On 16th July, in co-operation with Adobe, Arch ran a highly successful combined event which included the first FLM user group.
We were pleased to welcome delegates from 14 organisations and had 30 attendees for our morning briefing session on SAP Interactive forms by Adobe (SIFbA). The emphasis was on exploiting and implementing SIFbA solutions and presentations included Adobe’s vision for the future use of the technology. We were also pleased to welcome our guest speaker, John Burton, Project Owner at the Department of Communities and Local Government. The feedback was very positive: “the session proved useful and provided great insight into the solutions available” (UK Police service attendee).
The afternoon saw the gathering of representatives from the FLM customer base. This was a useful exchange between Arch management and FLM users. It was “great to listen to other company’s views and learn from their experience”(Services plc).
We were able to explore how to facilitate collaboration and the sharing of forms and methods, and we’ve take away 2 main things from this group; firstly, we’ve now established a new user forum on our FLM Connect site to allow customer input and discussions, as “FLMConnect will help to create a cohesive group and give quick opportunities to interact with other users”(UK Local Authority attendee). Secondly, by the end of August we will be setting out guidelines to allow customers to share forms.
SAP UK have implemented a PDF forms-based process using FLM for capturing specific sales information. The project was implemented rapidly using the FLM infrastructure and replaced an Excel spreadsheet.
The form is used by SAP UK’s specialist sales team and has been very well received by them: “The new form is much easier to complete and as a sales professional anything that makes my reporting task easier is to be welcomed”.
Jason Bath, Manager of the team complimented Arch: “Arch delivered just what I asked for very quickly and the team now definitely find it easier to get me the information I need to manage our sales process effectively.”
FLM™ User Group
July 16th 2009 sees the first FLM (Forms Lifecycle Manager) User Group meeting.
This event has been put together to enable the FLM user community, development partners and Arch management team to get together to explore new capabilities in the product, best development practices and determine the best way forward for collaboration.
The FLM framework provides the means to share components, methods and forms templates.
The event, hosted in partnership with Adobe Systems at their prestigious London, Regents Park offices, will run from 13.30 though to 16.30, preceded by a lunch.
Representatives from Amey PLC, Buckinghamshire County Council, Camelot Group, Cardiff City Council, Department for Communities and Local Government, LB Southwark, Surrey County Council and Capgemini will be there.
Arch Business Development Manager John Poole says “We are committed to working with the community to maximise the value of our collective experience in exploiting FLM – The form server for SAP Interactive Forms by Adobe.”
SAP’s community-powered marketplace, EcoHub, launched their newsletter last month and featured Arch’s Head of Operations, Chris Scott:
Businesses Turn to Electronic Forms During Global Economic Downturn
Enterprises Turn to Electronic Forms
Electronic forms processes enable businesses to realize new cost efficiencies by automating paper-based processes and removing manual steps. The cost savings include the reduction of the direct labor costs associated with the current manual processes and also the reduction of physical material costs associated with printing, posting, and filing. Tangible business benefit can also be delivered through a reduction of office space, the delivery of environmental policies, and a reduction in printer hardware deployment and maintenance.
James Irving-Bell, Business Development Director at Adobe Systems Europe comments: “Adobe´s research has found that paper-based forms processes can be expensive as well as slow to complete. By implementing e-form processes savings of €90 for every submitted form can be achieved, with millions in savings every year for a mid-sized business.”
Due to a faster end-to-end process speed, a positive impact on customer service such as an increase in SLA¹ performance or a reduction in OCT² should be achieved. With a reduction in the number of data errors, the number of expensive exception processes is reduced, which helps to reduce the overall business or legal risk.
“Using the SAP Interactive Forms software by Adobe has meant that we have been able to implement a long-term manageable form strategy that has reduced our administration time and costs. It also provides a simple method for occasional users to access the SAP system,” says David Firth, Buckinghamshire County Council.
Arch is assisting more and more enterprises to identify and realize these business benefits using SAP Interactive Forms and FLM³.
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Service-level agreement
- Order cycle time
- Forms Lifecycle Manager
This June, Arch will be in Johannesburg, South Africa teaching SAP Interactive Forms (SIFbA) on behalf of SAP and Adobe. Arch are delighted to be running this course for 3 days from June 22nd-24th which is specifically aimed at Adobe and SAP partners wishing to master the exploitation of SIFbA forms in the ABAP environment. It offers us the opportunity to increase our presence in South Africa and support what we believe will be a vibrant market for this technology.
The course can be booked via your local SAP or Adobe contact, or through Desiree Haadonson desireeh@adobe.com in South Africa.
About SIFbA: ‘The strategic partnership of Adobe and SAP is basis for a multitude of new solutions on process optimization and efficient workflow. With SAP Interactive Forms, your company can extend the reach of enterprise applications – such as product life-cycle management, enterprise resource planning, supply chain management, and customer relationship management – to a much broader set of users, while easily pulling vital data need from SAP software.’
Arch is delighted to announce that the UK Department of Communities & Local Government has decided on using FLM to support its implementation of SAP Interactive Forms by Adobe. The implementation will begin in May and continue through the summer in its first phase with more forms to follow later in the year.
FLM 290 SP4 now supports Flex forms. Arch has developed this capability primarily to be ready for the shipment of Flash 10 by Adobe in late 2009. Flash 10 will allow Flex forms to be rendered on PDA format devices and thus FLM will support PDAs as part of a SAP and SIFbA centric workflow. We envisage this being used initially for decision capture – ‘can an employeee take tomorrow as holiday?’, ‘has the job you were allocated been finished?’ and so on, but there can be little doubt the opportunities are broader than that.
Arch is delighted to announce that Camelot has decided to implement FLM for a selection of its forms based processes. The project licked off in April 2009 and the first deliverable went live at the end of that month. Further forms will be implemented through the early summer and we hope that Camelot will be speaking about their experiences at our user confernce later in the year.
