SAP Mobile Engine

Information is the lifeblood of business in today’s increasingly interconnected world. The flow of Information across the physical confines of an enterprise is being driven by technological developments resulting in "true mobility" for its stakeholders. Businesses embracing this idea are reinventing themselves as boundaryless organizations, where access and interaction can be instant.

With MySAP^® technology, SAP offers a technical infrastructure for operating mobile business applications in such organizations. This technology makes it possible for organization members to work together while being spatially and temporally apart.

For instance, salespeople can co-locate with their clients even as they access sales databases and communicate with their distant colleagues to accomplish their tasks. Others can isolate themselves in their homes or tele-centers to provide undivided attention to the completion of a task even as they remain connected with their work world through electronic means. Still others can work even as they travel.

With SAP mobile technology, anyone in an enterprise can access any data at any moment of time as per requirements. The range of applications offered by the mySAP mobile business enables an organization to meet its business goals effectively. A mobile device can be connected to various applications of the enterprise systems such as production and warehouse applications, time and attendance management, asset management and sales etc. Empowering employees with access to vital corporate information anytime, anywhere, anyhow, can bring incredible competitive advantages through a better-informed workforce. Employees can make better decisions simply because they are accessing precise data.

To fulfil these requirements, SAP has invented a modern technology. It has been named as mySAP™ Mobile Business. The more common name is Mobile computing or Pervasive computing. The technology facilitates mobile workers by integrating mobile device connectivity with the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems Mobile connectivity increases customer responsiveness through quick and easy access to integrated and up-to-date information.

1.1 Mobile Devices For Mobile Applications

There is a broad range of available mobile devices due to recent growth in mobile computing. Analysts predict that the wireless market in 2002 will be comprised of 9.5 million wireless devices.

MySAP™ Mobile Business can be integrated with the Laptops, PDAs, pocket PCs and wireless phones. The Mobile business provides greater integration and supports between these devices in any location.

In this 7 article tutorial we will cover subjects such as:

• Architecture
• Features and Benefits
• Technical Specifications
• New Functionality
• Upgrade Path
  Benefits of Mobile Technology
  
  • Low-cost mobile devices make automation affordable in many situations. Most handheld devices are designed for simplicity, which limit the need for extensive user training.
     
  • Mobile technology provides instant access to information, applications, and services anytime and anywhere. This saves a lot of time- a very precious commodity.
     
  • Data transaction is accomplished swiftly.
     
  • Mobile applications enable mobile order entry and provide fast responses to onsite customer inquiries.
     
  • The latest mobile technologies also provide offline functionalities to users of enterprise systems.
  • Higher levels of responsiveness to customer needs result in long-lasting, profitable customer relationships.
     
  • Promotes better decision-making and control of business processes
  2.0 Mobile Business
  mySAP Mobile Business is an online/offline mobile technology platform, which connects people and organisations through mobility. Mobile Business provides seamless integration between back-end and front-end interfaces. It ensures that an important business development in the enterprise is communicated to the right people at the right time so that appropriate action can be taken immediately.
  Offline solutions in an enterprise are deployed through the SAP Mobile Engine, which allows applications to function locally on mobile devices. This gives employees the added flexibility of using mobile devices even when they don't have a network connection.
  MySAP Mobile Business delivers established applications over smart phones, PDAs, handhelds, and other mobile devices.
  The SAP Mobile Engine also supports the offline processing of data in an enterprise. It uses local business logic and device-resident data storage to process the data. Mobile engine is an independent platform, which enables mobile devices to run applications without a live connection to a server or the Web. It later synchronises data with any mySAP.com solution through an Internet connection via a wireless modem, IR connection or a phone line.
  
  Mobile Engine – What is it?
  
  The concept of mySAP® Mobile Business is based on an open standard-platform, the SAP Mobile Engine. Mobile Engine is implemented on mobile devices as an integral component of MySAP® Technology. The core components of a Mobile Engine environment are:
  • Local Web Server (For mobile device)
  • Database Layer
  • Business Logic
  • Data Synchronization and Replication Layers
  • Deployment Console
  The article will discuss all these components in detail, in the next section, Mobile Engine Architecture. Mobile Engine adopted an open standard platform to support all existing wireless devices such as handheld, Laptops, and PDAs and enable deployment across various types of networks like Bluetooth, WAN, GPRS.
  Since SAP Mobile Engine is built on open industry standards, it supports Java technology, which is based on Java Virtual Machine (JVM). JVM provides a development environment for JSP (Java Server Pages) and Java 2 platform. It also complies with the Web Services technology that includes SOAP and XML. Developers can exploit the open source technology to develop network and device independent applications.
  It also enables enterprises to implement mobile enterprise applications to internal and external users in both online and offline mode. In online mode, mobile users can access the SAP systems using browser interface while in offline mode mobile users access SAP system using the native interface of the mobile device (See Figure 1).
  Mobile Engine facilitates mobile applications for various enterprise scenarios such as Human Resources (HR), Supply Chain Management (SCM), and Business Intelligence etc.
  Figure 1: SAP Mobile Engine Interfaces
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  SAP^® Mobile Engine Architecture
  
  The objective of a Mobile Engine is to provide mobility to enterprise systems. In a mobile enterprise, the users work remotely, which requires a mediator for establishing communication between the mobile devices and the enterprise system. Hence, Mobile Engine architecture concentrates on providing secure, timely and critical business transactions over a network.
  Further to the discussion in section 2.1, Mobile Engine architecture contains basic components, which help in realizing mobile solutions for a SAP system. There are two sets of components, which are differentiated on the basis of their installation. For a successful mobile engine solution, appropriate components should be installed at mobile device and the corresponding SAP system. The mobile device components include:
  • Interface
    • Browser based
    • Native
  • Local Web Server
    • Servlet Engine
  • Business Logic (Programming models)
    • Micro ITS
    • JSP
    • Cached HTML pages (or offline browsing)
    • Any other Customized model
  • Public Interface Layer
    • Synchronization Layer
  Figure 2 displays the way these components are structured to form a Mobile Engine.
  
  Figure 2: Mobile Engine – Structure
  Before deploying a mobile engine solution, it is important to understand the functionality of the following nine components:
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  SAP^® Mobile Engine Architecture - seven components
  Component 1 - Interface
  
  SAP Mobile Engine accepts mobile device user instructions through a standard built-in web browser (Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator, Opera etc.). This web browser can be used to access enterprise portals. It is also known as the front end of the mobile device. The native interfaces are the default user interfaces of a mobile device, which use J2 Micro Edition for connecting to enterprise system.
  Component 2 - Mobile Engine Server
  
  It is also known as the local server and contains server components, which form the first layer of back end components. They ensure smooth flow of data exchange between the business logic of the mobile application and user. It includes Servlet Engine, which acts as a processing environment.
  Component 3 - Business Logic (Programming Models)
  
  SAP Mobile Engine supports different programming models that provide the business logic of the enterprise to mobile applications. The business logic implemented in the mobile device should be parallel to the enterprise business logic to maintain consistency of the business transactions.
  SAP Mobile Engine supports programming models such as MicroITS (a standard Internet Transaction Server flow logic service), JSP (Java Server Pages) and offline browsing. You can also implement a customized model that suits your requirements.
  Component 5 - Mobile Engine Public Interface
  
  Public Interface is the final back-end layer in the Mobile Engine architecture in mobile devices. It is responsible for security and synchronization of data. This is the first layer of the mobile device that establishes communication with the SAP system.
  In order to deploy a successful mobile solution, the SAP enterprise system should also contain components that are as follows:
  Figure 3: Integrated SAP Mobile Engine Architecture
  
  
  
  Component 7 - Mobile Engine Synchronization Layer
  
  A synchronisation layer is implemented to reduce the redundancy of the data in the SAP database. This layer works in tandem with the synchronization layer of mobile device to maintain data consistency and data integrity.
  Component 8 - Mobile Engine Deployment
  
  As a part of implementing Mobile Engine solution, the SAP system also incorporates a deployment console. This console helps in managing various mobile devices, which may work concurrently with the SAP system. Figure 3 shows the SAP system components for a Mobile Engine solution.
  Component 9 - Web Gateways
  A Web Gateway is the common interface between the mobile device and the SAP system. This gateway acts as a passage for all data exchanged between the SAP system and the mobile device. It establishes communication between the mobile device and enterprise system.
  
  
  Data Synchronization and Replication
  
  The most potential and perilous problem arises when data inconsistency is observed between the mobile device and SAP system. To avoid such situations, a SAP business transaction should result in updating the enterprise data residing on SAP system as well as mobile device.
  To implement this, SAP Mobile Engine ensures the availability of critical business data to the mobile device. The mobile device user makes desired changes to the data. This data is updated in the data container [The logical unit where data is stored] of the mobile device and when substantial number of modifications are made to data, it is updated in the SAP database. The Mobile Engine Synchronization Layer is responsible for this functionality and maintains data consistency (See Figure 4).
  Figure 4: Data Synchronization
  
  Data container exists on one place only in the mobile engine and hence during the process of data transfer, there is no possibility of a data container being lost in the engine. Moreover, data is not handed over to the other container if connection gets lost during synchronisation process between mobile device and SAP system. In such situation the data container stays on the mobile device and is sent automatically with next synchronization. It also ensures that data has been transferred successfully to the SAP system and vice-versa. Synchronization layer also provides data security by using HTTP with Secure Sockets Layer (SSL).
  The Replication layer plays a major role by monitoring user synchronization process and uses Web Application Server (WAS) to determine data, which is assigned to multiple mobile device users. 
  
  
  Deploying a Mobile Engine
  
  Mobile Engine deployment is an automated process, which requires minimal administrative efforts on mobile device. Deployment is a role-based process in which different mobile users are assigned specific roles. The deployment is administered with the help of Deployment Console that speeds up and simplifies the administrative tasks. Some of the important and common steps are useful while deploying a Mobile Engine are:
  Task: 1 Installing Mobile Engine applications
  It includes deployment of new applications based on roles or device parameters. The deployment is automatic on the mobile device.
  Task 2: Generating overview of offline applications
  By using Mobile Engine Deployment Console, all the offline applications (on mobile devices) can be viewed. It helps in determining the application being used by a particular user or device.
  Task 3: Detecting Errors
  The Deployment Console displays installation logs sent by the mobile device. It facilitates a centralized error detection and correction method.
  Task 4: Managing Versions
  It defines the current version of an offline application.
  Task 5: Integrating with enterprise portals
  SAP users are using MySAP® technology and making a presence of their business processes on the web. In this scenario, companies are developing enterprise portals. Mobile devices can also be integrated with enterprise portals using the Deployment Console.
  The SAP mobile technology smartly integrates all the disparate technical aspects of ERP technology. Its open-source structure has enhanced its acceptability worldwide. SAP Mobile Engine provides the right framework for offline applications on a wide array of mobile devices, ranging from small PDAs to complex laptops.
  Enterprises all the over the world have started taking advantage of this scalable technology from SAP. This trend is likely to accelerate in the coming years.