By Freya Purnell
Oxygen Business Solutions has developed a solution that enables public sector organisations to link documents held in TRIM, an HP document management system, to related data within SAP.
TRIM is widely used in the Australian public sector, allowing organisations to manage and secure business information in order to meet governance and regulatory compliance obligations. It provides search, access and version control functionality.
Oxygen SAP consultant, Wouter Venhuizen, said Oxygen originally developed the solution for a Queensland-based government customer.
“They wanted the ability to access documents stored in TRIM in SAP, without duplicating the data in the underlying system. Rather than extracting the document from TRIM and attaching it to SAP, they wanted an integrated process which would allow them to open up the relevant documents stored in TRIM directly from within the SAP environment,” Venhuizen said.
He said prior to the integration project being completed, users had to open TRIM, search for the relevant document, create a shortcut file and then attach this file manually to an SAP document or piece of Master Data – a time-consuming and error-prone process.
“To eliminate these problems, we created an extra menu entry in the Services for Object menu, which normally delivers the conventional attachment functionality in SAP. With the new TRIM option, it now provides a front-end to the search functionality in TRIM. Users simply click on that menu button and it allows them to search, open and attach TRIM documents within any transaction in SAP where the Services for Object menu is available.”
Verhuizen said Oxygen is currently working with HP to also offer a data extraction method which will allow the storage of SAP data within TRIM.
“Sometimes it is beneficial to store a hard copy of a particular SAP transaction in TRIM to provide a snapshot in time. If we can provide integration both ways between the two systems, organisations will benefit from improved record-keeping and compliance, and the time saved on data entry can be redirected towards higher value tasks.”
