mySAP™ ERP For Dummies®

mySAP™ ERP For Dummies®

by Andreas Vogel, Ian Kimbell
Released September 2005
Publisher(s): For Dummies
ISBN: 9780764599958

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Book description

  • SAP is the world's leading provider of ERP software and services, with worldwide revenue in 2004 of $9.7 billion and a 57 percent market share among major business application providers; it is one of the world's largest software companies overall

  • ERP is a flexible, open technology platform that helps businesses run more efficiently (and profitably) by providing integrated management of key operations and supply chains

  • Written for IT professionals who find it hard to get through SAP's complex documentation, our book demonstrates how ERP can cut costs, provides a clear overview of how the ESA (enterprise service architecture) model affects ERP, and shows how to implement the new ERP in the real world

  • Topics covered include reducing the cost of an existing IT backbone, using the new ERP to address a company's "pain points" and challenges, and proving the value of ERP through ROI (return on investment) and TCO (total cost of ownership) studies

    •

    Table of contents

    1. Copyright
    2. About the Authors
    3. Authors' Acknowledgments
    5. Foreword
    6. Introduction
      1. Why Buy This Book?
      2. Foolish Assumptions
      3. How This Book Is Organized
        1. Part I: mySAP ERP in a Services-Enabled World
        2. Part II: Getting Under the Hood: The Underlying Technology
        3. Part III: Implementing Change
        4. Part IV: The Part of Tens
      4. Icone Used in This Book
    7. I. mySAP ERP in a Services-Enabled World
      1. 1. ERP: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow
        1. 1.1. Just What Is ERP?
        2. 1.2. A Brief History of ERP
          1. 1.2.1. Starting with basic applications for survival
          2. 1.2.2. Adding to the mix with expanded applications
        3. 1.3. What Early ERP Did Right
          1. 1.3.1. Made businesses more productive
          2. 1.3.2. Offered a scalable solution with a three-tier client/server architecture
          3. 1.3.3. Centralized data all over the place
          4. 1.3.4. Provided a bit of integration
        4. 1.4. Where ERP Had Room to Grow
          1. 1.4.1. Focused on transactions
          2. 1.4.2. Kept IT busy
          3. 1.4.3. Technology presented challenges
          4. 1.4.4. Challenged by the changing demands of customers and business
          5. 1.4.5. Needed to address specific industry requirements
        5. 1.5. The New ERP: mySAP ERP at Your Service
        6. 1.6. Service-Enabled: The Foundation of Flexible ERP Today
          1. 1.6.1. Breaking functionality up for flexibility
          2. 1.6.2. Building processes from services
          3. 1.6.3. Getting to Enterprise Services Architecture
        7. 1.7. Exploring the Benefits of Enterprise Services
          1. 1.7.1. Starting with standardization
          2. 1.7.2. Making applications platform- and vendor-independent
          3. 1.7.3. Hiding technology details through abstraction
        8. 1.8. Enterprise Services Provide Building Blocks
          1. 1.8.1. Services integrate applications and people
          2. 1.8.2. Where does ESA take you?
        9. 1.9. Where Does ERP Fit In?
      2. 2. Differentiating Yourself with ERP
        1. 2.1. Start by Being Business Model-Driven
        2. 2.2. Differentiating versus Standard Processes
        3. 2.3. Bringing in Innovation
          1. 2.3.1. Defining business innovation
          2. 2.3.2. The changing cycle of innovation
        4. 2.4. Meeting the Two Challenges of Innovation
          1. 2.4.1. Gaining the flexibility to change
          2. 2.4.2. Creating a common language for IT personnel and businesspeople
      3. 3. Raising the Bar on Productivity
        1. 3.1. Upping Your Usability
          1. 3.1.1. Providing a control center for your work
          2. 3.1.2. Taking advantage of work centers
        2. 3.2. Integrating with Applications You Use Every Day
          1. 3.2.1. Going into the office
          2. 3.2.2. Taking paper forms online
        3. 3.3. How Roles Make Life Easier
          1. 3.3.1. Defining roles for users
          2. 3.3.2. How roles show up in control centers
        4. 3.4. Self-Service for Productivity
        5. 3.5. Preconfigured Business Scenarios
        6. 3.6. Gaining Productivity through Industry-Specific Scenarios
        7. 3.7. Sharing and Outsourcing
          1. 3.7.1. Centralizing functions with shared services centers
          2. 3.7.2. Outsourcing the nondifferentiating parts
          3. 3.7.3. To outsource or not to outsource?
        8. 3.8. Making Things Run Smoothly with Automation
          1. 3.8.1. Automation in standard business processes
          2. 3.8.2. Using new technologies for data entry
      4. 4. Gaining Business Insight
        1. 4.1. Tapping into the Potential of Analytics
          1. 4.1.1. Getting it right
          2. 4.1.2. Ineffective analytics: What's the cost?
          3. 4.1.3. Enterprise analytics: The way of the future
        2. 4.2. Empowering Business People
          1. 4.2.1. Embedding analytics in business processes
          2. 4.2.2. Making analytics actionable
          3. 4.2.3. Outtasking the creation of analytics to the user
        3. 4.3. Tallying Up the Analytics You Get in mySAP ERP
        4. 4.4. Analytics in Action
          1. 4.4.1. Expediting your budgeting with express planning
          2. 4.4.2. Analytics in the plant
          3. 4.4.3. Playing by the rules: Compliance challenges
          4. 4.4.4. Industries banking on analytics
      5. 5. Keeping IT Flexible
        1. 5.1. Creating a Common Language for IT and Business
          1. 5.1.1. Syntax, meet semantics
          2. 5.1.2. Enterprise services get granular
          3. 5.1.3. Enterprise services understand industries
        2. 5.2. How IT Works in a Service-Enabled World
          1. 5.2.1. Developing enterprise software
          2. 5.2.2. In walks business content
        3. 5.3. Using Abstraction to Hide Complexity
          1. 5.3.1. The two sides of abstraction
          2. 5.3.2. Which database is under there, anyway?
          3. 5.3.3. Taking abstraction further
        4. 5.4. Summing Up the IT Service-Enabled World
    8. II. Getting Under the Hood: The Underlying Technology
      1. 6. Meet SAP NetWeaver
        1. 6.1. So, What Exactly Is SAP NetWeaver?
        2. 6.2. Orchestrating a Technology Symphony
          1. 6.2.1. What's in it for me?
          2. 6.2.2. SAP NetWeaver 101
          3. 6.2.3. Bringing all the instruments together
        3. 6.3. Giving SAP NetWeaver the Once-Over
        4. 6.4. Making Users Productive
          1. 6.4.1. Running an enterprise portal
          2. 6.4.2. Some user productivity examples
          3. 6.4.3. Enterprise knowledge management
          4. 6.4.4. Helping folks to work together
        5. 6.5. Unifying Data
        6. 6.6. Managing Business Information
          1. 6.6.1. Enterprise reporting, query, and analysis
          2. 6.6.2. Planning and analyzing your business
          3. 6.6.3. Putting data in warehouses
          4. 6.6.4. Integrating processes end to end
          5. 6.6.5. Making business-to-business processes work
          6. 6.6.6. Enabling application-to-application processes
          7. 6.6.7. Business process management
          8. 6.6.8. Enabling an RFID infrastructure
        7. 6.7. Customizing Development
          1. 6.7.1. Developing, configuring, and adapting applications
          2. 6.7.2. Enabling platform interoperability
        8. 6.8. Unified Lifecycle Management
        9. 6.9. Governing Applications
          1. 6.9.1. Integrated user and access management
          2. 6.9.2. Authentication and single sign-on
        10. 6.10. Consolidating All Your Systems
          1. 6.10.1. User-interface consolidation
          2. 6.10.2. Information consolidation
          3. 6.10.3. Process consolidation
          4. 6.10.4. Adaptive computing
          5. 6.10.5. Business event management
          6. 6.10.6. Business task management
        11. 6.11. Service-Oriented Architecture Design and Deployment
        12. 6.12. Guided Procedures: Focus on Activity
          1. 6.12.1. User-friendly user interface
          2. 6.12.2. Guided procedures
          3. 6.12.3. Interactive form integration
        13. 6.13. Designing Processes and Managing Solutions: SAP Solution Manager
        14. 6.14. What Can SAP NetWeaver Do for You?
          1. 6.14.1. Unified testing
          2. 6.14.2. One platform powering all SAP solutions
          3. 6.14.3. It's just better for customers
        15. 6.15. Technology and Data: The Great Equalizers
        16. 6.16. SAP NetWeaver Enables Business Process Evolution
      2. 7. Bringing Services to Life with SAP NetWeaver
        1. 7.1. Working with Services
          1. 7.1.1. A home for services: The service repository
          2. 7.1.2. Finding a service with solution maps
          3. 7.1.3. Naming services
        2. 7.2. A Web Service Description Language Primer
          1. 7.2.1. WSDL revealed
          2. 7.2.2. An example of WSDL in action
        3. 7.3. Modeling with Enterprise Services
          1. 7.3.1. Modeling basics
          2. 7.3.2. Patterns, models, and frameworks
          3. 7.3.3. Visual Composer: The modeling whiz kid
          4. 7.3.4. Do-it-yourself modeling
        4. 7.4. ESA Is Open to Working with Other Tools
          1. 7.4.1. Microsoft and SAP: Logical bedfellows
          2. 7.4.2. PDF forms
          3. 7.4.3. Other Web service—compliant tools
      3. 8. SAP NetWeaver Up and Running
        1. 8.1. Figuring Out ESA Run-Time Architecture
        2. 8.2. Business and Technical Protocols: Synchronous versus Asynchronous
          1. 8.2.1. Business protocol interaction semantics
          2. 8.2.2. More than you ever wanted to know about technical protocol interaction semantics
          3. 8.2.3. Going deeper: Enterprise service interaction semantics
          4. 8.2.4. Now what?
        3. 8.3. Getting a Handle on the Transactional Behavior of Services
        4. 8.4. Simplifying Sessions
        5. 8.5. Seamless Security
          1. 8.5.1. Authentication
          2. 8.5.2. Authorization
          3. 8.5.3. Encryption
        6. 8.6. Taking a Closer Look at Web-Service Run-Time Architecture
        7. 8.7. Discovering XI Run-Time Architecture
      4. 9. Composites: Extending mySAP ERP
        1. 9.1. What Are Composites?
          1. 9.1.1. Enterprise services to the rescue
          2. 9.1.2. Making a difference in your business
        2. 9.2. The Nature of Composites
          1. 9.2.1. Getting comprehensive with composite applications
          2. 9.2.2. Integrating content with composite views
        3. 9.3. Fitting Together Composite Applications
          1. 9.3.1. Guide2Result
          2. 9.3.2. Request2Response
          3. 9.3.3. Event2Resolution
        4. 9.4. SAP xApps: Delivering on the Innovation Promise
          1. 9.4.1. What do xApps need to work?
          2. 9.4.2. Saving money up-front and along the way
          3. 9.4.3. Increasing flexibility
          4. 9.4.4. Taking one from vendor A, one from vendor B ...
          5. 9.4.5. Going to market, to market
          6. 9.4.6. Zeroing in on your industry
          7. 9.4.7. Automating it
          8. 9.4.8. SAP xApps bring benefits galore
        5. 9.5. A Case in Point: SAP xApp Cost and Quotation Management
          1. 9.5.1. Examining the challenges
          2. 9.5.2. Enter xCQM
          3. 9.5.3. xCQM: Making the process flow
          4. 9.5.4. xCQM: Architecture
        6. 9.6. The Composite Team
        7. 9.7. What Can You Do Today with Composites?
    9. III. Implementing Change
      1. 10. Knowing What to Expect: Covering Costs and Managing Change
        1. 10.1. The Financial Bottom Line of mySAP ERP
        2. 10.2. Exploring Costs with a TCO Model
          1. 10.2.1. Exploring the SAP TCO Framework
          2. 10.2.2. The SAP TCO Model: The key to understanding your costs
          3. 10.2.3. Defining costs by category
          4. 10.2.4. Calculating TCO
        3. 10.3. Making a Plan with Value-Based Services
          1. 10.3.1. Business assessment
          2. 10.3.2. Business case development
          3. 10.3.3. Value assessment
        4. 10.4. Tackling the Change Management Challenge
          1. 10.4.1. ERP exposes problems to solve them
          2. 10.4.2. Everybody is married to the status quo
          3. 10.4.3. Change is hard, but the rewards can be worth it
          4. 10.4.4. A last few words to the wise
      2. 11. Building an ERP Roadmap
        1. 11.1. Zeroing in on Business Goals
        2. 11.2. Understanding Your Industry
        3. 11.3. Finding a Roadmap
          1. 11.3.1. Reviewing the ESA Adoption Program
          2. 11.3.2. Why have an adoption program?
          3. 11.3.3. Unique customers, unique needs
          4. 11.3.4. ESA Adoption: A four-phase approach
          5. 11.3.5. Unifying users
          6. 11.3.6. A roadmap case study
        4. 11.4. Getting the Most Out of SAP Solution Manager
          1. 11.4.1. Who needs SAP Solution Manager?
          2. 11.4.2. Getting the lowdown on what's in SAP Solution Manager
      3. 12. Following ERP into the Future
        1. 12.1. The SAP Roadmap for ESA and ERP
          1. 12.1.1. Embracing SAP NetWeaver
          2. 12.1.2. Enterprise Services Architecture adopted by mySAP ERP
            1. Composites grow in importance
            2. Using dashboards
            3. Services and scenarios grow
        2. 12.2. How mySAP ERP Will Change Going Forward
          1. 12.2.1. People get even more productive
          2. 12.2.2. Giving people more analytical applications
          3. 12.2.3. mySAP ERP Financials
            1. Figuring out the financial supply chain challenge
            2. Financial and management accounting
          4. 12.2.4. mySAP ERP Human Capital Management (mySAP ERP HCM)
            1. Talent Management and Workforce Processes
            2. HCM Service Delivery
            3. Workforce analytics
          5. 12.2.5. mySAP ERP Operations
            1. Procurement and logistics execution
            2. Production planning and manufacturing gets more mobile
            3. Product development and lifecycle data management
            4. Sales and service
          6. 12.2.6. mySAP ERP Corporate Services
            1. Project Portfolio Management
            2. Environment, health, and safety
            3. Travel Management
            4. Real Estate Management
    10. IV. The Part of Tens
      1. 13. Top Ten Ways to Make People More Productive
        1. 13.1. Using Both Generic and User-Specific Roles
        2. 13.2. Work Lists
        3. 13.3. Active Alerts
        4. 13.4. Mobile Scenarios
        5. 13.5. Voice Technology
        6. 13.6. Embedded Analytics
        7. 13.7. RFID Technology
        8. 13.8. Form-Based Processing
        9. 13.9. Guided Procedures
        10. 13.10. Easier User Interfaces
      2. 14. Top Ten Ways to Enable Innovation
        1. 14.1. Creating the Framework for Innovation
        2. 14.2. Composing Service-Based Applications Strategically
        3. 14.3. Offering Services to Others
        4. 14.4. Using Services from Others
        5. 14.5. Using Model-Driven Development Tools
        6. 14.6. Connecting Analytics to the World
        7. 14.7. Working with Composite Processes
        8. 14.8. Utilizing Composite Applications
        9. 14.9. Collaborating and Sharing Knowledge
        10. 14.10. Deploying Hardware Efficiently
      3. 15. Top Ten ERP Resources
        1. 15.1. Your SAP Account Rep
        2. 15.2. ESA Adoption Help
        3. 15.3. User Groups
        4. 15.4. ERP Events
        5. 15.5. Web Sites
        6. 15.6. Publications
        7. 15.7. SAP Partners and the Ramp-Up Program
        8. 15.8. SAP Developer Network
        9. 15.9. Solution Manager
        10. 15.10. Industry Solutions
      4. A. Glossary

    Product information

    • Title: mySAP™ ERP For Dummies®
    • Author(s): Andreas Vogel, Ian Kimbell
    • Release date: September 2005
    • Publisher(s): For Dummies
    • ISBN: 9780764599958