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IntelliCorp's (IC) LiveInterface for SAP is a comprehensive, integrated development environment (IDE) for the SAP community to reduce the risk and time associated with integrating and moving transactional and master data throughout the SAP lifecycle ? migrations, upgrades, consolidations, testing, etc. LiveInterface for SAP is a centralized workbench for those working within the SAP code environment to accelerate the development of scalable, accurate and portable interfaces across all instances of SAP. It is also NetWeaver compliant and SAP certified, supporting Unicode, all SAP API's, and protocols and integrates easily with industry-specific SAP modules.
Meeting the Data Management Challenges
Managing data and developing interfaces either internally (within your production SAP instance) or externally to another SAP instance or 3rd-party application creates many challenges:
- Selectively extracting data from Production to a Test Instance
- Updating in a way which preserves database integrity and Unit-of-Work (UoW) integrity - Identifying and extracting the correct data, at the right time - Transporting the data between systems securely, once and only once - Transporting the data record structure from the source to the target - Retaining an audit trail of transport activities - Developing an environment for transmission error detection, notification and recovery - Employing an auto restart for error recovery - Ensuring a secured data access
In today's world, your SAP system has moved to center stage for managing all of your Corporation's mission-critical applications on a global basis. SAP controls the books, manages the inventory, produces the product and oversees the entire the sales process. Recognizing the importance of SAP is central to the success of your overall enterprise. It should direct your data management standardization and integration design principles, methods which optimize integration techniques. In addition, it needs to provide monitoring and alert functionality to oversee and protect the integrity of your SAP data structures.
Data Management and Interface Development is a Lifecycle Issue
More than traditional IT systems, your SAP system changes constantly. This volatility can have a big impact on all application integration needs. Changes range from version upgrades, to the addition of new business processes or modules, to mergers and acquisitions which all require access to your SAP data and interfaces to your SAP system be reconfigured and extended.
A Significant Cost Factor
The overall costs for an SAP system's application interfaces, and data extractions including initial development costs as well as ongoing maintenance, are roughly proportional to five factors:
- The amount of data (including custom) to be extracted - The number of interfaces - The amount of code that has to be written for each interface - The level of developer expertise required to write the code - The level of developer expertise required to maintain the code
The goal of the SAP project manager or IT Director should be to reduce the effects of the latter two factors as much as possible. In fact, Forrester Research states that "Ongoing management costs run 45% of the initial purchase - per year! Persistent customization and integration costs top the list."
And yet most companies do not budget adequately for the initial and on-going development of interfaces, much less the costs of interface maintenance. In addition, the unusually high turn-over rate of trained SAP staff further exacerbates the problem. The need to retrain new staff, or out-sourcing the work, results in drawn-out, and expensive interface development costs.
Addressing all of the various data needs is much more than moving data elements from point A to point B. Both transactional and master data movements have unique needs tied to specific requirements. The interfaces must be carefully designed, keeping in mind the need to stay within the existing data structures while addressing unique user specifications working within aggressive timelines.
LiveInterface for SAP Is Designed to Meet Multiple Data Management and Interface Needs
LiveInterface is IC's SAP application integration environment, designed for building SAP interfaces from the ground up. It is the only interface application product, built within SAP that provides for this full spectrum of needs. LiveInterface was designed specifically for, and exists within your SAP system. Consequently, it is able to take advantage of its unique access to SAP's data dictionary, database and operating environment, thereby enabling the development of powerful interface programs which are monitored during execution and respond to exceptional conditions.
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