The new OpenText™ Release 16 Enhancement Pack 5 (EP5) is here and it brings a variety of new product releases and updates across the OpenText partner ecosystem. All features are designed to benefit organizations build an intelligent and connected enterprise, getting the most from their lead applications, the content they generate and the people that use it, regardless of on-premise or cloud deployment.
Here’s an overview of the new product launches and noteworthy advances in EP5:
OpenText Information Extraction Service
As well as new features to aid in productivity, usability, and cloud readiness, we are launching a new product focused on one of the key challenges faced by any organization as they embark on their digital journey. For an organization to become digital, you need digital content. This new product is called Information Extraction Service and it replaces our capture tools in the Vendor Invoice Management and Business Center solutions (sold by SAP® as Digital Content Processing) with a single application for digitization of any content into SAP® applications via Vendor Invoice Management and Business Center. Read more about this exciting new product on the Information Extraction Service launch blog.
OpenText Extended ECM for Microsoft Dynamics 365, by Contesto
“If it’s not in CRM, it doesn’t exist.” But actually, there is a huge amount of valuable information that is not in the CRM relating to customers, products they have purchased, renewals and marketing communications that should be available. OpenText Extended ECM for Microsoft Dynamics 365, by Contesto is our second new product in this launch window and enables intelligent and connected enterprises to transform sales, marketing, customer and field service automation by securely and seamlessly integrating content services into business processes. A more detailed blog by my colleague Roel Gilleson goes into more details about this new application and its capabilities.
OpenText Extended ECM Overview and applications
Currently, we are providing seven Extended ECM solutions to allow customers to utilize their content in the context of their lead applications and enable cost savings and efficiency gains. Our Extended ECM solutions support SAP®, SAP® SuccessFactors®, Salesforce®, Microsoft® Office 365™, Oracle® E-Business Suite (EBS), and vertical solutions for Engineering and Government.
It is worth noting that because our Extended ECM solutions are all built on the same Extended ECM platform, any of the new features cascade into these applications and can be taken advantage of.
My colleague Lee Van Cromvoirt has written a specific blog on the Extended ECM platform features but by way of a little teaser, one of the major features of the platform is:
- Extended ECM goes mobile. Users can now browse workspaces on their mobile device and interact with content in an entirely new way. Field staff can now directly access a workspace and critical documents when working in Extended ECM for SAP, supporting processes like Intelligent Asset Management and Predictive Maintenance.
OpenText Extended xECM for SAP Solutions
Extended ECM for SAP® 16.5 focuses the new functionality around usability, productivity and faster time to value. As well as the mobile capabilities, and the Automation Center described in the Extended ECM for SuccessFactors® section below, we have added certain capabilities that are more associated with general SAP® usage.
Workspace creation has been dramatically accelerated by up to 20x to support the bulk import and creation of new workspaces, either by migration or upgrade of an existing system or by the need to create new workspaces. For example, an asset may consist of many thousands of sub workspaces and these are now created much faster.
Speaking of workspaces, another new capability is the ability to create a snapshot of a workspace. A snapshot creates a version of that workspace and all included documents when triggered. Documents created during the snapshot process cannot be deleted, making this a valuable tool for compliance purposes.
Finally for Extended ECM for SAP® , there are Business Attachments. A single document may need to be used in many different workspaces. For example, in an enterprise asset management scenario, the documentation around a light bulb may be describing a component used in many different parent assets. With Business Attachments, you can now associate one document into multiple locations rather than keeping multiple copies in multiple workspaces, with the associated risks of documents getting out of sync, etc.
OpenText Extended ECM for SAP SuccessFactors
For Extended ECM for SAP® SuccessFactors® 16.5, the key updates all focus on productivity for end users and HR Administrators.
The Automation Center enables key users to use a wizard-like interface to start an interaction based on a manual or automatic event. For example, when an employee status is updated – completing a probationary period for example – an action can be triggered to automatically generate a personalised letter to the employee, and store a copy in their digital file, removing the labour-intensive manual nature of this and many other repetitive tasks. But it’s not just document generation, events can interact with other processes, such as workflows, folder generation or status updates on information.
The second feature around productivity is to allow any user, in either the OpenText or SAP® SuccessFactors® user interface to generate a user letter. For the end user, this means that they can now answer their own questions, rather than raising an HR ticket. For administrators, it means that documents can be generated as they are browsing the employee’s digital HR File, rather than having to switch to another menu
OpenText Business Center for SAP Solutions
Business Center supports the new Information Extraction Service (IES) application for digitization of any kind of incoming paper-based content. The potential benefits of automation and machine learning can be dramatic — up to 90% of all incoming content can be processed automatically.
In addition to supporting IES, Business Center enables an incoming document to trigger multiple business processes within SAP. A sales order may be from a new customer, and before the sales order can be processed, the customer needs to be added to SAP so that the sales order can be processed correctly. This used to require multiple manual steps and interactions with delays to the sales order being actually processed. This new feature will reduce that processing time.
OpenText Digital Asset Management for SAP Solutions
The market’s leading Digital Asset Management solution continues to add new capabilities to support the SAP C/4HANA Suite of applications. This takes the form of faster metadata synchronization (handy when you are talking about tens of thousands of assets), new usability features to streamline tasks such as recently visited folders and suggested assets based on product filtering.
OpenText Vendor Invoice Management for SAP Solutions
As with Business Center, this release of Vendor Invoice Management supports the new IES application, enabling machine learning and automation to be applied to incoming invoices speeding up the capture and subsequent processing by removing a lot of the manual corrections and tasks needed during this first phase of an Accounts Payable process. This release provides support for the SAP S/4HANA 1809 release and supports customers running SAP BW/4HANA to run custom reports on Invoice processing efficiency.
To learn more about Release 16 EP5 for SAP, Microsoft, Oracle and Salesforce.com solutions, visit our website.
