ALE CLASS I

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Application LinkingAnd Enabling



Distributed Process

An introduction



When a part of a business process is conducted in one

system and another part of the same business

process in another system, such procedure is termed

as a distributed process.

Distributed Process.



Distributed Process : Example.

Sales operations : Create and Store Sales Order.

Calculate price.

Check inventory availability.

Check credit rating of customer.

Calculate delivery dates.

Determine Shipping Point.

Calculate shortest route.

Generate Delivery notice.








Create and Store Sales Order.

Calculate price.



Sales operations

System 1 - Sales

System 2 - Deliveries








Create and Store Sales Order.

Calculate price.



Sales operations

System 1 - Sales

System 2 - Deliveries



Why a distributed process ?



Reasons for Distributed Process

Geographical Location

Consolidation

System Capacity

Mission Critical Applications

Separate upgrade of Modules

Data Security




Geographical Location

Companies that opt for SAP implementation are large companies that are

physically spread.

Manufacturing units are strategically located to take advantage

of cheap labor or cheap raw material.

Warehouse units are located nearer to some convenient

transport facility for easy movement of goods.

Admin / corporate offices are located at main cities to facilitatebetter transactions with business partners.

These units tend to operate autonomously and do not like to depend on

distant central system.

It is necessary to have a dedicated system for each geographical area in

which the company exists.




Consolidation

A company can have several business units that share some common

resources.

A company with several sales operations could share a common

shipping and warehouse systems.

This may need to keep shipping and warehouse applications on one

system and applications for sales operations on another.




System Capacity

System capacities such as :

Database size.

Memory requirements.

Number of concurrent users.

Network bandwidth.

often offer limitations which force to split and shift applications on

different systems.




Mission Critical Applications

Mission critical applications (ex : shipping, delivery, inventory,

purchases, sales etc) cannot afford frequent down time for any reason.

In such cases it becomes necessary to deploy such mission critical

applications on separate systems.




Separate Upgrade of Modules

SAP delivers new modules and enhanced functionality in every new

release.

Some company has implemented SAP with release 3.1,. Later the SD

division is interested in customer service model available in 4.0. This is

not generally possible since the SD division cannot use this functionality

until next implementation of release 4.0, when the entire company moves

to 4.0.

In such situations , ability to upgrade a module without worrying about

compatibility issues is desirable.




Data Security

On some sensitive operations , it may be required to separate critical and

general information and keep the critical information secure, by not

allowing general applications to use the same.



Existing technologies for Distribution of data



Disk Mirroring. Online Distribution using two phase commit

protocol.

Distributed updates to Replicas.




Disk Mirroring.


Just like disk copy.

Changes in a database are simultaneously propagated to

another disk which maintains a mirror image of the main disk.



Online Distribution using two phase commit protocol.


Online Distribution enables you to maintain distributed

database in which enterprise data is managed across multiple

database servers connected thru’ network.

Two phase commit protocol guarantees that the related tables

across systems that are updated in one LUW.



Distributed updates to replicates.


In this scenario, the system allows to maintain redundant data

across multiple systems.

The owner of the data or the holder of the copy can update the

data.

If changes are made to a copy, changes are first propagated

to the owner and then to the replicas.



What SAP wanted for itsdistribution solutions.



What SAP wanted for its distribution solutions.

A system that understands the syntax and semantics of

data.

To base distribution of data on business rules and not on

data replication techniques.

Distributed systems should maintain their autonomy

while being integrated as one logical system.

Distributed systems should handle different data models.

Sending and receiving systems should handle their ownproblems and not tie up with each other.

Distribution process should continue inspite of network

failures.



SAP’s solution for itsdistribution requirements :

Application Linking & Enabling.




SAP introduced ALE to to support a distributed yet

integrated environment.

ALE allows for efficient and reliable communicationbetween distributed processes across physically

separate systems.

ALE is based on application to application integration

using message control architecture.




ALE is not based on any data replication technique.

ALE architecture is independent of participating systems.

This allows SAP to allow SAP to Non-SAP communicationalso.

This allows third party applications to integrate with SAP

using ALE at data distribution level.

IDOCs constitute a major component of ALE.

Features




ALE is not based on any data replication technique.

ALE architecture is independent of participating systems.

This allows SAP to allow SAP to Non-SAP communicationalso.

This allows third party applications to integrate with SAP

using ALE at data distribution level.

IDOCs constitute a major component of ALE.

Release upgrades are supported by ALE.

ALE supports AUTONOMY.

Features



Provisions of the standard systemfor ALE



Provisions of the standard system for ALE

Pre-configured Distributed Process Scenarios

SAP provides pre-configured scenarios based on the

commonly deployed distributed applications.

SAP has identified process boundaries, optimized

these scenarios and defined various IDOCs that mustbe exchanged.




Pre-configured Distributed Application Scenarios

SAP allows third party applications to be integrated

with SAP using ALE and IDocs.




Pre-configured Master Data Scenarios

Several master data objects in SAP have been enabled

for ALE.

Master data is the critical information that needs to be

shared between several applications in a company.

N t Cl



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