Chapter NINE. Project Mendocino: A Product Based on Consuming Enterprise Services


On any given workday, information workers at companies around the globe can be found performing the same task: planning time off for a vacation. It starts with opening a calendar program, most likely Microsoft Outlook, and scanning for available dates. Appointments get moved forward or back, and eventually a weekor twogets cleared for takeoff. After emailing a manager for approval, the next step for many employees is to log on to the company's enterprise system, find the HR workspace, scroll down to the correct section, and ultimately submit a vacation request. This process is often tedious.

Even if the vacation request screen has a nice-looking user interface (UI), employees still have to use two different tools with two different views of reality, and often the conversion from the calendar to the vacation request form is done by hand. This laborious task of updating information in one system that is not automatically reflected in the other also increases the probability of erroneous data being entered. Completing just one simple vacation request requires all these additional steps. If these steps were part of planning the vacation itself, a travel agent could be called on for assistance. Unfortunately, there is no travel agent to call on when problems are encountered during the request-for-leave processinstead, a power user who understands the system is all too often called on for support. Figure 9-1 illustrates the problems caused by the disconnect between desktop applications and enterprise applications.

Figure 9-1. The disconnect between desktop applications and enterprise applications, leading to compromised productivity and noncompliance


What if an employee were able to access the HR system without ever knowing it? Instead of navigating the intranet labyrinth, information workers could simply enter a week-long vacation request into Outlookthe same desktop application used daily anyhowand have that request translated into data that can be integrated with the enterprise system and automatically directed into the appropriate workflow process for payroll and management. That, in a nutshell, is the goal of Project Mendocino: to take the simple enterprise processes that are used every day and make them transparent to the end user.

SAP and Microsoft joined together to leverage the openness of the ESA blueprint with the .NET architecture of Microsoft's Office applications suite. The result is Project Mendocino, a solution that extends and automates the business processes from mySAP ERP within the familiar and commonly used Microsoft Office UI. Project Mendocino provides role-relevant displays of information while retaining process context as well as the collaboration and analytic tools for which SAP is famous. By simply taking the information that is already being gathered through desktop tools on a daily basis and reusing it by pushing it forward into underlying enterprise systems, SAP is creating tremendous value, increasing efficiency, and lowering total cost of ownership (TCO).

Project Mendocino is an extension to the enterprise portal, which will always be needed to gain full access to more advanced SAP business applications. But most of the time, information workers only require quick access to simple processes, such as billable time entry or budget monitoring. Project Mendocino eliminates the reliance on power users and business application experts while also seamlessly connecting business process applications with commonly used productivity applications.

Project Mendocino's capabilities include:

  • Personalization

  • Object synchronization

  • Report distribution

  • Alerts and notifications

  • A form-based approval process

  • Offline functionality

Through these capabilities, employees and managers realize greater efficiency and flexibility through self-service processes. These processes take the form of Project Mendocino applications, which in the initial release include:

  • Time Management

  • Budget Monitoring

  • Leave Management

  • Organization Management

Project Mendocino consumes the underlying functionality of transactional applications through services and offers new ways to use the system. It represents one of the first in a new wave of products from SAP that uses ESA to extend the reach of transactional applications to where they will make the most difference for businessesin this case, the information worker's desktop.




Enterprise SOA. Designing IT for Business Innovation
Enterprise SOA: Designing IT for Business Innovation
ISBN: 0596102380
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 265

flylib.com © 2008-2017.
If you may any questions please contact us: flylib@qtcs.net