A recent study by The Conference Board painted an
ugly picture about ERP deployments. This study reported that business
and IT executives most often suffer from:
Having
a set of disparate, undocumented data sources and business practices.
Data
quality and incompatibility problems - for example, multiple
variations of a name for a single customer - making it difficult
to provide "clean" data and transform this legacy
data to conform to the new standards in the ERP system.
A
poor understanding of source systems and business practices
complicates the ability to map out a data migration plan and
can lead to project delays.
The fact that business does not stop when you're
rolling out a new system simply aggravates the problem - you need
to keep the current one running for some time in parallel so people
can do their work.
In talking to companies who use SAP, three common themes have
emerged. IT executives need to:
Have
a single platform to handle all their SAP and non-SAP data integration
needs because they want to maximize the return on their IT assets.
Reduce
time-to-market by automating a key piece of their application
development process that they previously managed through custom
code and point integration tools.
Improve
the overall quality of any data-centric application by focusing
on quality as a key component of the integration effort.
Even companies who consider themselves an "SAP
shop" generally operate a heterogeneous IT environment, with
applications and databases from multiple vendors.
Business objectives drive IT investments generally,
and in particular the major investments in enterprise applications
like ERP, customer relationship management (CRM), supply chain
management (SCM), business intelligence (BI) analytics and e-business.
All these applications, and the many others that exist within
the enterprise, must be integrated together to accomplish business
objectives.
Successful enterprise integration begins with
successful data integration. And on-going data quality monitoring
becomes a necessity to ensure new data added to the system doesn't
"pollute" good, existing data.
White Paper: Seven Key Steps to Maximizing
Value from SAP
Implementing and deploying SAP NetWeaver-based
applications such as SAP R/3 and SAP NetWeaver BI (formerly
known as SAP BW) can be long and costly IT projects. Organizations
undertake these projects because they believe they will achieve
a rate of return from the business benefits delivered by the
SAP solutions that will exceed the cost of implementation. Delivering
business value as quickly as possible and minimizing the expense
associated with deploying and maintaining these types of applications
are two critical goals.
