InformationWeek

Document Management For ERP Software

By Jeff Angus and Tom Stein

ocumentum Inc. and PeopleSoft Inc. are jointly developing code to give enterprise resource planning software users intrinsic document-management capabilities. The companies will build an add-on module that will provide full document-management capabilities for PeopleSoft's new engineering application, which will be released as part of PeopleSoft 7 this fall.

That means PeopleSoft users will be able to store such things as computer-aided design drawings and product documents and specifications within the engineering application. "This relationship gives PeopleSoft a differentiating factor with their engineering application, and gives us a beachhead into their customers," says Documentum marketing director Larry Warnock, who adds that the Pleasanton, Calif., companies plan to extend this integration to other applications within the PeopleSoft suite.

That's good news to PeopleSoft customers. "We do payroll for more than 200 locations each week, and we'd love to have document management," says Buck Buchanan, senior VP of IS at Snelling and Snelling, an employment agency in Dallas. He says the technology would help the company cut down on paper-shuffling.

Documentum also has a relationship with SAP, a key rival of PeopleSoft, but the software isn't as tightly integrated. Instead, the companies have built a bidirectional interface that links Documentum's Enterprise Document Management System with SAP's R/3 software.

Barbara Noti, an analyst at the Meta Group in Stamford, Conn., thinks the addition of document management to ERP packages is a natural evolution. "The ERP vendors have not had a formal strategy when it comes to document management," she says. "But they realized this is something they need and they're not going to make the mistake of trying to build their own."

PeopleSoft plans to ship PeopleSoft 7 in September.

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