IntelliCorp Suite Helps Make Sense Of SAP R/3

IntelliCorp this week unveiled a diagnostic suite called NetProcess, which comprises five modules that together deliver a broad range of capabilities aimed at ERP life-cycle management.

"We've found that most companies running R/3 have doubled its functionality in the past five years and don't know what they have anymore," said George D'Auteuil, CEO of the Mountain View, Calif.-based company. "When most companies want to add something to R/3, they usually hire someone to review the documentation, interview the users to find out what the system already does and try to understand what's in that SAP environment. Our job is to demystify SAP."

Why not scrap the old and put in the newer mySAP system? In many cases, those R/3 systems have been so highly customized, primarily by staff who left for more lucrative jobs when SAP programming skills commanded a premium, that companies are afraid to touch the systems. "SAP actually promotes technical upgrades because there's too much risk of breaking something by incorrectly putting in a whole new system," D'Auteuil said.

IntelliCorp's NetProcess suite aims to remove that risk. The first module, LiveCapture, can examine SAP usage as far back as 18 months and be used used to optimize functions, assess and deploy upgrades, consolidate multiple R/3 instances and determine functional gaps. Another module, the LiveModel process model repository, stores an organization's business processes, which can then be evaluated, improved upon and added to.

Solution providers can use LiveCompare to go deep into multiple R/3 systems to determine and then reconcile their differences. LiveMonitor evaluates and reports on user activity and transaction times, the better to find and then eliminate inefficiencies. And, finally, LiveInterface delivers data migration and cleansing; manages upgrades, consolidations and deployments, and handles integrations and interactions with other systems.

"Now customers can decide whether to upgrade to the next release," said D'Auteuil. "Not only that, they'll know which new functions they should take advantage of and which will make their current functions obsolete, whether some of their customized functions can be replaced with new, standardized features, and what code will no longer work."

Pricing for the NetProcess suite starts at $80,000. Next month, IntelliCorp will also offer a module delivering point-in-time usage information, rather than a full 18-month history. Pricing starts at $25,000.