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News In Review

September 21, 1998


Taking Charge Of ERP

New, upgraded management tools add more control

By Beth Davis with Jeff Sweat

ERP applications may help manage the business, but what's managing ERP? Until now, very little. But new tools are simplifying the job of managing enterprise applications and the systems that surround them, letting IT administrators track performance and fix problems before software crashes and business suffers.

New offerings and upgrades from software vendors let IT managers combine data from the systems and networks that support ERP with application performance data metrics to get a comprehensive view of how core business functions are being served.

A suite of tools expected this week from Compuware Corp. will let users assess application availability and performance data from one place. IBM unit Tivoli Systems last week added a help-desk component to its management system for SAP R/3, while Computer Associates released a new version of its R/3-management module that lets IT administrators monitor both R/3 and non-R/3 processes from one console. BMC Software Inc. is teaming with AutoTester Inc. to integrate app stress-testing and test-management technologies into BMC's management suite. These products follow a recent rollout from Remedy Corp. of a suite that combines help-desk, asset-management, change-management, service-level, and year 2000 applications into a consolidated service desk with direct links to R/3 and Oracle applications.

The improvements in management software are important to IT administrators who need to know if a particular server is straining under the weight of an application, if a network bottleneck is delaying application response time, or if the system is about to shut down.

"We need to see how well the systems are performing, if there is anything that warrants a change," says Ken Bradberry, lead systems programmer at Caretech Solutions, the IT arm of Oakwood Healthcare System. "People using a financial system aren't going to have the patience for bottlenecks." Oakwood, a network of hospitals and health facilities in southeastern Michigan, runs a PeopleSoft human resources application and is rolling out PeopleSoft financials. It uses components of Compuware's EcoSystems, EcoTools, and EcoScope to help manage them.

The average cost for an enterprise application outage is nearly $36,000 an hour, according to a recent survey of 900 IT professionals by the Merit Project, a group of users and vendors founded by CA to study enterprise issues. More than half of the survey's respondents reported annual financial losses of $2.5 million or more due to enterprise software outages.

Compuware's EcoSystems suite integrates tools that help users assess the availability and performance of ERP apps, as well as detect and fix outages. The suite includes new versions of EcoTools for application availability and EcoScope for response time. The suite also includes a new tool, EcoSnap, that detects ERP failures.

As part of its rollout of Tivoli Enterprise (see story, p. 40), Tivoli launched Tivoli Service Desk for SAP R/3, which tracks trouble tickets, inventories assets, and manages requests for changes. It can be tied in with Tivoli Service Desk, which works with Tivoli management tools to provide a central help desk for all IT components.

Tivoli's R/3 management tool may be a good fit for Ford Motor Co., which is evaluating the product, says Ronald Wong, manager of infrastructure support. "The thought, the approach, and the process they're using would fit in well," Wong says.

CA last week released an updated version of its Unicenter TNG SAP R/3 Option, which now lets IT managers track all production jobs from a single console more intuitively than in the previous version. BMC and AutoTester plan to integrate AutoTester's stress-testing and test-management technologies with BMC's Application Service Assurance enterprise-management suite.

ERP vendors, meanwhile, already build some management capabilities into their packages. For example, SAP's Computing Center Management System (CCMS) lets IT administrators monitor R/3 processes and detect anomalies. PeopleSoft has a management console that schedules operations and reports problems.But ERP vendors' management tools don't manage applications other than their own, don't provide detailed historical data or performance metrics, and don't tie that information to a single console. These gaps limit IT managers' ability to identify trends, set service levels, and plan future ERP rollouts.

Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. uses Luminate Software Corp.'s Luminate for SAP to manage its R/3 applications, says Steven Passer, director of SAP performance and capacity planning for the pharmaceuticals company. Passer had found that SAP's CCMS didn't let him analyze historical data and was too complex.

Even if ERP vendors do provide more comprehensive management tools, they're unlikely to go beyond their own ERP implementation. They can't pull statistics from the servers the applications run on or the networking infrastructures that move ERP data, analysts say.

That's why appliance manufacturer Whirlpool Inc. went with Tivoli Systems' SAP-management products, which sit on the Tivoli Enterprise framework. Neither SAP's CCMS nor point products from other vendors would tie into the rest of the systems Whirlpool needed to manage, so the company would've had to use multiple management tools. "We want to concentrate on providing good service, not on integrating tools," says Jim Haney, Whirlpool's director of global network services.

Enterprise-management vendors are in the best position to provide the comprehensive picture because their tools give IT managers information about the network, desktops, servers, and enterprise apps, and they tie that information together, users and analysts say.

Such "cradle-to-grave management" is needed, says Yogesh Gupta, CA's senior VP of product strategy. "Even before you run the application in full production, you need change management and version management. Nobody deploys an ERP app as-is."

In addition to R/3 management capabilities in Unicenter, CA is working with PeopleSoft to deliver similar functionality for its ERP package, Gupta says.

Tivoli, too, plans to expand its enterprise-management offering in the next six months to PeopleSoft, Baan, and Oracle applications, says Tivoli chairman and CEO Jan Lindelow.

Customers frequently don't think of management until after implementing ERP, analysts say. "At first, they're more focused on getting the ERP software implemented," says Sam Wee, a partner with Benchmarking Partners. "But there's always a time after going live whenyou have to start making sure things don't break. Then the need for these tools becomes apparent."

But not all ERP users are moving to third-party management software. Dennis Doll, VP and controller for Westfield, N.J., utility Elizabethtown Water Co., says his company is sticking with SAP's tools because a management product may gum up an already complex system. "The more things you plug in, the more things you have to maintain," he says. Still, the utility will likely look at third-party offerings as its ERP implementation grows.

--with additional reporting by Tom Stein


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