Enterprise SOA

ESA for professional service providers

When it comes to creating solutions for professional service providers—a job description that includes everything from consulting, tax, audit, law, and IT services to hospitality—SAP often plays a dual role. Not only is it creating applications and enterprise services that firms such as Deloitte & Touche choose and configure on behalf of their clients, but it is also encouraging those same providers to develop their own services for use within ESA.

One example of the former is SAP's work in providing base services for professional firms—e.g., automatically time-capturing billable hours and invoicing clients. The traditional pain points for these applications are the time-to-bill and confirming the accuracy of the data in question. SAP engineers have sought to solve both problems by creating enterprise services derived from the Cross Application Time Sheet (CATS) and using them in a composite application. This application records billable hours and can then link that data to a portal-based application in which project managers can check the total number of billable hours so far, or link it to a mobile application on a laptop or BlackBerry—an application which can also be used to record billable hours on the road. Using enterprise services, all of this data can be aggregated faster and with greater accuracy than current packaged solutions allow. Using enterprise services, it's relatively simple to take a standardized service for time-capturing ...