Web seen as make or break for larger designers

By ADAM GIFFORD

South Auckland firm Design Build Systems has built a web front end for Tourism New Zealand's SAP system so staff can use the complex software without extensive training.

Tourism New Zealand corporate services manager Keith Thomas said the Design Build Systems solution had saved training costs and increased productivity.

"We were trying to achieve an easier user interface into SAP - it's a complex system and, with about 80 staff around the world using it, the easier we can make the input screen the better," Mr Thomas said.

He said the new interface cost $50,000 and was built in four months.

Tourism New Zealand has been using SAP software for three years.

Design Build Systems (www.dbsys.co.nz) has three staff and two associates, all veterans of the team which put SAP into the kiwifruit marketing cooperative Zespri.

Other customers include HortResearch, Environmental Science Research and Zuellig Pharma.

Director Angus Scott-Knight said that for the Tourism New Zealand job, Design Build Systems used the bTalk tool from Florida company Backsoft to generate web-based templates for SAP functions.

The code was then deployed on a Macromedia ColdFusion application server.

"If you look at how an SAP user usually works, the office will have sticky labels all over the place telling them the gobbledygook they need to write to get the system to work," Mr Scott-Knight said.

"We build a web interface which fits the way people in a specific organisation actually work, then map that to SAP and build it on to a web server. Backsoft solves the technical problem of calls back and forth to SAP."

Tourism New Zealand is using the SAP Projects module to manage marketing campaign budgets.

Until the web interface was developed, setting up work breakdown structures and plans was time consuming and required significant expertise.

It has now been greatly simplified and integrated with a web-based workflow process, allowing spending to be requested and approved online.

Mr Scott-Knight said SAP customers had put up with the complexity because companies tried to avoid customised solutions, and customising SAP could be extremely expensive.

"We offer them a low-cost alternative."