The move to online tools has exploded in response to schools and organisations working remotely during the Covid 19 lockdowns. Zoom’s active user base increased by over 150{8bf2b29f36318f0ac46ab1cc03d7035abce669a1cea16c9ed62389a818fa22fd}, while SharePoint and Teams have seen their use more than doubled. Even the Australian government’s collaboration platform GovTeams has seen usage skyrocket due to remote working.
For businesses where staff are performing business activities/process, collaboration is powerful in the moment; solutions like SharePoint and Teams, along with the associated content, lose value once collaboration has ended as it is challenging to find that content once the collaboration activity has ended. If you’ve ever tried to find an old SharePoint site or stared at an extensive list of Teams, you may have some idea. There are examples of companies with more than 70,000 SharePoint sites.
That is where integration with ERP becomes vital! If you can associate documents to your process, aka transaction or master data in ERP, you remove the risk of losing it or using the wrong information. ISO standard 55000 is concerned with Asset Maintenance effectiveness and reducing risk to life. It recognises the importance of leveraging content integration into ERP processes holistically by specifying this as best practice. It’s hard to understand what content you have if the information is kept in silos and organised using different methods.
Integration between SAP and Office 365 or SharePoint has been largely misunderstood. It began in the mid-2000s when the partnership between SAP and Microsoft produced the product Duet (delivered by project Mendocino), but this wasn’t about making documents available in SAP or allowing collaboration around related content. Instead, it was designed to make SAP transactions available in Microsoft via APIs.
Consequently, there continued to be a significant gap in functionality and usability when it came to documents integrated with SAP, a fundamental requirement for most modules in SAP.
Today SAP and SharePoint integration tools have advanced, and you can now access your SharePoint and Office 365 content in SAP, and vice versa work from Office 365 and SharePoint with SAP information, a “supercharge” for user experience. But it’s important to do things in the right way to achieve tangible benefits.
Office 365 can be installed locally within the firewall or accessed online. Some solutions are sophisticated enough to integrate SAP and Microsoft wherever it is deployed. This article will address some considerations if you’re planning to integrate SAP with Office 365 or SharePoint installed locally:
1. Using shortcuts exposes the organisation to exponential risk
The most common shortcut (excuse the pun) that we see is copying and pasting shortcuts from SharePoint into SAP.
On the surface, it looks easy, but shortcuts ultimately result in increased risk to broken links and lost/missing content; and if it’s an asset maintenance context, that risk could result in injury or death.
The reason? Copying and pasting a URL link is an unintelligent link between the document and the SAP object. SharePoint isn’t aware of “where and how” often that URL was copied and pasted by other staff across the organisation. If you or others copy and paste a link to a work instruction for a specific piece of equipment and then use it for similar equipment, there is no visibility in SharePoint. As a result, the changes incurred through a document’s lifecycle could reduce risk in one area and increase risk because you’re making changes without a full understanding of which SAP objects the content is linked to.
Similarly, you could delete a document because you no longer need it, whilst users of another SAP object may still be using it.
It also increases risk with bulk printing work packages or assembling content for mobile applications, with no guarantee the mobile application can authenticate with the URL, or that print solutions can retrieve the deleted document. If critical information is missing, and the user isn’t aware, the risk of injury is much higher.
2. Integration using a product will save you in the long run compared to custom development
On the surface, using a custom development approach for document integration for an SAP object always seems simple, but document integration is a rabbit hole. The way different processes and objects in SAP require document integration to be designed is vastly different and the complexity increases exponentially as you start doing it.
Documents used in Plant Maintenence may relate to multiple objects/transactions, with “controlled document” workflows required to manage the change and the impact on the many connections.
Documents relating to HR require infotype specific security because different roles accessing the employee master have different document access levels.
EHSM has incident-specific security depending on the consequences of the incident to human life. Fatalities may result in higher security levels than near misses.
Individually, the integration requirements are easy to address, but in combination, it becomes complex. A recent analysis showed that integrating an external document management system into SAP is likely to cost $80,000 per SAP business object. That may not seem like a lot, but Plant Maintenance has eight commonly used objects incurring approximately $640,000. Add two or three related process areas such as procurement, EHSM or HR, and the amount will quickly exceed the cost of a solution that has productised integration.
A recent customer spent over $1 million against the advice of SAP before eventually returning to implement a productised solution. The $1 million was for integration alone, and did not include the cost of undoing the custom integration, migration to a non-workable solution and the internal costs, which matched the external consulting effort. It’s an expensive lesson.
After the initial deployment, you then need to add the cost of ongoing fixes in response to SAP changes overtime, testing work and retaining the knowledge and skills of the programmer. Overall these costs could double within five years compared to a productised integration where the updates are performed and tested by the vendor. Vendor cost can be shared amongst a large user base and are typically included in your software maintenance.
3. Never underestimate the power of one throat to choke
As a consultancy involved in many projects with SAP integration, getting stuck between two software vendors can add considerable cost to a project. Vendor A blames Vendor B, Vendor B blames Vendor A, and it is left to the customer to invest the time and money to prove who is responsible. I’ve yet to see any costs recovered from software vendors when this occurs.
It’s for this reason that you may want to consider buying your solution from SAP if it’s available on the price list. When SAP sells the license they have to support it, whether it’s their own product or not. If there is a problem, you as the customer don’t have to worry where the problem is, and you certainly don’t have to incur the cost of proving who is at fault.
4. Security
Security is one of the most complex areas when it comes to integrating SAP with Office365/SharePoint because there are many security approaches that exist in SAP, and no single method is suited to all use cases. The aim is to apply the same security permissions whereby document security is aligned to the associated objects and data in SAP.
- Human Resources relies on security based on roles within the employee file or hierarchies.
- In contrast, asset management relies on groups, except if you’re the author of a document, in which case the security may be locked during the authoring stages.
- Incidents have incident role-specific security where the security may be locked based on a single checkbox to indicate it’s highly confidential.
To add to this, there are many cases where document security may be tighter than the permission levels of the associated transactions. The document security requires a deeper level of granularity. So a user may be able to access a transaction but not all documents relating to that transaction or object. They may be able to create documents on that transaction but not approve them.
The security approach should be flexible enough to allow the synchronisation of the security configuration in SAP based on the SAP roles, to ensure that you don’t have to duplicate security set up twice, reducing the administrative effort.
5. That’s not a knife; this is a knife (8 dimensions of integration)
When it comes to productised integration, there is integration and INTEGRATION. Some integration will be one dimensional ie, the bare minimum integration to tick a checkbox in an RFP.
Most solutions will utilise a baseline certification called ArchiveLink. It’s a certified method of integrating with SAP, but it comes with some significant constraints, including forcing the user to only work in SAP and not in the content system. On the surface, this may not be a bad thing, but it also forces users to approve documents in SAP when many of them are not core SAP users. Imagine forcing your legal team to use SAP Gui or Fiori as a document management user interface? Do you get the idea?
The more mature solutions will provide you with the capability to navigate the SAP relationships outside of SAP meaning a user can navigate from a vendor to a purchase contract in SharePoint without touching SAP. It also extends to tagging SAP metadata onto documents so you can find them based on any combination of transaction or master data.
6. Best of breed vs best of suite
Under “One throat to choke” we talked about the importance of getting everything from a single vendor and this extends on that concept.
When you have multiple solutions from multiple vendors coming together, which is commonplace with SharePoint add-on partners, it can cause problems. Let’s say you buy SAP integration from Vendor A, records management from Vendor B, and workflow or Drawing Management or 1 of the many other solutions, from Vendor C. What happens if one product doesn’t work with another? Most Vendors will guarantee their product works with SharePoint, but they don’t guarantee it will work with other partner products.
This may leave you with a predicament where you have to choose the most valuable tool for the organisation, which may be a tough choice. If you’re working in government, you may have to choose between records management (which is a state and federal requirement) and drawing management for more effective engineering document control, a functional requirement. It’s a lose/lose situation.
Best of suite solutions will allow you to purchase everything from the same vendor, with product roadmaps that are collaboratively planned and compatibility matrixes for all the valid combinations to ensure no nasty surprises when it comes to upgrading.
You can use SAP to structure your document taxonomies
One of the hardest things to do is keep SharePoint organised in some way that the content is still valuable to the end-user, and that’s where SAP comes in. Imagine using SAP to structure SharePoint so that documents relating to vendor, customer, asset, project, employee, cost centre (or any other SAP objects) are organised consistently with appropriate naming convention. For instance, a vendor’s financial information is automatically stored securely in the correct place in SharePoint without users having to intervene manually.
These are the integration capabilities running in the background keeping structure and security synchronised in real time to ensure users always have access to the right content to support their business needs. It also means that users can navigate SharePoint in a structure that is kept consistent with the way the business works.
About the author
Athol Hill is a Enterprise Architect and a director of Chrome Consulting Pty. Athol has more than 20 years experience in SAP, with the specific focus on document integration into SAP.
Chrome Consulting is a certified SAP and OpenText Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Implementation Partner based in Melbourne as our head office. We also have offices in Sydney and Brisbane servicing our clients across the whole of ANZ. Chrome Consulting is the largest OpenText certified implementation partner for SAP.
Chrome Consulting offers a wealth of knowledge in the OpenText space with experience across all of the SAP resold OpenText product suite. Along with an impressive number of implementations with SAP Vendor Invoice Management solution, the consultants at Chrome Consulting have been involved in more than 80{8bf2b29f36318f0ac46ab1cc03d7035abce669a1cea16c9ed62389a818fa22fd} of the SAP XECM implementations conducted to date in ANZ.
This article is sponsored by Chrome Consulting
