SAP yesterday introduced D&B for R/3, a product that will let customers integrate business information from Dun & Bradstreet directly into SAP's R/3 software suite. The product promises to automatically pass credit, supplier, and purchasing information from a D&B database into R/3.

SAP officials say D&B for R/3 offers many potential benefits to customers, including the ability to identify bad debts at an early stage and make better and faster risk-management decisions.

Gabriele Hecken, a senior manager of global sales operations at Nortel Networks, says she is intrigued by the product. "It could reduce time spent on overnight updates and also ensure more accurate data," she says. Nortel now manually extracts customer entries from SAP and matches them with data in the D&B database. It then replaces that customer entry, which includes such information as credit history, product data, and other data, into the SAP system. The whole process is cumbersome and susceptible to error.

"The value of integration," says analyst Harry Tse of the Yankee Group, "is that it takes the inefficiencies out of migrating data between D&B and SAP. Now, clean data and customer information is automatically entered into SAP, which ultimately helps the user make better business decisions."

Release 1.1 of D&B for R/3 supports R/3 releases 3.1 and 4.0. The product will be available at the end of March. Pricing information wasn't disclosed.