Postal Service Turns To SAP For HR
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Very few organizations have as many feet on the street as the US Postal Service. To better get a handle on those feet, the Postal Service said Monday it&#39;s implementing SAP Human Capital
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(InfoWorld) - SAP AG has brought in outside talent Uwe Herold as its chief information officer (CIO), filling a post vacant since the previous incumbent left the company earlier this year. The business applications vendor confirmed Thursday that Herold joins SAP Oct. 1. He will also hold a position on the company's board of directors in the area of human resources, processes and production and report to Claus Heinrich, one of SAP's executive board members. SAP operates a two-tier board system with a board of directors and an executive board. Herold will be based at SAP's headquarters in Walldorf, Germany. Most recently CIO at German automotive supplier Brose Fahrzeugteile GmbH & Co., Herold has 15 years of experience in business process engineering and IT management. While at Brose, he worked on SAP implementations and so can also bring an SAP user perspective to his new employer. Before joining Brose in 1999, Herold headed up process engineering and organizational development efforts at fluid technology company Hydac Filtertechnik GmbH. "Like any other enterprise that places value on developing and harnessing internal talent, SAP always considers internal applicants for vacant roles," an SAP spokeswoman in Germany wrote in response to an e-mail for comment on why the company chose an outsider as the CIO. "At the same time, it is also important for us to bring in fresh ideas and different expertise from time to time. In this case, Herold was the ideal candidate for this role and we are confident that with his wealth of experience he will be an asset to SAP." Herold replaces Carol Wilson who left the company after three years in the job earlier this year. Wilson joined Tata Consultancy Services Ltd. in April as its implementation director charged with the development and delivery of the Indian outsourcing and consulting firm's IT services in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
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SAP&#160;is pushing ahead with two partnerships that aim to provide customers with better user interface options for its ERP (enterprise resource planning) applications.SAP and Microsoft&#160;plan to announce an upgrade in the coming weeks to their Duet software, version 1.5, which will be generally available early next year, officials at SAP&#39;s Tech Ed conference said this week.At the same time, SAP is stepping up its efforts with Adobe Systems&#160;to let developers liven up SAP interfaces using Adobe&#39;s new AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) technology, for building rich Web applications that run outside of a browser.Both projects, on show at TechEd in Munich, Germany, aim to expand the number of employees who access SAP applications and data. The partnerships are also part of an industrywide trend to bring enterprise software to a wider range of business users.SAP&#39;s standard interfaces are often seen as functional, but not very imaginative or easy to use.&quot;Anything that improves SAP&#39;s interfaces, which are hideous and hard to use, is a good thing,&quot; said James Governor, an industry analyst with RedMonk.Duet allows workers to view &quot;contextual&quot; SAP data that might help them make business decisions from within Microsoft applications such as Outlook and Excel. In the current version, that contextual data is limited to what SAP and Microsoft chose to provide for a given task.&quot;It&#39;s really the information we think people want, based on our experience and best practices,&quot; said Yifat Ferber-Harel, a Duet product manager with SAP.Version 1.5 of the product will include tools that allow developers to choose the contextual data they want to present to end users.For example, a big company might set up a process for approving promotions using Microsoft Outlook. When a senior manager receives an e-mail from a department head suggesting a promotion, a developer will be able to provide related information from SAP&#39;s human-resources software, such as the employee&#39;s sales figures, absentee record or current pay scale.The capability should help to deliver on the original promise of Duet, Ferber-Harel said. &quot;Part of our original vision was to give you the information you need to make decisions, and you can&#39;t make decisions without the right information,&quot; she said.The update will also add more user scenarios, the business cases in which Duet can be used. Today they include areas such as leave management and budget planning.At the same time, SAP is working with Adobe on its&#160;AIR technology, a recent addition to Adobe&#39;s Flex development environment. AIR is seen as a rival to Microsoft&#39;s Internet Explorer because developers can use it to build applications with HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) and Flash that can on a the desktop instead of in a Web browser.SAP has just developed its first application based entirely on Flex, called Spend Analytics, for aggregating and analyzing spend data, said Matthias Zeller, a senior Adobe product manager, in a presentation at Tech Ed.Spend Analytics includes a tool called Briefing Book, for capturing snapshots of data that can be shared with other managers. Briefing Book is already unusual for an SAP interface, appearing as an actual book rendered virtually on the screen. The tool is usually viewed in a browser, but Adobe has developed a proof-of-concept version with AIR.Zeller showed how users can drag and drop data-views from Briefing Book onto the desktop for offline use -- something not possible in Internet Explorer. And it lets a user work with spend data in Excel, to create a forecast, for example, and then drag that data into Briefing Book. The AIR interface can&#39;t be synchronized with the data in Excel, however.AIR is available today for the Windows and Mac operating systems and will &quot;very soon&quot; be available for Linux, Zeller said. Spend Analytics is available now to some SAP customers and should be generally available in the first quarter next year.Customers looking at the technologies should consider that AIR is still in beta, while Duet has been in the market since June 2006. That said, Adobe and SAP have been working together on interactive forms for SAP since 2002. IBM&#39;s Lotus Notes group also develops client interfaces for SAP.Microsoft and SAP are increasingly rivalrous in the business applications area, and for that reason SAP may find Adobe an easier partner to work with, Red Monk&#39;s Governor said. (RedMonk does consulting work for SAP and Adobe.) In addition, companies might not always find it easy to bring teams of SAP and Microsoft engineers together, said Alan Rickayzen, an SAP senior product manager.&quot;Culturally, the SAP people are totally different from those in the Microsoft Exchange world,&quot; he told Tech Ed attendees. &quot;You have to bring together two groups of people who would not normally talk to each other.&quot;
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DECEMBER 15, 2004 (IDG NEWS SERVICE) - SAP AG said today that it&#39;s offering customers a new service to ensure the security of SAP systems.
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InfoWorld - SAPÂ is pushing ahead with two partnerships that aim to provide customers with better user interface options for its ERP (enterprise resource planning) applications.
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Company turns over thousands of documents to House panel.
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The human resources department is so 20th century. Recruitment has become the next outsourcing frontier. Think India.
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FRANKFURT/BOSTON  - SAP AG  will unveil  on Wednesday a line of business management programs to be  delivered over the Web, becoming the first major software  company to make a big bet on software as a service.
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SAP is offering a new service called SAP Security Optimization, which provides a detailed analysis of security gaps and vulnerabilities and action plans on how to resolve them.
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SAP has decided to support virtual server installations.
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An SAP initiative to more tightly align its business software with Microsoft's tools is about to bear fruit.
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(InfoWorld) - Business software vendor SAP has added an offering to its growing suite of quickly deployable applications aimed at helping businesses manage specific tasks across diverse industries. SAP xApp Sales and Operations Planning (SAP xSOP), to be available in March, will enable finance, sales, purchasing, and production departments to collect, analyze, and track all sales and operations-planning data in a central location, thus cutting the time office staff spends compiling and preparing information for directors to make decisions, SAP said Wednesday. The application, the newest member in the SAP xApp family of composite applications, will help companies deal with a common challenge in their sales operations: obtaining a consolidated view of all the sales planning-related data that flows through spreadsheets and applications used by numerous departments, according to Andrew White, research vice president at Gartner. SAP's composite applications, which run on the company's NetWeaver integration middleware, tap reusable functions, or "services," from existing IT systems, automating processes that improve collaboration among business units and business partners, according to SAP With SAP xSOP, each user sees the same sales and operations planning data at the level of detail they need via role-based dashboards, according to SAP. For instance, a detergent maker's sales and marketing directors can use their dashboards to determine the regional campaigns and in-store promotions needed to achieve a monthly million-unit projection. Production managers can use the same projection to determine how much detergent will be powdered, how much will be liquid, and how many tablets to plan for. Integrated key performance indicators will be available in general categories such as demand, supply, inventory, capacity and budget. The indicators can be easily added and altered.
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Postal workers are on course for an Â£800 bonus after the Royal Mail today reported a huge improvement in its finances and more reliable deliveries.
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SAP is buying a small Indian software company to help beef up the business process management capabilities in its NetWeaver applications platform.It is purchasing Yasu Technologies, a maker of business rules management software, which helps ensure that business processes automated through software are in compliance with a company&#39;s rules and regulations.SAP characterized the deal, announced at its Tech Ed conference in Munich, Germany, on Wednesday, as a &quot;fill in&quot; acquisition that would bridge a gap in its technologies. The deal is due to close this month and financial terms were not disclosed.Several vendors, including SAP, are providing software tools that allow companies to automate common business processes, such as issuing a purchase order or checking inventory levels, with the goal of making them more efficient.But SAP does not yet offer tools for managing these processes, and buying Yasu will help it to add such BPM (business process management) capabilities to NetWeaver.SAP will begin pilot tests of its first BPM product, code-named Galaxy, in the first quarter of next year. The technology acquired from Yasu will be integrated with Galaxy around the middle of next year, said Klaus Kreplin, SAP&#39;s head of NetWeaver technology.Yasu&#39;s software helps companies to enforce the rules that their business processes must abide by. If a company automates a project approval process, for example, Yasu will send projects under a certain budget to a midlevel manager for approval, and more costly projects to a senior manager.&quot;The nice thing is, you can define rules and make them available as a service that can be integrated with other applications,&quot; Kreplin said.Yasu was founded in 1999 and has about 120 employees. Customers include the automaker BMW, according to its Web site.BPM is one of several areas SAP is entering to compete better with its main applications rival, Oracle. SAP will also offer software for building composite applications, called the NetWeaver Composition Environment, and developing hosted applications for smaller companies, called SAP Business ByDesign.The Galaxy software will be integrated with NetWeaver Composition Environment next year. Eventually that, in turn, will be offered as a part of Business ByDesign, Kreplin said, although he wouldn&#39;t say when.Last week SAP said it would&#160;buy business intelligence vendor Business Objects&#160;for S$6.8 billion. A few days later&#160;Oracle offered to buy BEA Systems, whose software competes with SAP&#39;s NetWeaver, for $6.7 billion, but BEA called the offer too low.SAP CEO Henning Kagermann told the Financial Times of London over the weekend that SAP won&#39;t enter a bidding war for BEA, and that its strategy is still to grow its two core businesses -- applications and middleware -- organically.But he wouldn&#39;t rule out further big acquisitions in areas where SAP is not already strong. &quot;We are categorically not excluding further big acquisitions,&quot; Kagermann said, according to the Financial Times.The company also continues to snap up smaller companies. SAP has bought more than a dozen vendors in the past three years, according to IDC, including five in 2005, three in 2006, and six so far in 2007, including Yasu and Business Objects. That compares to more than 30 acquisitions for Oracle, a few of which were much larger deals.
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SAP has unwrapped a new on-demand business software platform targeted at midsize companies (100 to 500 employees) looking to simplify their I.T. requirements while improving the efficiency and flexibility of their business processes.
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John Lindeman is the acting customer relations coordinator at the US Postal Service in Milwaukee, a very busy place these days. He has worked for the post office for eight years and also drives a semitrailer truck for the post office.
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Company outsources e-mail for small to medium businesses.