Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) and SAP AG are announcing the availability of a new software system that helps users turn raw data from SAP’s ERP (enterprise resource planning) software into finished documents, and tracks their delivery to their final recipients. The launch was made in conjunction with the SAPPHIRE 2001 convention, which opens today in Lisbon, Portugal.
The HP Output Management System (HP OMS) enables corporate users of SAP software to tailor their output for printer, fax, e-mail, or Web publishing, without resorting to complicated programming procedures, said Ian White, HP product manager in the U.K.
As an example, if a user wants to send an SAP-generated purchase order via fax, said White, “What we’ll do is take that document, add a corporate logo for example, take that raw SAP data, deliver it, and even send a receipt back to the user to know it’s been delivered. They no longer have to print it off, take it to the fax machine, and wait over the fax machine.”
HP OMS was developed by information-delivery software company Dazel Corp., which HP acquired in 1999, in conjunction with Swedish forms-management software company StreamServe Inc. The product is the result of an agreement made last year between SAP and HP, which have cooperated for over a decade.
“SAP used to work with their internal solution called SAP Script, but it’s manual, very difficult to maintain, so they came to us and said, ‘Why don’t you create a solution to make it simpler and user-friendly?'” said Thierry Ranc