EAI is the process that connects multiple applications so that they can work together
in order to accomplish business tasks. The purpose of EAI is to simplify the cost
and inconvenience of going through multiple integrations. With so many businesses
adding new technologies to their existing business models, many are finding that
EAI is one of the best ways to reduce costs and to improve their bottom line.
Cost savings are however, only one of many benefits in using EAI. Another is shorter
development times - all applications are designed to work together and to run at
peak efficiency, reducing the time from planning to deployment. An added benefit
is all future implementations can be added to the arrangement efficiently because
of the flexibility of EAI . This feature means that no matter when future implementations
are made, the EAI will continue to provide cost and time savings over the life of
its use within the business.
Furthermore, EAI promotes greater accuracy of data and fewer opportunities for redundancy.
The handling, transference and archiving of data through technology, reduces the
risk of human error.
MicroNet believes that an intelligent integration strategy has three primary requirements
:
(i) the support of the real-time needs of today's e-business solutions, by incorporating
back-end legacy systems with CRM systems, corporate portals, and other Web applications,
to deliver a unified view of information to a business time-scale.
(ii) it must offer a flexible range of interfaces that allows the most appropriate
solution to be picked for a particular job
(iii), integration must look outwards, as well as inwards, to enable business processes
to be linked with those of trading partners.
This requires a loosely coupled connection, that as far as possible is platform-agnostic,
but which still forms part of an overall integration platform within the organization.
We are now seeing a new generation of integration solutions that address these requirements.
MicroNet has created a Management Guide that addresses and suggests a methodology
for product and process utilization to relieve some of the integration burden, and
create a common framework to support a wide range of business systems.
Duet for SAP Business Process
Duet is a solution from Microsoft and SAP, we used Duet to enable seamless access
to SAP business processes and data via Microsoft Office, it revolutionized how information
workers interact with enterprise applications.
What is the value proposition for Duet?
- Increase corporate policy compliance. Duet simplifies employees' ability
to interact with business processes which enables consistent and proper use of corporate
policies.
- Improve decision-making. Duet provides employees and managers with straightforward
and timely access to relevant, contextual business information.
- Save time and money. Duet increases the return on investment (ROI) of enterprise
software implementations by reducing employee training costs and accelerating user
adoption.
What is the value-add of Duet with SAP Employee Self Service (ESS), deployed
in the enterprise?
Duet exposes SAP data and process from within Microsoft Outlook. SAP ESS is a pre-requisite
for deploying the Duet Leave-Request scenario. The compelling story for Duet is
that the employees are now able to request their day-off using the Outlook calendar
which will then trigger the right processes in SAP for the approval and for updating
the data in SAP back-end. This results in increased information worker productivity
because employees are able to continue to use the familiar Outlook calendar.