Supporting Cross-Organizational Processes

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Organizations of all sorts are today realizing that to excel they have to be able to coordinate activities across functional and geographical boundaries. These cross functional - cross geography ( - and cross time zone) requirements pose new challenges to IT infrastructure. The standard IT answer to these requirements is simple data sharing. But sharing data generated by users in one context with other users in a different context doesn't create coordination. Data sharing only facilitates coordination when all parties can look at the data in their own context and perspective. An example of this challenge is organizations trying to implement "Sales and Operations Planning" (also known as S&OP). A demand plan in units of finished product per month is certainly a good starting point, but if the operations side of the business can't translate this into capacity requirements and the financial side can't translate the plan into revenue and margin then the demand plan is of little use. The ability to transform data in ways that correspond to the varying perspectives of the many consuming audiences is crucial. With out the ability to transform shared data in ways that make sense to the consuming audience the data is of little value. - But with the ability to move between perspectives data sharing and transformation can be the critical element that helps an organization become coordinated - or even synchronized. Together with the need for transformation of data between perspectives also comes a need for making the data available according to the schedule of the different audiences. As the audiences become more diverse so do their requirements for access to the data. Long running batch processes for data preparation is gradually becoming an unacceptable process. Instead data has to be available always and in real-time. AdapLink Objects and AdapLink's native rules engine are powerful answers to these types of challenges. AdapLink Objects provide rich data that after transformation can satisfy multiple perspectives, and AdapLink's rules engine enable transformations to take place with the speed and flexibility required to keep the different perspectives synchronized.