Industry Solution - PDC Gateway ™ for
SAP®
Integration Software for Kronos® and
SAP®
PDC Gateway™ for Kronos® and
SAP® seamlessly integrates SAP® PP (PP-PDC), HR (HR-PDC), PM (Plant
Maintainence), PS (Project System), PK (Kanban), and CATS to
Kronos® products. Kronos® offers integrated human resources, payroll, and
time and attendance solutions for small to mid-size businesses as well as
a comprehensive suite of labor management applications for larger
enterprises. Kronos® products and services help organizations of all sizes
align their people, processes, and technology to improve individual
productivity and boost overall business performance. SAP® is the worlds
leading Business Platform. PDC Gateway™ is the bi-directional, bridge
between the two systems providing data transfer, mapping, translation,
error handling, and system recovery.
PDC Gateway™ is a stand-alone
product from iomotion and is used throughout
the world with Kronos® products (WorkForce™ Central Suite,
TimeKeeper™, iSeries Central™, DCM™ ,WorkForce
Activities™ and Timeclocks) providing a real-time bi-directional interface
for SAP®.
PP-PDC -
Production Planning Detail | HR-PDC - Human Resources
Detail | PM -
Plant Maintenace
Detail
PDC Gateway™
Overview
Out of the box, the PDC Gateway supports, in
full, the standard interfacing requirements for the Kronos® and SAP®
integration for Time and Attendance and Labor. With any large SAP
implementation, there are many factors, which can, and almost always do
alter the SAP pre-configured client. The PDC Gateway supports these
requirements in full as in addition to it’s base functionality designed
for immediate communication between Kronos® and SAP®, the integration
utility provides a robust toolset to accommodate any business requirement
and is fully scalable and customizable. Complementary to the translation
tables and mapping tools (Figure 2) that can be easily extended to support
system field extension, PDC Gateway utilizes XML Type Mapping for support
of customized IDOC formats (Figure 3) and provides built in scripting on
demand which supports the VB.NET and C# scripting
languages and can be executed during run-time integration.
PDC Gateway™ Technology
The PDC Gateway was
developed closely with the software engineers from Kronos® and SAP®
under the SAP® recommended and certified processes for external
system integration.
- Kronos® The Kronos®
connection is direct, using the same internal system structure
processes used by Kronos systems, and was designed to flawlessly
gather and submit the needed data for integration between the two
systems. This allows current Kronos® systems to harness the
integration without alterations to the existing internal data
structure and the PDC Gateway database subset co-exists on the
same Kronos® database further allowing speed and accuracy.
- SAP® The PDC Gateway supports both
TRFC and SRFC SAP® protocols bi-directionally. The TRFC protocols
in an asynchronous interface utilizing SAP® IDOCS via ALE while
the SRFC protocol is a direct BAPI interface. In some cases such
as PP-PDC time tickets, the TRFC protocol can also be
used as a direct asynchronous interface without the disadvantages
of delayed IDOC processing. Depending on business and performance
requirements, either protocol can be used for communication to
SAP®. All of the interface points into SAP® via IDOC or BAPI are
standard SAP® interfaces. There are no internal development
requirements in the SAP® system, nor are there any additional
software or hardware requirements for any of the interface
protocols; everything is internal to the PDC Gateway product and
the existing Kronos® and SAP® systems.
|
System
The PDC Gateway runs quietly on the Kronos® server as multiple services. At anytime
status can be checked graphically by opening the PDC Gateway Monitor. The PDC Gateway can
support any
number of Kronos® instances. Process detail can be easily monitored by viewing the status page of the Monitor tool. In addition, trace files for all SAP activities are maintained as
well as individual TID (Transactional Identification) records for SAP
uploads and downloads on a per call basis. All of the transactional
data is stored on the PDC Gateway database instance.
This allows for verification, research, reporting,
troubleshooting and other tasks that require a detailed history of
the integration transactions. The PDC Gateway is a multithreading system. It assigns tasks to seperate "Gateway Controllers" that perform the task and report back the results. Each process can in turn trigger child processes or other processes to perform some other required task such as error handling.
Summary
The PDC Gateway for
Kronos® and SAP® is the bi-directional bridge between Kronos®
systems and SAP® PP, HR, PM modules and Timeclocks. The PDC Gateway provides
data transfer, mapping, translation, error handling and is fully configurable and programmable with the
full-featured internal toolset. Whether a system is comprised of a
single server instance of Kronos® and a single plant of SAP® or an
international chain of Kronos® systems and multiple SAP® servers,
plants, and clients, the PDC Gateway is fully capable and scalable
to solve the integration needs of virtually any business
requirement.
|
|
|
|
|