The Business Suite is out. The very focus of the name sounds so unlike an ERP, It sounds more like an extension of an office suite. What do we make out of it? Simple. It is for the business. And its core focus lies on the Business, unlike the old ERPs which focused on enterprise long solutions. The transition from the Enterprise to the Business has been a long drawn from R/3 to ECC to BS. Again, the focus is all on Business processes rather than on Enterprise resources.
However, the idea that an entity needs to focus more on the Business rather than itself is still at a stage of infancy and would not find many takers mainly because of how abstract the idea. However, the future is here to stay and we cannot turn away from true Business process oriented applications. To put it simply, we had to shift from applications which made the entity bend around it, to applications which fitted the existing business processes like a glove. The tailoring of the glove is under the robust environment of Netweaver which powers it.
In today's economic scenario, organisations are going to have to rethink how to think less about software applications and more about the business
Its always been a need to make software and IT the invisible backbone of the business and now the need is all the more apparent. Entities need to cut costs on administering, managing IT resources all the more and what could be better than have a completely integrated tailor made solution which runs silently in the background without affecting the business processes in anyway. So that the processes could be made more and more cost effective without having to worry about its impact on application systems.
The SOA has arrived
Any SOA installation has to convey loosely coupled and interoperable application services on web service standards. and with the power of Netweaver, that is not going to be hard to achieve. SOA has never been this mainstream until the arrival of Business suite 7 which focuses os the services oriented platform of SAP or the eSOA Enterprise Service oriented architecture). SOA always had been the future and it was more of a concept than a reality. And in a way, the business suite is something close to driving a concept car of the future.
So what does SOA truly do? I would love to explain with a comment I received on on my old blog posts on SOA. Read the comment The concept of SOA. Built around the Business Process
Business suite floats around value based business processes and is all about adding value to the business. It looks at the whole business as single value chain which encompasses value based activities starting from purchasing to manufacturing to selling the manufactured to delivering them. integrated demand management, purchase planning, inventory management and sales and marketing process enhancements go a long way in making the suite what it real is all about. The business
Open- with the power of SOA
The power of web services lets the business suite take advantage of data from a multitude of sources which could be collatively could allow the business to take critical decisions. The integration and "plugged in" ability also ensures that the application could move from utility to another easily to perform necessary actions.
Challenges
The business needs to be convinced of the capabilities of what the business suite can do, in terms of real monetary and other benefits. But this would prove challenging as the benefits any implementation would be dependent on several factors.
During times of a financial crunch, most businesses move to limiting IT budgets and restricting IT spend on new projects. Unless of course, it is evident that the benefits would outweigh any costs incurred. But, this is a challenge as well considering that benefits would take a reasonable period to surface.
