REDMOND, Wash., May 21, 1997 — Microsoft Corp. today announced it has implemented SAP’s R/3 human resources solution for domestic personnel administration operations, with the worldwide rollout scheduled to be complete by July 1997. Microsoft has added the human resources module to its existing R/3 System on the Microsoft® Windows NT® Server network operating system with the Microsoft SQL Server
™
version 6.5 database. Microsoft already runs its worldwide financial and procurement operations on R/3.
“Microsoft is looking forward to having worldwide visibility on our most valuable resource, our people,” said Mike Murray, vice president of human resources and administration at Microsoft. “We do business in more than 60 countries, and having one personnel system integrated with finance provides an additional level of support for managing the business.”
Microsoft originally selected R/3 in 1995 to support its worldwide financial and procurement operations. The ability of R/3’s client/server architecture to run on Microsoft technology, as well as the breadth of its global business functionality, led to Microsoft’s decision. Because of the integration with financial data, extending the system to include employee data provides additional business value as well as a base from which to continue functional expansion, such as activity-tracking related to costs.
With the successful implementation of R/3 for its financial and procurement operations, Microsoft has a stable system infrastructure to build on. Worldwide users connect to the central R/3 database running on Microsoft SQL Server 6.5. This central database is located on the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Wash. Remote sites communicate with the system in Redmond using Microsoft’s worldwide wide area network. The current R/3 System supports 2,000 users – 400 concurrent – and has simplified the worldwide financial systems considerably.
The benefits of implementing an enterprise solution with R/3 for Microsoft’s human resources business are significant. The human resource implementation replaces a dozen HR systems and 18 separate personnel tracking databases around the world. It centralizes support while providing a localized solution for each site. Microsoft continues to assess other functional areas of the business that could fit into its SAP solution.
Microsoft has had a technology relationship with SAP AG since 1993, including a strong cooperative effort to implement R/3 for Microsoft SQL Server. The availability of R/3 on the Microsoft SQL Server 6.0 database was announced in March 1995. SAP first released R/3 for Windows NT in April 1994 and now has more than 2,300 Windows NT-based installations worldwide. In addition, R/3 is compliant with ActiveX
™
technologies, enabling customers and software vendors to integrate personal-computer applications with SAP software seamlessly. R/3’s Microsoft SQL Server database format also allows customers and developers to benefit from the open database connectivity (ODBC) API for personal-computer database access.
SAP provides flexible, integrated client/server and mainframe-based business applications software that is compatible with most popular hardware, software and database platforms. More than 9,000 companies around the world have chosen to implement SAP’s R/3 client/server suite to manage financial, manufacturing, sales and human resources requirements.
Founded in 1975, Microsoft (NASDAQ
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) is the worldwide leader in software for personal computers. The company offers a wide range of products and services for business and personal use, each designed with the mission of making it easier and more enjoyable for people to take advantage of the full power of personal computing every day.
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