ALE is a business solution to a very real need emerging in the SAP market. This is the need for businesses to move towards tighter integration between systems, yet, at the same time, provide independence to the various business units within the company.
In the past the move was towards centralized systems...
Standardization of business processes accompanied by ever tighter integration within the central system no longer represents a practicable approach to this problem. The following are some of the most commonly encountered difficulties:
- technical bottlenecks,
- upgrade problems,
- the effect of time zones on international corporations,
- excessively long response times in large centralized systems.
How do you achieve this "loosely coupled applications" without compromising data integrity, without committing yourself to a specific technology, without adding to the technical issues mentioned above, ???
What if you want to link in to external systems as seamlessly as possible?
The SAP Solution - ALE
SAP has provided ALE (Application Link Enabling) as the solution to these issues. It allows you to:
- distribute your applications across several SAP systems, such that centralized functions, as well as decentralized functions can operate in the same company arena
- maintain and distribute master data elements from a central system, thus maintaining unique number ranges across several systems
- maintain and distribute control data objects from a central system, thus synchronizing important configuration data. This is important when trying to decentralise functions, yet keep them integrated
- couple R/2 and R/3 systems, in some instances
- couple SAP and external systems, via IDocs (Intermediate documents) and an external translation mechanism.
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