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A shared vision(Manufacturing Business Technology Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) The typical office worker routinely checks email at the beginning and end of each work day. In between, they tackle numerous projects using word-processing programs, spreadsheets, and other desktop applications. And at least a few times each day, a typical worker also must tap into an enterprise-class application such as ERP or a supply chain management system. These simple facts underpin much of the strategy that Microsoft the world's largest supplier of desktop applications, and a leading developer of IT infrastructure productshas adopted in working with independent software vendors (ISVs) that serve the manufacturing space. While manufacturing-centric ISVs have a long history of building and running applications on Microsoft technology, the level of cooperation between Microsoft and its partners has reached a new level in recent months. In fact, several of these partners have taken a step that previously might have seemed blasphemous: making Microsoft Office the primary user interface for some of their enterprise applications. Both Microsoft and the ISVs say this heightened level of collaboration is a direct response to manufacturers' stated desire for streamlined IT solutions that can be easily applied to multiple business problems. "Our goal in serving this market is to address manufacturers' overall pain points, both today and tomorrow," says Charles Johnson, Microsoft's worldwide managing director for manufacturing. "That means we not only want to address problems manufacturers are experiencing now; we also want to be forward-thinking and anticipate problems that will arise in the future. Working closely with our partners helps us validateand at times accelerateour thinking about what we need to do with our technology." Johnson says Microsoft ensures itself of covering the gamut of manufacturers' problems by working with ISVs in four key areas: Product development; Business operations, inside the plants, as well as in the areas of finance and government compliance; Supply chain management; and Customer relationship management. In each area, Microsoft wants to give peoplesuch as the typical office workerthe tools they need to perform their jobs most effectively. The proper set of tools, in Johnson's view, involves a combination of IT infrastructure products like Microsoft's SQL Server database, a collaboration platform like Microsoft SharePoint Server, and an ISV-developed application focused on a specific business problemsuch as demand planning or engineering change management. Johnson says Microsoft builds its closest working relationships with partners who share this vision. Game-changing solutions "There are still some partners who simply want to have their applications run on Windows," Johnson says. "Then there are those who want to create potentially game-changing solutions. Those are the ones we have the most direct go-to-market plans with, because they are accelerating the timetable for bringing our vision of serving the manufacturing space to life." One potential game-changer is ERP market leader SAP , which last summer unveiled a joint solution with Microsoft called Duet that makes the Microsoft Office suite the primary user interface for multiple parts of the mySAP application suite. Udo Waibel, SAP's senior VP for emerging solutions, says SAP entered the Duet initiative with an eye toward making life easier for typical office workers, who have to "rethink and refocus" each time they switch between a desktop application like Microsoft Outlook, Word, or Excel to a portion of mySAP. "Our thought was, 'Wouldn't it be nice if you could access all of those applications within the same environment,'" Waibel says. Apparently, users agree. SAP reported more than 200,000 Duet licenses sold in the first three months after the product's release, a figure that Waibel did not find completely surprising. "Users have been asking for this type of integration for years," he says. "But only recentlywith the advent of new technology infrastructure tools like Web serviceshas the timing been right to make this happen." Microsoft and SAP, which are working together to both develop and sell Duet, have created a road map for the functionality that users can expect to get through the single Office interface. The first manufacturing-specific linkconnecting the Office suite to SAP's demand-planning applicationis scheduled to debut early this year. "Users will be able to download demand plans from the mySAP supply chain management systems into Excel spreadsheets," explains Waibel. "From there they can sort through the data in any way they like, and even define fields they want to use in demand-planning models." Creating this link to Microsoft Office required SAP to acknowledge what for years has been something of an open secret in the supply chain management community: Planners in most SAP shops actually do the bulk of their preliminary data gathering and analysis in Excel, which they find more user-friendly, and then load the results into the SAP planning engine for complex number crunching. "The SAP supply chain solutions are not known for being easy to use," Waibel now concedes. "They are most often accessed by power users who are specifically trained in working with such advanced planning applications." Spreading the wealthWith Duet offering an Excel-based link to the SAP planning application, Waibel says companies will be able to get more people involved in planning processes, which should give them better results. "Anyone using the Duet interface is interacting directly with the SAP system, even if they don't realize it," Waibel says. "That means whole new groups of users can have input into the planning process." Best-of-breed supply chain management software vendor i2 Technologies counts ease of use as just one factor, albeit an important one, behind the tightening of its relationship with Microsoft. "One of our goals as a company is expanding into the midmarket," says Karen Laucka, who manages i2's partnership with Microsoft. "And the cost of ownership that a Microsoft platform provides, along with the ease of use, is particularly appealing to that market segment." Laucka also notes that without some of the recent enhancements to the Microsoft technology stack, the i2-Microsoft alliance might not have been as close. Microsoft's move to boost the scalability of the SQL Server database was critical for i2. "They made [SQL Server] a large-scale, enterprise-class database option," Laucka said. "That allowed us to take our first big step in working with Microsoft, developing i2 Demand Manager, Microsoft Edition." This version of i2's solution for demand forecasting, planning, and collaboration runs on the SQL Server database and relies on Microsoft SharePoint server as a means of creating role-based portals for users to access data tailored to their needs. Now, i2 is working to make Microsoft Office 2007 the user interface for a business intelligence platform. A demonstration version of this solution, called i2 Intelligence, was unveiled at i2's user conference last fall; it's scheduled for release early this year. Laucka says i2 Intelligence relies on the business intelligence capabilities embedded in Microsoft Office 2007 to analyze supply chain data. SharePoint portals will be the primary user interfaces for i2 Intelligence, but Laucka says users can tap into the solution through any Office application, including Word, Outlook, or Excel. "We see the SharePoint portal as the first-level user interface that gives users the key performance indicators (KPIs) they would monitor as part of their individual jobs," Laucka says. "Let's say a VP of sales is monitoring customer-service levels for the top five customers. He logs into a SharePoint portal, where he will see KPIs and alerts related to those customers. Inside that same portal, he will have access to Microsoft Outlook and Excel, along with workflow and collaboration capabilities." Clicking on a KPI or alert will send the VP to i2 Intelligence, where he will find a full report on that KPI, and a series of related reports. SharePoint Server also has document-control capabilities, which Laucka says ensure that users will only see reports that are relevant to them. Johnson says discussions with partners like i2 about global supply chain collaborationwhich requires companies to communicate openly with trading partners while ensuring sensitive information is protectedinfluenced much of Microsoft's development work on Office 2007. A new delivery modelEpicor , a midmarket ERP supplier, is giving users direct access to its applications through Office 2007. Epicor used the service-oriented principles of the Microsoft .NET Framework to create its solution, called Epicor Information Worker (IW). The solution gives users access to any Epicor application through an Office interface. Users can synchronize information from any Office application with data from any Epicor application. For instance, salespeople can look up appointments in Outlook and jump to the area of Epicor that contains the sales histories of the customers they are scheduled to meet with. Users also can drag information from Epicor applications into Word documents or Excel spreadsheets. They can save such documents to SharePoint and initiate a workflow process that calls for other workers to review and act on that information. Workflow and collaboration are at the heart of the solution product life-cycle management vendor Sopheon built on Office 2007. Sopheon's primary product is Accolade, which manages the process of shepherding products from the concept phase into production. Accolade, in effect, automates a methodology known as stage-gating, in which members of a product development team are required to review the status of a project as certain milestones are met, and then decide whether work on that product should continue. The decision makers, who typically are executive-level people, review high-level project information in an Accolade interface. But that high-level information is based on data created in other applications, including Excel spreadsheets. Sopheon is attempting to make all aspects of stage-gating easier by linking Accolade with the Microsoft Project component of Office 2007. "Accolade was built on Microsoft technology from inception because most people in the product innovation arena already use Microsoft applications, and we believed that leveraging tools potential customers were familiar with would magnify the benefits our solution," says Bryan Seyfarth, Sopheon's solutions marketing director. With Office 2007, adds Seyfarth, those benefits are magnified even more, which is why Sopheon has decided to offer direct integration between Microsoft Project and Accolade. "The value of this integration is making it easier for the people making decisions about investing in new products to get the information they need without forcing them to wade through data they don't need", Seyfarth says. "Executive-level decision makers don't want to see Gantt charts. The want summary information that lets them know immediately that a project is 350 person-days behind schedule, and what that means from a financial standpoint." With the new level of integration, project managers can use Microsoft Project to disseminate detailed project schedules to workers and monitor the progress of those tasks. Then, when it's time to summarize information for the executives who decide on project funding, the pertinent information can be pulled from Microsoft Project and fed directly to Accolade. "There also is the ability to synchronize schedules between Project and Accolade," Seyfarth explains. "So when the detailed schedules are set for the project, that information is used to generate the high-level milestones that Accolade presents to upper management." Seyfarth says the features in Office 2007 prove that Microsoft understands what manufacturers need in an underlying technology platform. "They definitely understand our customers' requirements for improving productivity, and how important it is for them to effectively create, present, and share information," concludes Seyfarth. Vendor Solution Microsoft Integration SAP Duet Microsoft Office is the primary user interface for select SAP applications. The first manufacturing-specific link allows users to go directly from an Office application to SAP's demand planning application. i2 Technologies i2 Intelligence Microsoft SharePoint Portal is the primary user interface to an application that allows for analyzing data from i2's supply chain management solutions. i2 also offers Demand Planner Microsoft Edition, a demand management application that runs on Microsoft's SQL Server database. Epicor Information Worker Allows Microsoft Office to be the primary user interface for accessing any Epicor application. Data from Office and Epicor can be synchronized to improve worker productivity. Sopheon Accolade, with Microsoft Integration Application for managing new product introduction process tightly integrated with Microsoft Project and Excel. Executive-level users of the Accolade system get data directly from Project and Excel that is filtered and tailored to their individual needs. Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information. All Rights Reserved. |