Alloy by IBM and SAP

Alloy™ software by IBM® and SAP® is an offering jointly developed and supported by both IBM and SAP. Business users need easy, consistent access to people, processes, and information to improve their productivity. With Alloy, business users can easily access SAP software and information from within the IBM Lotus Notes® environment, both online and offline. Since business users work in the familiar Lotus Notes environment, training can potentially be minimized, which helps speed adoption. As a result, organizations can help make business users more productive, improve decision making, and increase compliance with corporate policies.

Alloy software by IBM and SAP leverages the power and extensibility delivered in Lotus Notes software. Built upon the open Eclipse platform, Lotus Notes software can bring together diverse applications and data sources, and present them in a way that makes sense to the user. Users in turn don't have to learn new systems to gain value from business information, which can help them accelerate processes. Organizations can also easily build custom extensions to the Lotus Notes environment to provide unique contextual information that users need to make informed decisions. Alloy builds upon these capabilities to deliver your SAP applications within a productive and customizable experience.

With Alloy, IBM and SAP have also brought Communications Enabled Business Processes (CEBP) to life. In Alloy, any name is live presence- and chat-enabled when connected to an IBM Lotus Sametime server, which gives users a superior collaboration experience enriched by the power of unified communications.

Alloy software can potentially help organizations to:

• Increase user effectiveness and productivity by integrating the collaborative capabilities of Lotus Notes software with SAP applications, workflows, and information.

• Improve decision making. Alloy provides easy and intuitive access to relevant, contextual information to help users quickly make more informed decisions.

• Improve risk management and mitigation. Business users can easily adhere to processes, follow workflows, and act on essential information – potentially increasing compliance, thus mitigating risk.

• Increase returns on existing investments (ROI). Companies may increase ROI by leveraging investments in SAP applications and Lotus Notes software.

Alloy software provides access to selected business process functions and data from SAP applications through Lotus Notes software.

• Reports management – Personalize, schedule, and access reports from SAP Business Suite applications via the security–rich Lotus Notes client. Share security–rich reports with coworkers, and view reports both online and offline.

• Leave management – Approve and submit leave requests from the familiar Lotus Notes environment. View contextual information to make approval decisions. Leave requests are processed according to approval guidelines in SAP ERP.

• Travel management – Approve and submit travel requests from the familiar Lotus Notes environment. View contextual information to ensure cost–effective travel that fully complies with corporate policies supported by SAP ERP.

• Workflow decision management – In addition to out–of–the–box Leave and Travel Management, Alloy software allows an organization to bring decision steps into any SAP business process, for example, recruitment and hiring processes. Decision steps in any SAP business processes can be bought into the Lotus Notes standard configuration.

• Customizable – To make process decisions, business users need access to contextual information to improve decision making. For example, to approve a travel request, a manager needs to know how much money is left in the travel budget and what the current travel policy is. Alloy software allows an organization to bring the contextual information from SAP application to the Lotus Notes sidebar by customization. Customization can be done using standard tools like IBM Lotus Domino® Designer, LotusScript and the workbench for the ABAP™ programming language. The contextual information can be displayed in the sidebar as any HTML element like graph, table, text, link, etc.

Alloy takes advantage of the offline and collaborative capabilities inherent in Lotus Notes and Domino.

Alloy 1.0 software is available in English, German, French, Japanese, and Italian.

• Managing reporting in Alloy by IBM and SAP 1.0

  This article provides a high-level architectural overview of Alloy, in-depth explanations of all the reporting management features supported in release 1.0, and troubleshooting tips for some common issues.