CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
13 March 2006
Implementation Investments
Documentum Content Services for SAP Software Helps York Accelerate Time-To-Market of HVAC Products
EMC Corporation announced that York, a Johnson Controls company, has achieved significant business benefits by integrating EMC's enterprise content management (ECM) solutions for SAP into its enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. The solution enabled York to more efficiently capture, access, share and manage content including engineering designs, material specifications, inventory information and purchase orders. The result was increased collaboration and reuse of intellectual property across departments, which translated to faster time to market for its HVAC products.
Rounding out its archiving and content management offerings across all SAP applications, EMC also announced today the availability of EMC Documentum Content Services for SAP Portal. Content Services for SAP Portal provides an SAP-compliant Repository Manager and a set of ready-to-use iViews for the SAP portal framework that together enable users to create, link, access and manage content in the context of SAP portal applications. In addition, Documentum Content Services for SAP Portal is integrated with EMC Archive Services for SAP, allowing users to access content that is captured or archived from an existing SAP application within the SAP portal.
Thomas Tobias, Application Program Manager for Global Content Solutions Group at York, said, "Because our ERP system runs on SAP, we needed a solution that could seamlessly integrate with our current SAP environment and eliminate information silos. EMC was the only vendor with a unified enterprise content management (ECM) platform that addressed all of our SAP requirements including archiving, content management, scanning and imaging."
Tobias added, "With the tremendous success we've achieved using EMC's enterprise content management solutions, we expect to realize additional benefits with EMC Documentum Content Services for SAP Portal. No other vendor comes close to delivering a one-stop shop for managing all SAP applications."
"In today's globally distributed business environment, the ability to manage and share information between key systems of record is critical. Our SAP integration software combines the two most powerful systems -- SAP for enterprise resource management and EMC Documentum enterprise content management," said Balaji Yelamanchili, Vice President and General Manager of Content Management Software, EMC Software Group. "York's implementation is another example of how EMC is delivering its customers solutions that address entire business processes, connecting the right business tasks to the right collaborative processes and across any application."
To link its SAP applications to disparate content stored across the global organization, York utilized EMC Documentum Services for SAP software to integrate the two systems. The integration software linked its digital assets, incoming documents and SAP-generated documents such as invoices and purchase orders with SAP processes in a paperless, distributed electronic environment. This process allowed York to complete and respond to tasks such as managing engineering-specific changes faster and more efficiently by linking important business documents within the context of SAP transactions. "Our SAP end users now spend a fraction of their time searching for information. With EMC's SAP solution, information is at their fingertips with a single click," Tobias explained.
An important element of the overall solution was effectively managing and integrating York's paper assets, such as Authorization for Expenditures (AFEs), insurance policies and associated collateral. EMC's newly acquired Captiva InputAccel software captured and digitized this information and seamlessly passed it on to the Documentum repository where a number of automated tasks and business processes were invoked. Tobias added, "By storing drawings, invoices and sales orders as electronic documents, every user had immediate access to information to make informed business decisions which ultimately lead to more efficient and accurate business processes."
York also leveraged EMC Documentum Archive Services for SAP software to automatically consolidate and archive its most critical SAP content into Documentum. The result was lower total cost of ownership (TCO), increased archiving performance and improved compliance. "When we started investigating archive solutions for our SAP information, we were pleasantly surprised to learn we already had a solution available from EMC," said Tobias.
Content Management for SAP Applications
Companies using SAP require a single infrastructure that addresses both SAP operational issues, such as data and document archiving, and more process-centric issues, such as content-enabling SAP business processes. EMC offers a comprehensive set of archiving, and content management software for SAP that can be deployed incrementally in order to satisfy evolving customer SAP requirements. Content-enabling SAP applications are supported by EMC Documentum Content Services for SAP software and EMC Documentum Content Services for SAP Portal software while archiving of SAP content and data can be accomplished with EMC Archive Services for SAP software. For more information on EMC's ECM solutions for SAP, please visit http://www.documentum.com/products/integrations/sap.htm .
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