functionality and about how it connects to other services.
Web services contain much of the same functionality as enterprise
services—usually at a more granular level than is useful for process
orchestration—but the soul of an enterprise service is that it's
there to help you, and it contains enough functionality to make a
meaningful difference in processes. Enterprise services are large
enough that combining and recombining them is a fairly easy task.”
“The
question then becomes, does this act help the larger business
process of canceling an order? The larger scope of that process
includes many actions beyond deleting a record in the ERP system.
There might also be a CRM system handling the sales aspect, an SCM
system containing its own order objects, and so on. Therefore, the
business process of canceling an order contains many steps: revising
the supply chain plan, flagging the material into stock, notifying
the customer that his order has indeed been cancelled, and so on.”
“Whereas a web service simply deletes the record, an enterprise
service is able to orchestrate the larger process of canceling an
order by sending individual messages to each of its systems, and
most likely many more.”
The SAP XI (Exchange Infrastructure) –
see Figure 8
– supports “mediated” web services, with routing, mapping and
Business Process Management.
Figure 8:
Web Services with SAP XI [Source: SAP]
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Rather than
use BPMN for code generation (see Figure 9 and
TEN#31),
it appears that SAP generates XML from Visual Composer using a GUI
Modeling Language (GML), producing an Execution Graph (xGraph) which
uses a library of Flex components from Adobe. From that XML and Flex
library they then generate Java for execution and iViews for portal
use: effectively the model is compiled into a Flex (Flash) movie.
Figure
9: SAP NetWeaver Execution [Source: SAP]
Figure 10
illustrates SAPs use of Composite Applications. Woods and Mattern go
on to say that:[6]
Figure
10: SAP NetWeaver Composite Applications [Source: SAP]
“Composite applications are about reuse. Another shade of meaning
enters when we think of the verb composing.”
“Composite applications are composed rather than developed.
Composing means assembling all the required services and
orchestrating them so that they work together to perform a new task.
Composing frequently takes place through use of modeling rather than
coding in traditional languages. Development of composite
applications is accelerated in another way. Modeling and the use of
services mean that the logic connecting the services is not nearly
as complex as traditional applications and is clearly separated into
layers. This makes adapting a composite to meet new purposes much
easier and faster. So, what are composite applications about? They
are about reuse, speed of development, and flexibility.”
“Composite Applications are used to combine the parts of existing
applications to initiate new business practices without having to
start from scratch.”
“They
are built and deployed on top of enterprise services. Operations are
provided by components, combining these service operations with new
application logic, user interfaces, and business process
orchestration. Composite Applications are loosely coupled to the
components on which they are based, resulting in a new logical
application tier which can be deployed and upgraded independently of
the component infrastructure.”
“xApps
are packaged Composite Applications that are sold separately from
MySAP Business Suite, Al, and Business One, with their own price tag
and release schedule. They are stand-alone, packaged composite
applications that deliver innovative, differentiated business
processes.”
“The
Composite Application Framework (CAF) provides an environment for
modeling the processes to build applications, leveraging NetWeaver.
It comes with predefined generic patterns for reuse in different
development projects.”
Composite Applications in Figure 11
enable companies to define innovative business processes by
leveraging existing IT investments. The SAP Composite Application
Framework (CAF):
- Provides a
methodology and toolset to efficiently develop and manage
composite applications, following the SAP Enterprise Services
Architecture blueprint
- Enables the
modeling of Entity and Application Services. Entity Services
encapsulate business objects including their local or remote
persistency whereas Application Services compose and orchestrate
services for implementing new business logic allows the
modeling, managing and execution of new collaborative business
processes.
Figure
11: Anatomy of a Composite Application [Source: SAP]
- Actions
decouple process steps from services and user interfaces to
allow business experts to model processes on a non-technical
level.
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[1] “Enterprise SOA: Designing IT for Business
Innovation”, Dan Woods and Thomas Mattern, O’Reilly,
Sebastopol: CA, April 2006 (p93).
[2] “Enterprise SOA: Designing IT for Business
Innovation”, Dan Woods and Thomas Mattern, O’Reilly,
Sebastopol: CA, April 2006 (p93).
[3] SAP is service enabling SAP ERP 2004, SAP ERP 2005
and MySAP Business Suite.
[4] “Enterprise SOA: Designing IT for Business
Innovation”, Dan Woods and Thomas Mattern, O’Reilly,
Sebastopol: CA, April 2006 (pp95-97).
[5] “Enterprise SOA: Designing IT for Business
Innovation”, Dan Woods and Thomas Mattern, O’Reilly,
Sebastopol: CA, April 2006.
[6] “Enterprise SOA: Designing IT for Business
Innovation”, Dan Woods and Thomas Mattern, O’Reilly,
Sebastopol: CA, April 2006 (p103).
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