SAP has been at the forefront of offering innovative solutions to manage documents that are accessible to all stakeholders.
These stakeholders can be the internal team members of a company or external business partners, such as suppliers and customers. The document management solutions offered are either available for SAP S/4HANA or SAP S/4HANA Cloud, or both. Let’s review a few of them here.
SAP Document Center
SAP Document Center (formerly, SAP Mobile Documents) started off as a document sync tool but quickly matured into a complete document management solution not only for SAP S/4HANA but also SAP S/4HANA Cloud. It’s available as a desktop version, on mobile devices, and on SAP ERP EHP 7 and 8.
The figure below shows the web app version of SAP Document Center with three documents. The bottom menu shows the options to create new folders or documents, download folders, and even open it up in the desktop edition. Placing files in SAP Document Center is as simple as dragging and dropping. The left-hand side shows the options to share files or folders or use the recycle bin.
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In the figure below, (1) is the mobile app version of SAP Document Center (iPhone) with the same three documents that were previously seen. Simply choosing Add on the top-right side of the screen in (1) will bring up (2), wherein the business user can create folders, take photos, and add them to the folders or even import them. An Android version of the SAP Document Center is also available.
The next figure shows the desktop version of SAP Document Center with the same three documents that were previously shown. After downloading and installing the SAP Document Center app on a desktop, simply clicking the SAP Document Center icon, and entering login credentials will bring up the screen shown below. Because the desktop interface is the same as the Microsoft Explorer interface, it’s very user friendly in terms of adding, removing, or making changes to the files and documents. All changes made in the desktop version are automatically synced with the web or the cloud version of SAP Document Center.
SAP Intelligent Product Design
The product lifecycle is all about effectively managing the entire lifecycle of a product. SAP Intelligent Product Design is a cloud-based solution that helps to accelerate product innovation with seamless collaboration among internal and external stakeholders. It’s focused on requirement-driven product development while ensuring actionable live insights across the entire organization. All these steps are logically and sequentially structured, as shown here.
SAP Intelligent Product Design can be integrated with SAP ERP, SAP S/4HANA, and SAP S/4HANA Cloud.
The next figure shows the Innovation Management area of SAP Intelligent Product Design. The bottom menu bar shows the option to create ideas or edit them. It’s also possible to create a campaign (see left-hand side panel) to generate new ideas that can then be evaluated for the practicality and technical and commercial viabilities.
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The next figure shows the Manage Collaboration area of SAP Intelligent Product Design. The various tabs show the options available, including the participants of the product design team. New folders and documents can be created or added, and design models can be created too.
The figure below shows how to create a new model, for example, for a bicycle, and list all the requirements that this new model must meet.
SAP Engineering Control Center
To address modern challenges while keeping the power of the CAD desktop functionalities, SAP created SAP Engineering Control Center as a higher performing UI that is more flexible and scalable as well. SAP Engineering Control Center is the strategic solution for authoring systems integration with the purpose to simplify and expand tool integration by providing one single platform. It enables systems engineering to involve all the different disciplines in product development, including integration to MCAD, ECAD, software, documents (e.g., Microsoft Office documents), and simulation tools.
After downloading and installing the SAP Engineering Control Center app on a desktop, clicking the SAP Engineering Control Center icon and entering login credentials will bring up the screen shown in the final figure.
The desktop interface is very user friendly in terms of adding, removing, or making changes to the files, documents, and document structure. All changes made in the desktop version are automatically synced with the SAP S/4HANA system.
Conclusion
As you can see, SAP offers a handful of great collaborative tools for stakeholders to utilize. This post introduced you to three such tools.
Editor’s note: This post has been adapted from a section of the book Document Management with SAP S/4HANA by Jawad Akhtar.
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