Product Features
Jointly developed and supported by SAP and Microsoft, Duet™ enables information workers to improve decision-making, increase process compliance and decrease costs by taking full advantage of SAP business processes and business intelligence through the Microsoft Office environment.
Duet™ Version 1.0 plus the planned Value Packs have several user scenarios, all of which are easily accessible without leaving the Microsoft Office environment:
1) Time Management: Employees who need to record work and billable hours can do so using their Outlook calendar. Microsoft Outlook appointments are automatically synchronized and updated with SAP ERP.
2) Budget Monitoring: Managers have seamless access to the financial data they need to make better decisions. They can also fulfill their cost and budget responsibilities with budget monitoring, alerts for budget variances and postings, transfers of budgets and posting adjustments.
3) Organization Management: Employees and managers can access organization information through contact views in Microsoft Outlook. In addition users can access HR-related tasks while remaining in the familiar Outlook environment.
4) Leave Management: Employees can submit personal leave requests and handle management approvals processes through Microsoft Outlook, thereby enabling data synchronization and process compliance between desktop and SAP ERP.
5) Travel Management: Make air/hotel/car bookings directly through Microsoft Outlook in a fully self-sufficient manner, reducing costs while facilitating compliance with corporate travel policies.
6) Reports and Analytics: Access scheduled and ad hoc reports through Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Excel, and drill down to key performance metrics through personalized views.
7) Sales Management: Manage key account activities, including appointments, contact updates, pricing approvals and access sales analytics through Microsoft Outlook, improving the quality of customer communications and driving faster deal closures.
8) Purchasing Management: Realize faster approval cycles and reduced operating costs through fully compliant purchase order notifications, routing, and approvals within Microsoft Outlook.
9) Demand Planning: Access demand plans from Microsoft Excel, analyze plans offline, and upload revised plans from Microsoft Excel into the SCM demand planning module.
10) Recruitment Management: Collaboratively schedule interviews with job candidates, capture feedback about each candidate, and generate rankings to automate the selection of the best-qualified person for a position.
Duet provides the following capabilities:
- Contextual data integrations for Microsoft Office
- Offline access and data synchronization between Microsoft Office and SAP applications
- Reliable security for data transfer
- Integration of approval processes in Microsoft Outlook (offline, routing, contextual data)
- SAP alerts notifications delivered through Microsoft Outlook inbox
- SAP controlled authorization for data access
For more information on how to implement and deploy Duet, please see our White Papers.