Electricity company Macquarie Energy has managed to slash its purchases approval process from a fortnight to a day after developing a BlackBerry-based application to integrate into its existing SAP workflow.
"The company's business process requires the creation of purchase requisition orders for all purchases," said Bruce Johnson, VP of SAP Mobility Services at Morse, during a presentation at SAP's TechEd user conference in Las Vegas.
"Depending on the value of the requested purchase, the requisition may require approval by several managers before the requisition is released to the purchasing department. However, staff had limited access to the system when travelling, leading to long delays in the approval process," Johnson said.
Those hold-ups could sometimes last a fortnight or longer, with requests stacking up until on-the-road workers had access to the central system.
Morse, an SAP support and delivery services company, collaborated with Melbourne-based Sky Technologies on the project for Macquarie Energy, which generates about 15 percent of Eastern Australia's electricity needs.
The Java-based application receives the purchase order request using the BlackBerry's existing connectivity and routes the approval back to the central SAP server after staff have reviewed it.
While staff will only receive the request when in a mobile reception area, the BlackBerry-based system still greatly speeds up the process.
Workers receive an e-mail notifying them they need to launch the approvals system, increasing the odds of a timely response.
Morse's approach, eschewing a middleware layer in favour of directly embedding the development tools within SAP's environment, improved performance and minimised the chances of posting errors, according to Johnson. Macquarie Energy already utilises SAP's systems for workflow and document management.
Angus Kidman travelled to Las Vegas as a guest of SAP.
Is it an advertisement for BlackBerry, an advertisement for SAP, or a way for a ZDNET writer to thank SAP for an all-expenses-paid junket? Because it sure AIN'T 'news'. Please ZDNET, stop peddling this sort of nonsense and pretending it's news.