D&B Beats Sword Into Plowshare With SAP

It seems everyone wants to partner with SAP AG, even its former archrivals. Once SAP AG's biggest obstacle to dominating the enterprise software market in North America, Dun & Bradstreet Corp. on Feb. 8 announced plans to integrate its business database with SAP's R/3 system to speed credit decisions. The joint product, called D&B for SAP R/3, integrates D&B's business information with R/3. The idea is to help companies streamline and consolidate their supplier base, leverage purchasing power, and identify bad debts at an early stage. "Integrating D&B information into SAP R/3 via D&B for SAP R/3 allows us to enhance our own customer information with valuable business intelligence that results in better, faster, more cost-efficient risk-management decisions and a more streamlined customer management process," says Martin Kraemer, financial accounting director at DyStar, a joint venture of Hoechst and Bayer in Frankfurt, Germany. Adds Steve Schaefer, enterprise reference data manger at Monsanto Co., St. Louis, "D&B has helped Monsanto create master records with high-quality data that flow through our SAP R/3 solution. In the end, better business decisions are made." In the early 1990s Murray Hill, N.J.-based D&B went head to head against SAP with its Dun & Bradstreet Software unit based in Atlanta, now part of GEAC, a business-software firm in Toronto.