We started a project at SAP dubbed Sagres (we want to show the world how to make better use of geography, as good old Prince Henry the Navigator did). It is about an evaluation where and how we should increase the integration of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) (think: ESRI and the other large GIS vendors like GE Energy, Intergraph, Autodesk, or MapInfo), other geospatial software (think: Google or Yahoo Maps, or Microsoft Virtual Earth), or Location-Based Services (LBS) (think: locate a cell phone) within the SAP suite. While we have several existing integrations points (e.g. the capability to show objects and areas on maps in BW, or to show the routing of trucks in Transportation Planning Vehicle Scheduling, to name just two (see below)), there are probably many, many more opportunities. If you are into GIS or LBS, you may enjoy to join us on this ride!!! While some postings will be about SAP, others will be just about intersting things we saw in the GIS/LBS world. As a warm-up, here is what BW Maps look like, in four examples. The way this works is that BW customers get a voucher for ESRI ArcView which they can use to "geocode" their data, and also get a sample set of free maps. The SAP Internet Graphic Server does all the rendering of the final map. 1) You can take any key figures in BW and map them onto an area (here revenue by state), and show business objects and size them by a key figure (here locatiosn of customers and their revenues). You can hover over one with your mouse and get the excat value. 
2) You can show the data broken down by an additional characteristic as a pie or bar chart on the map. Here the revenue by product category is shown, per state. The pies vary in size according to the total. You can also see how the mouse-over works for an area as well. 
3) You can do a drill-down into the the location characteristic by clicking on the south-west region on the map above and then get the data for the next lower zoom level (here by state): 
4) And last but not least, using the BW Web Application Designer, you can combine a map element with other charts. If you click on the different sales regions on the map the other charts update automatically. 
And here is the example from TPVS, where the map gets shown in an area on the SAPgui. Here the Internet Graphic Server gets the map from an external map provider. 
In project Sagres we are thinking of much more interactive maps, and of making more use of the powerful features of GIS servers and GIS web services. Here are some examples: 1) A citizen enters a service request for a broken hydrant directly onto the map. The map comes from the GIS and is mashed up in this Composite with SAP screens for collecting the repair information. And the application then triggers SAP to create a service request (calling it via SAP XI) and triggers the GIS to draw that hydrant with a red ring (so that other citizens can see that someone else already requested a repair). And the data with all the hydrant details? It is synchronized between the two systems using SAP MDM! 
2) A city supervisor wants to see where how many repairs have happened. We retrieve the data from BW and sure, we could just draw each asset using different colors. But instead we use further GIS visualization algorithms to further aggregate the data using a grid overlay, or draw hull curves showing where 40%, 60%, and 80% of all repairs were. Imagine to see this "blob" move over the map when you show this quarter-by-quarter for the last three years... it will move towards were more and more repairs in the city are due, e.g. in the direction of where new subdivisions were put in place 10 years ago. 
What are your ideas for meaningful, interesting, innovative SAP/GIS mashups?
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