Easily Create Web Pages Which Interact with SAP

Imagine a world where all users in your organisation – wherever they are based – felt confident to use SAP through a front end that did not resemble the native SAP GUI at all. Where they could navigate easily through simplified web pages where information is accessed from SAP in real time but is presented in an easy format using business language they understand.

Imagine an end to time-consuming and often ineffective user training. Imagine slashing support costs for those everyday business processes which users find so difficult to transact in SAP.

Imagine being able to invite your customers and suppliers to order or supply products and services, without needing any SAP training, without even knowing they were interacting directly with an SAP system!

Our Story

A few years ago we set out to find a tool that would enable us to build web pages that interacted with SAP. At the time, SAP's only answer to this problem was a technology called ITS. ITS simply enabled standard SAP screens to be accessed as web pages. These so-called web pages looked just like ordinary SAP screens, because that's all they were: SAP screens wrapped up as HTML.

But our clients wanted more than this: they wanted to present their users with web pages, not SAP screens. They wanted to model process flows on their own businesses, not on some global template. They wanted to reduce their training costs and increase user-acceptance.

We found the ColdFusion to be simply the best tool we could use to rapidly deliver quality and customer satisfaction in the web user interface. The search was on to find a simple connector that would integrate ColdFusion pages with SAP. Initially we used a third party product but when time moved on and the product didn't we developed a 100% ColdFusion solution called CF2SAP to fill the gap. You can read about CF2SAP on www.cf2sap.com the home of ColdFusion to SAP Integration.

We've come a long way since that first SAP-connected web page. In New Zealand the operational arm of a government department runs its entire global management processes on our portal. We've worked on on SAP-web projects in N and S America, and we have a number of well-known brand names here in NZ using our portal.

A product like CF2SAP needs to be used within the context of a business application: a framework in which to launch the pages. The DBS Business Portal provides the application infrastructure for developing sophisticated business systems which interact with SAP via CF2SAP. It's a workflow collaboration engine, a relationship management system and an integration engine all in one easily deployed web interface. Because ColdFusion allows us to choose the software products we work with, the integration touchpoints cover not only SAP but almost any connectable system, via almost any protocol you care to name.