LDS & SAP NetWeaver^® Portal

Many of the world’s leading companies have made large investments in deploying SAP, resulting in:

• More standardized business processes
• Greater data integrity
• The decommissioning and consolidation of legacy systems
• Organizational change management
• A cadre of SAP application power users
• Streamlined back-office tasks and processing.

For many companies, however, the promise of SAP can only be fully realized when we can effectively deploy its robust functionality and information to business and casual users. Here, SAP e-enabled services and knowledge are surfaced across the many roles of the business, creating significant value with employees, managers, partners and customers. These business users are unique, though, and confusing their knowledge, intents, or needs with SAP power users is problematic and potentially disastrous in terms of realizing the goals of the portal.

In the worst-case scenario, we leave it to people to make sense of the interfaces that we deliver — to find some context or meaning of these transactions or data, and to "connect the dots" to their jobs or their needs. This is a disconnect we see often with our clients who have standardized on SAP, and the result is often a significant "push-back" from the business stakeholders in using SAP’s portal for their business users or customers.

LDS has extensive experience in delivering SAP NetWeaver^® Portal solutions that:

• Engage and align users with the business process
• Deliver functionality from multiple back-end asset systems
• Provide and enable a robust decision support capability
• Deliver business performance information, competitive intelligence and corporate knowledge
• Become an integral part of the user’s work environment.

We do not believe that SAP NetWeaver^® Portal poses an inherent limitation in terms of realizing a sound user experience. Nor do we believe that other non-SAP platforms solve the problem any better out-of-the-box. The issue is not dominantly a matter of product; it is a user-centric methodology and approach issue that needs to be applied in order to make SAP NetWeaver® work for business users.