Loraine Lawson spoke with Atul Saini, CEO/Chairman/CTO of Fiorano Software, about how Fiorano's SOA Platform can help companies customize and Web-enable ERP forms, without spending huge money on consultants.
Lawson: I understand you've had some experience with SOA to improve ERP systems. Can you explain?
Saini: Let me give you an example. SAP, because of its generality, is designed for separation of duty. The invoicing process has to be very general-purpose, so a typical invoice in SAP takes five steps and has nine SAP screens. Now, in a really large company, someone might want every step to be done by a separate person, so that is where the separation of duty makes sense. But for the vast majority of companies, one person does all the invoicing.
Let me give you an example. There's this billion-dollar company, which is the world’s third-largest distiller. They have 45 different factories and manufacturing units, but people need to do the invoicing. If everyone has an SAP screen, every invoice takes 12 minutes and every person in every factory that is creating an invoice needs SAP training. So here is what these guys did. They use the SAP system to hold all the data, but when they want to generate an invoice, they don’t use the SAP screens, they just create an HTML page. The HTML page has all of the information of the invoice. You click a button, go and just a verification screen pops up. After that, all the data is fed into SAP and you get the invoice.
Behind the HTML screen is an SOA flow. So what the SOA flow does is the information is fed through an HTTP adapter -- the HTTP adapter pulls up information from the HTML page, performs a transformation converted to the format that is suitable for SAP, and then calls an SAP adapter with three different SAP adapter calls, and lo and behold, the invoicing is done.
Five steps, nine screens and 12 minutes is converted to two steps, two screens in two minutes. This company generates 10,000 invoices a month, and the savings is over 200 man days in one month. It’s absolutely stunning. So that’s the kind of value we’re talking about.
Lawson: What is an SOA flow? What do you mean by that?
Saini: With the Fiorano system, when you compose an application flow, the visual diagram that you get is the actual execution flow. It’s not just a diagram, like Visio or Vista.
So the bottom line is you have these pre-built components, you have HTTP adapters, database adapters, file adapters, and when you connect them onto the screen, the directional lines connecting them actually represent data flows at run time. It's all created automatically by the system.
The entire invoicing flow took this company one week to build, testing took another week, in two weeks they had a system which reduced the time for invoice creation from 12 minutes to two minutes.
SAP requires SAP consulting that is very expensive. Let’s say you’ve got 50 ordinary factor workers who are trying to generate an invoice. They've got to go and take SAP training. That’s a disaster. Now, they go to a friendly HTML page, which is designed by their company, enter the data, and they're done. By spending just a quarter of a million dollars one time in license fees, in the first year they're going to realize savings over $750,000, and secondly they realize savings of $2 million.
SAP is a very good system to hold the enterprise data but the processes that SAP has designed around the enterprise data are very archaic. If you want to follow the default template, which is the SAP way, it's okay. But if you want to change it, they say, “Ah-ha, you’ve got to do a lot of programming,” (in) ABAP. If you want to change the default SAP process and to run the program the way you run your business, then you're going to spend a tremendous amount of money on SAP consultants.
You still get the benefit of SAP from the standpoint of the transactionality; your enterprise data is still held within SAP. And that is very good, but you don’t have to go through the whacked-out archaic SAP processes. And Oracle is just as bad.
Lawson: On the Web site, it talks specifically about SAP integration. Is that a specific solution for SAP? Do you have a packaged solution for Oracle?
Saini: We do, in the sense that the solution that we have can be used either for Oracle or for SAP. Now, the connector to Oracle is just the database connector that we’ve got. For SAP, the connector is a specific SAP connector.
SAP has more of a blue-blooded ESB pedigree. Put it that way. We’ve only concentrated on it. Oracle is like the new kid on the block. Oracle is basically a database company. They want to be everything. “I'm middleware, I’m here and I’m there,” you know? Great, but they’ve got a long way to go before they prove that they are much more than a database company.