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Extend Your Business Processes
By ERPupdate
Staff Writer
Article Date: 2004-11-02
Designed for Global 2000 firms seeking to maximize their significant investments in ERP, CRM and SCM, Intalio/APEX extends the business processes of packaged applications without making any significant changes to the applications themselves.
Available for mySAP Business Suite applications, Intalio/APEX lets organizations quickly and cost-effectively consolidate multiple instances of mySAP.com, integrate new mySAP.com modules or upgrade to mySAP.com or SAP R/3 4.7. Built on top of Intalio/n3 3.0, the newest version of its trailblazing Business Process Management System (BPMS), Intalio/APEX recently earned the Powered by SAP NetWeaver certification.
"Enterprise applications are the new legacy -- too expensive to maintain, yet too entrenched to displace," said Intalio's president and chief strategy officer, Ismael Ghalimi. "We estimate Intalio/APEX will reduce the cost of development and maintenance of extended SAP business processes by up to 75 percent, while giving SAP users a way to leverage their existing IT assets and improve business agility."
With Intalio/APEX, SAP customers can extend SAP software processes outside of their host applications, without ever writing code, to gain best-in-class business processes and move closer to the next generation of mySAP.com architecture. Technical and non-technical SAP users can work with Intalio/APEX to reduce their total cost of ownership of their SAP applications, while accommodating changes to the core business processes that they were originally deployed to support.
Emergence of the APEX Market
APEX, or Application Process Extension, responds to a fundamental challenge enterprise applications present most customers: deployed straight out of the box, enterprise applications fail to meet each customer's particular needs. As a result, customers must tailor the off-the-shelf offerings to reflect their unique ways of doing business.
While such customizations work when made to business objects only, they falter when made to complex business processes that span multiple business objects and applications. In turn, many deployments go over time and over budget. Meanwhile, the associated cost of maintenance for such customization, especially for an upgrade, can dramatically impact total cost of ownership and compromise overall return on investment. The maintenance and consolidation of existing systems and applications usually accounts for up to 85% of today's IT budgets.
To consolidate multiple mySAP.com instances, a company faces the costly and disruptive prospect of re-engineering its business processes to align with those of the application. The alternative -- customizing the mySAP.com master instance -- entails expensive, time-consuming ABAP programming that must be carried forward with each SAP upgrade.
Integrating new mySAP.com modules requires expensive integration efforts, especially with cross-functional processes that span modules. The mySAP.com modules offer limited, out-of-the-box, cross-application, business process integration. Likewise, companies pay a steep price to modify their existing end-user workflows. Similarly, companies upgrading to mySAP.com or SAP R/3 4.7 are hit with the high costs associated with re-implementing any existing customization in the new version.
Enter Intalio/APEX
Intalio offers a compelling answer for SAP customers looking to keep their SAP projects on time and on budget. When consolidating multiple mySAP.com instances, Intalio/APEX lets users extend the processes of the master instance to reduce the need for process re-engineering and keep traditional ABAP customization to a minimum.
SAP shops integrating new mySAP.com modules can use Intalio/APEX to automate cross-functional processes to increase the value of new module deployment, while slashing process integration costs. For those upgrading to mySAP.com (or SAP R/3 4.7), Intalio/APEX extends mySAP.com processes to simplify the migration of existing customization and significantly reduce code development.
Intalio/APEX has been developed on top of Intalio/n3, the only standards-based and platform-neutral Business Process Management System (BPMS). Powered by SAP NetWeaver, Intalio/APEX does not compete with SAP NetWeaver. Rather, Intalio/APEX complements existing SAP NetWeaver solutions by extending them with an application process extension development and runtime environment.
Intalio/APEX runs on top of SAP Web Application Server, and uses SAP Exchange Infrastructure for connectivity to SAP and non-SAP applications, as well as business partners. It leverages the SAP Enterprise Portal for end-user interfaces developed with SAP NetWeaver Developer Studio, leverages SAP Master Data Management for service abstraction, and integrates bi-directionally with SAP Solution Manager, which is used for specification and configuration, while Intalio/APEX is used for extension.
In one tool and runtime package, Intalio/APEX lets users build processes that include system-to-system, system-to-human, and human-to-human transactions. No expertise with SAP Business Workflow, aka SAP WebFlow, is necessary. Intalio/APEX coordinates distributed transactions across multiple instances and modules, as well as supports human workflows for SAP and non-SAP users, who are notified of tasks through SAP Enterprise Portal or any email client.
Functioning as an integrated process development environment, Intalio/APEX covers the entire lifecycle from discovery to implementation to testing. It supports the dynamic introspection of BAPIs, IDOCs, RFCs, and tables to immediately make these resources available for use as Web services. Intalio/APEX includes process maps of 1,800 mySAP.com reference models and features Intalio's ground-breaking Zero-Code Development methodology and a One-Click Deployment architecture to address the needs of process designers.
About the Author:
ERP Update provides articles, insights and commentary on enterprise resource planning issues.
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