The Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission to Combine the Power of SAP and Microsoft Office With Selection

Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission (PTC) is combining the power of SAP and Microsoft Office with its license of Duet (TM) software, the first product jointly developed and supported by industry leaders SAP and Microsoft, to drive new business efficiencies and further extend the value of its technology systems. The PTC, operator of a 532-mile-long toll highway system with $580 million annual toll revenues and 2,300 employees, will deploy Duet to enhance productivity across the organization-including support of processes such as time and leave entry-by enabling its employees to access SAP business data and processes via the familiar Microsoft Office environment.

Duet unites the worlds of information worker productivity applications and enterprise applications, empowering information workers across global businesses and government organizations to link their structured business processes with critical information to improve decision making and help ensure compliance with company policies. Built as a composite application, Duet makes optimal use of enterprise service-oriented architecture (enterprise SOA) and Microsoft .NET to extend select processes and information from mySAP(TM) Business Suite applications into Microsoft Office, simplifying the way information workers access and leverage SAP applications while enriching the Microsoft Office experience.

The PTC, which supports more than 500,000 motorists a day, chose Duet to empower its employees already using Microsoft Office to easily access and leverage critical SAP data in their day-to-day work to save time and money, drive new business efficiencies and support enhanced productivity. For example, by allowing its employees to take advantage of their familiar Microsoft Office environment to achieve new business insight, Duet will help reduce employee training costs and accelerate user adoption.

“Duet delivers a people-ready solution for the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission that brings together the Microsoft Office and SAP environments in a seamless manner so that information workers gain improved access to the information they need with virtually no additional training required,” said Lewis Levin, corporate vice president of Office Business Applications Strategy at Microsoft Corp. “We’re excited about the positive impact Duet can have on our joint customers like PTC.”

Duet also extends the value of the PTC’s existing IT environment as it will leverage the commission’s recent investments in SAP’s flagship ERP product, mySAP(TM) ERP, to assist in finance, procurement, human resource and e-commerce, as well as asset, fleet and fund management. Duet delivers critical data from these back-end applications, through Microsoft Office, in the form of event-based alerts and notifications. With Duet, the PTC reduces the time and expense of duplicating the entry of project data between Microsoft Office and SAP applications as workers will have the ability to enter information offline in Microsoft Office Outlook, which will then automatically synchronize across SAP applications when the user is back online. Ultimately, Duet supports the PTC’s vision to drive enhanced value of information-technology across the organization to better serve its customers.

“Duet empowers information workers to improve productivity and make smarter business decisions by delivering critical enterprise information to their desktops in real-time,” said Dennis Moore, executive vice president and general manager of Emerging Solutions, SAP. “In adopting Duet, the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission has again demonstrated its commitment to leveraging innovative technology that will help the commission better serve its constituents and become a best-run government agency.”