SAP visualizes ERP

SAP signed the global distribution agreement with iRise and will sell its software under the name SAP Application Visualization, said in the official statement of vendor. The agreement relies on the operating partner relationship between the companies.

In projects of SAP for the last 20 years traditional methods of documentation of business requests, such as spreadsheets, text files, charts, flowcharts, practically did not change also to corporate users them "impracticablly" to untangle, consider in iRise. Besides, business users often do not know what they want from the software, will not learn to interact with it, says the company yet.

According to iRise, the visualization provided with the company – means for users, let and virtual to learn to use the main software as soon as possible. It will help to save money of clients due to cost reduction on rewriting of the software code, to simplify training of employees, "change managing actions".

Simulation of iRise is so close to final applications that people do not see a difference between them, affirms on the website of the company. Visualization are available to assembly even nontechnical workers.

The company of power supply National Grid carried out a pilot project with iRise software recently. "After users gave an assessment to experience of its application "extremely positively", is going to accept it as the standard instrument of project implementation now", - the Chief information officer David Lister reported.

If visualization tools correspond to the promises, eventually they will help to reduce the number of failures of ERP projects which became a problem for SAP and other vendors for a long time.

Use of such software for ERP - unconditional rise, the analyst of Forrester Research Chayna of Dr. Martens (China Martens) considers. From the very beginning of the project the group of the strengthened support for obtaining the right of implementation is created and the expanded employee group of the company participates already on early blueprint stage and start.

ERP systems "remain too difficult in use and opaque in workflow", she added. Instruments of visualization will help customers to be trained with software bends.

According to Dr. Martens, tools of this kind can be useful for all lifecycle of the ERP applications, not only in a stage of development and testing. For example, when the companies are going to reconfigure significantly software or make the decision on change of the sphere of their deployment.

However customers of SAP should decide whether it is worth paying extra money for the software of iRise as it is on sale as "expansion of the solution" and therefore does not enter the amount of an annual subscription fee, the independent analyst Jon Reed told.

Possibly, the benefit will be the greatest upon purchase of a net SAP product, he told: "If you apply possibilities of SAP selectively, then this tool, in my opinion, is slightly less useful".