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Unlock the Value of Enterprise Applications

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My name is Anu Chawla and I am a Program Manager on our Enterprise ISV team. I am responsible for technical evangelism and readiness for enterprise customers running applications from SAP and Oracle. Customers make significant investments when they buy Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM) or HR Applications, and they depend on having a solid platform on which to run these applications.

For example, BNSF, one of the largest railroad networks in North America, recently evaluated ways to modernize its decade’s old legacy systems. BNSF chose to go with SAP Applications in part because of the availability of Duet. A Duet scenario of interest to BNSF permits their employees (40,000+) to schedule vacation days via an email to their manager, who then replies with their approval. That time is entered automatically into their Outlook calendars and the underlying SAP systems.

Here’s another example from my personal experience. Prior to joining Microsoft, I worked for a large CRM software company. We spent more than a year customizing our CRM application for the sales force of a large footwear and apparel manufacturer and integrating the “front office” CRM application (as it was described back then) to browse products, create quotes, convert to orders and send them to the SAP ERP system to check availability and send orders to the right factory, etc. When the CRM system was rolled out, users were very unhappy due to complexity and time it took to deal with the custom CRM system—it did not help them up-sell or cross-sell shoes, and it took more time to enter orders. They wanted to go back to their Excel-based “order-entry” system, as the spreadsheet had everything they needed— pictures of the shoes (built in VBA) and a dynamic grid (rows/columns) that they could quickly fill in to order the right style/color/size. While the CRM system tried to replicate this dynamic column grid, it took more time than the sales rep could afford (even though it did a better job of showing them historical data on their orders). Ultimately, a custom Excel application was written to enter quotes and then integrated with SAP. The CRM system was downsized and used only for Opportunity and Contact Management, and the company was not able to realize the vision of 360 degree view of the customer.

These are just two scenarios where companies have invested in ERP for automating their back-office – purchasing, materials and supply chain. In each case, the user experience and the ability to extend the reach of line of business systems to information workers, through the use of Office Business Applications (OBA), was a huge factor in the purchase and re- design of enterprise applications.

This year, I am excited to be leading and organizing several webcasts and workshops to enable customers to unlock the value in these applications. We have a series of upcoming and archived webcasts available here. If you are running Oracle Siebel applications, my team recently presented a three day technical workshop, in which we provided hands-on experience and guidance with integrating Siebel Applications with Microsoft Office/Exchange Server and SharePoint. You can view the on-demand webcast from the www.microsoft-oracle.com site.

We look forward to hearing from you.

Regards,

Anu

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