GIS Integrated with ERP: A Case Study

Integrating SAP and GIS
During the infancy stages of this project, there were not a lot of options for linking SAP R/3 with a GIS. A company in Germany-ivl GmbH—had successfidly integrated Smallworld with SAP R/3, using a product they had developed called GISConnectTM. (The architecture employed for this technology will be discussed later in this paper.) At the time, this was the only product on the market that could perform this integration. Disconnect also had a very good track record in Europe and Australia. Therefore, in order to support the technical requirements of the project, GPU elected to use Disconnect to perform the integration.

Three primary tasks make up the effort to successfully implement such a strategy. The first step is to conllgure the product. The second step is to provide an index on all data that will have corresponding information in both SAP R/3 and the GIS. The third step is to customize any applications that will use data from both systems.

In the first step, Disconnect configuration deals with identifying the GIS classes and their corresponding SAP R/3 classes. In most cases, class names are different, and sometimes formats are different as well. The configuration utility allows the user to select the classes and the attributes the two systems will interact with.

GPU configured the equipment classes in SAP FU3 with the corresponding GIS classes in the GIS, such as poles, transformers, and conductors. They then identified each field in these classes that would be viewable from both systems and which would be redundant between the systems, as well as the rules for edits concerning which system had update ability and which had only view privileges.

The configuration module allows one to perform the necessary steps to configure a combined GIS/SAP R/3 data model. GIS and SAP R/3 object classes are mapped to each other and SAP IU3 fields of these SAP R/3 classes are made visible in the corresponding GIS object class. Other functions include the definition of field redundancy, editor layout, read-only fields’ set-up etc.

Figure 1. Configuration Menu from within Smallworld
After selecting the corresponding SAP R/3 object class for the GIS object class, the configuration on the attribute level follows from here.