For engineering in the oil and gas industry, most of these companies, specifically in the Texas region, are kind of OpenText customers.
Since we all do bigger enterprises and stuff like that, I go to these meetings called Regional User Groups, which are oil and gas-based quarterly meetings to discuss and look into the roadmap, look into the products, and stuff like that.
So, I know pretty much almost every single company here is an OpenText shop inside this oil and gas industry. OpenText Extended ECM for Engineering is a big product that most of these companies have in common.
OpenText has different product stacks. One of the products, which was primarily called Content Server or Content Suite, has been rebranded as Extended ECM, essentially Extended ECM platform. So OpenText becomes ANY basic ECM.
It’s a bigger module suite. It’s another application altogether to manage engineering drawings and the lifecycle of engineering-related stuff. So that’s another stack.
Now, consider that if you come to SAP, they call it Extended ECM for SAP. The terminology is still the same. The common term is Extended ECM; then the extensions are called something. So if it is engineering or operations-related stuff, dealing with drawings and other stuff, we call it Extended ECM for engineering. If we are dealing with SAP-related information or asset information, we call it Extended ECM for SAP.
So Extended ECM for SAP comes in two different kinds of flavors, if you will. There is a smaller flavor, and then there is a full-blown capability related to stuff, which is called Extended ECM for SAP. Extended ECM for SAP typically starts with a small implementation. However, most manufacturing companies have a SAP footprint, and if they are getting started either in OpenText or stuff like that, they will integrate at some point for the attachment parts of the SAP implementation because SAP HANA is a costly deal. You don’t want to architect all the content, which is not essentially business content, to store in an SAP HANA database. So that’s where Extended ECM for SAP comes into the picture.
Most of the companies I had some past experience with this bigger manufacturing company will integrate their SAP, not completely with OpenText, but using a smaller integration. It’s called archival and document access (ADA). That’s the component most of these companies will utilize. At a certain point in their implementation, they’ll realize, "Hey, let’s take a closer look at the full-blown capability of Extended ECM for SAP." So that’s where this kind of rollout will evolve.
Consider you have some use cases. For example, something for your accounting or procurement department. And you purchase equipment, machines, and plants for plant-related operations. Essentially, there will be manuals and basically anything and everything related to your particular equipment. So, where do the equipment entries go? They go into SAP. Depending on your SAP deployment, it can go into some database. Most companies these days are talking about SAP HANA and stuff like that. So it will be stored in SAP HANA.
But, these documentation, drawings, manuals, and help files for these big pieces of equipment, where do they go? That’s where Extended ECM for SAP comes into the picture. All these integrations are through a one-way push, essentially, but with two-way access. So as a user in the procurement department or the accounting department, or an engineering department where you are using SAP for asset management entries inside your system. All those related documents, drawings, manuals, and files have to be stored somewhere.
If you store them in SAP, it will be a costly implementation going forward. After maybe a couple of years, you will realize that it’s too much to deal with because HANA database will be too costly. There will not be much business value because you cannot utilize a lot of search and cool features inside your application from an SAP perspective. That’s where you will integrate SAP. For example, SAP Extended ECM for SAP Plant Maintenance. One of the modules SAP provides is SAP Plant Maintenance.
So what you will do is deploy Extended ECM for SAP, then try something called SAP Plant Maintenance, Extended ECM for SAP Plant Maintenance. The content maintenance, manuals, files, drawings, and related stuff, its details or tags, or any kind of stuff is stored in your SAP. But anything and everything else is pushed through this integration into Extended ECM platform. So now it is available to be utilized by your business user who knows nothing about SAP.
They only live and breathe in a different management system. They can look into these details depending on what kind of integration has been done for that company. So that’s one use case.
Second use case will be in SAP itself. Now, if you are an SAP user, you have this information readily available at your fingertips. Anything goes wrong in your maintenance or any kind of management, you can look into these details, which are readily available because this documentation lifecycle is being managed by Extended ECM for SAP. It will give you extended storage capabilities within your SAP application. So it will be a two-way integration, essentially. Similar, wider features will be available within Extended ECM platform.
Within SAP, you have these extra features called business attachments or business content retrieval. Those business contents are stored inside Extended ECM, and those features will be available within your SAP GUI from an SAP perspective. So it’s a win-win situation for both worlds.