How to take Advantage of SAP Document Management Services

Many companies struggle with the task of managing all of their documents. They can be scattered across multiple platforms including flash drives and various network locations. This creates a huge headache for those responsible for maintaining these documents. Document challenges can account for significant productivity loss.

WHAT IS DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT SERVICE IN SAP?

Document Management Services (DMS) in SAP allows you to manage all of your documents directly in your SAP environment. You can upload old documents as well as create new ones directly in SAP utilizing document types to organize your data.

For instance, documents in the Quality Management (QM) module and documents in the Production Planning (PM) module can be shared when the quality team needs to go back to look at what was produced in order to run their quality testing. For those worried about overloading their system with too many documents content servers are frequently utilized as storage so the front end server is not affected.

If you are going to implement DMS, get to know what it has to offer so you can take advantage of the functionality that works for your business.

Key Functionality in SAP DMS includes:

1. Create documents directly in SAP
2. Manage document approval through workflow
3. Easily distribute documents for review
4. Manage security around creation and changes
5. Keep change control history of documents

Not only is it possible to manage the upload and storage of documents directly in SAP, through DMS you can manage your entire document review process. Once a document is created, a workflow will give the responsible parties a chance for as many review steps as they want before releasing said document for public use. The document statuses will make the review process more visible relieving the burden of manually maintaining and monitoring this process.

The benefits of utilizing SAP DMS are:

1. Utilize existing SAP security
2. Can store documents in the database or content server
3. Link documents through various business objects in SAP
4. Easy change and version management
5. Simple distribution of documents for review and approval utilizing workflow

SAP BUSINESS WORKFLOW

SAP Business workflow is a standard tool used for the automation of a given business process. In the case of document review it would notify the responsible users directly instead of the typical manual process. The workflow can determine the responsible agent who has the next step in the process. These agents can also utilize digital signatures to increase the security if needed.

Workflow can integrate seamlessly with email systems so that users will be notified of work items in their normal email environment where most people spend much of their day. In the email, a user will be able to go directly to the work items in SAP to approve/reject the given item. This will trigger an e-mail to the next person in the workflow. When a team member is unavailable due to vacation or sick time for example, a substitute can be maintained and the work item is automatically redirected.

By: Jack Cawley