In an industry undergoing rapid transformation, the worldwide market leader in enterprise software has been reshaping its product offerings and adjusting its market focus to position it for the next generation of software. Last year the leader in CRM, ERP, and supply chain software caused a stir in the CRM market when it introduced CRM on Demand. SAP also joined with Microsoft in releasing Duet, a solution that increases efficiency for business users by utilizing a familiar Microsoft desktop tool to access enterprise level data and manage corporate processes. We asked SAP’s Jon Bobalik, Director of IBU Insurance (Americas), to discuss SAP product offerings in this evolving environment.
We have been watching the release of Duet, the joint SAP/ Microsoft product that brings together business productivity and enterprise application. How does Duet fit into SAP product offerings?
Duet software enables business users to access SAP business processes and data via Microsoft Office – effectively changing how information workers interact with enterprise applications. Business data and processes that were traditionally the domain of back-office specialists and managers are now easily accessible for a wider cross-section of employees. One of the things we recognize is that business users spend a large portion of their day working within Outlook for example, to manage appointments, e-mail contact lists, etc. The same information is also relevant to many business processes such as budgeting, expense management, travel management and scheduling. By exposing the enterprise applications through Outlook we are increasing efficiency and making life easier for the business user – for example, by eliminating the need for duplicate data entry regarding leave requests and the subsequent workload re-assignments.
Microsoft is an important and widely adopted desktop software provider within the insurance industry. We are trying therefore to make life easier from a user perspective in that our applications work seamlessly together. Interoperability of our two platforms allows insurance companies to reap more benefits because they can more quickly bring together different pieces of functionality that may reside in SAP or Microsoft applications to support their everyday business needs. Neither is going to provide every single application within an insurance company IT landscape. By bringing the platforms together we are creating a richer foundation.
The biggest corporate players use SAP’s enterprise software applications to run almost all areas of their business. They have come to rely on SAP’s highly integrated, reliable product offering that brings them significant gains in productivity. How is SAP staying ahead of the rapidly evolving world of Internet-based software applications? What are you doing to address flexibility?
The two are closely related. The way that we are addressing the rapid evolution of requirements is by providing a flexible, services-based insurance business process platform. We are trying to provide the base level of insurance functionality within a flexible orchestration environment based on services. This allows companies to configure the software to their individual needs as well as add in other point applications or components of individual functions that they require. One of the main advantages of SAP is that we provide an evolutionary infrastructure both from a technical and business perspective. We provide a cohesive, integrated environment of applications that support most functions within the insurance industry, together with the necessary configuration tools so that a company can configure the applications to directly support an insurer’s specific business functions without compromising functionality. By eliminating the need for coding the required application functionality we are also protecting the upgradability of the software.
Explain how you have taken Web services up to the business level.
We see Web services as very granular and therefore as building blocks within enterprise services. We try to concentrate on enterprise services representing the individual business steps within business processes. For us, breaking those processes down and having those defined from a technical view is a very natural step and the exact way we have approached design and development historically within our systems. For example, the definition of the enterprise service within SAP Claims Management for first notice of loss/first report of injury began with the business specifications from our customers as well as the ACORD-xml definitions for FNOL/FROI to which we then added support for commonly accepted standards in other countries. The approach we are taking also relies upon direct involvement of our customers, partners and user groups, which are collectively referred to as the enterprise service community. We take input as far as how the individual services within the business processes should be defined. The most important aspect of this, however, is that we start with the idea of the overall scope of all business processes within a specific industry or domain and then work top-down in defining the process steps. The idea is that when you then break that down to services, they work together seamlessly in a cohesive, process-based platform. Our goal is to provide via enterprise services an even more flexible configuration environment for our applications.