Based On Sap's Cross-component Process Integration And Exchange Of Technical Studies,

When you visit any modern company of considerable size in this times ofglobalization of economy, you would probably notice that the software products andsolutions it uses are derived from more than just one software provider. It partly becausecost considerations prevent companies from replacing entire softwaresolutions(including ERP/CRM/SCM etc.), and partly because companies build theircomplete solution based on their own individual requirements. Furthermore,collaborations between companies become more and more frequent with thedevelopment of Internet at very fast speed. And a mass of information need to transfer.The focus of the solution is the integration of people, information, and processes.Process Integration is the most flexible and complex part of this solution. And theinfrastructure and the technology of data exchange are contributed to the realization ofthe integration. Because the information regarding the integration of the applications isdistributed across the various systems, making changes after the. initial implementationis laborious, time-consuming, and expensive. Thus the purpose of my thesis is exploringhow to create an efficient and open platform to integrate a range of SAP and non-SAPsystems.I constructed the integration exchange platform with topology of star as thefollowing by developing and configuring Integration Objects in Integration Repositoryand Directory at Lenovo MCS project, which realized the cross-component processintergration and met the actual needs of business: The traditonal solution would appearto be point-to-point connection of the various applications and systems. A range ofmiddleware technology is available for exchanging data between these systems.However, as the number of different systems increases, so does the complexity ofoverall the system landscape. New integration infrastructure adopts to star schema withIntegration Server. Adapter Engine on it is responsible for converting various messageinto XML and forwarding it after the dealing of Integration Engine. And BusinessProcess Engine may be used when the situation calls for that. This means that you don'thave to search through all the systems to find the relevant information, rather, you can access this information at a central location.The significance of this infrastructure isgreat improvement of collaboration and expansibility between systems, so it provides aconvenient platform for connecting with new systems and components in the futurewithout lots of changes. However, the issue of capability of Integration Server needs tobe solved.This thesis first introduces the basis of SAP, describing the development of SAP,the architecture of R/3 system, the ABAP program and the ABAP bench. The followingresearch focuses on the exchange infrastructure of the cross-component processintegration. The next part of it concentrates on the exchange technology in integration,covering interfaces, messages and proxy generation (emphasis on proxy model andadapter-based communication), also mappings. Then I examine the integration scenariosat Lenovo Group in the technical details of implementation. At the end of this thesis,sum up the cross-component integration technology based on SAP, and a prospect to thefuture research in this field is given.