Integrated Teamware Calendar and SAP BCM for The Local Insurance Group

The Local Insurance Group integrated Teamware Office and SAP Business Communications Management (SAP BCM) and now more than a thousand workers have their calendar appointments automatically transferred as the absence information in SAP BCM.

This solution was introduced in August 2009 and greatly reduces manual end user tasks and improves the response of the inbound contact center.

The need for the integration came from the end users – Teamware Calendar was actively used for personal time management,  for group appointments and for resource allocation, but the availability/absence information had to be manually input to the SAP BCM once again. Also, the end users had experienced the smooth mobile calendar synchronization and wanted the same with these two systems.

The new event-based integration method (Event Server) introduced with Teamware Office 7.4 made the server based integration possible between Teamware Office and SAP BCM. The new appointments, modifications and deletions in Teamware Calendar generate an XML/SOAP message that will be sent to SAP BCM. The SAP BCM DAI interface will then handle the message and add, modify or delete the absence information. When a group appointment request is made the message to SAP/BCM is sent only when the participant confirms the appointment. This integration works well with the mobile users too, the synchronized appointments go to SAP BCM in the similar way.


Figure 1. Overview of the Teamware Calendar and SAP BCM system integration.

As the end users use Teamware Calendar for personal notes, reminders and many other ways, The Local Insurance Group required that not all appointments are handled as absence information. The easiest solution for the end users was that the calendar appointments for the absence information are marked with the leading # sign. The integration is one-way, the appointments and changes in Teamware Calendar (or the mobile calendar) are passed to the SAP BCM.

The Local Insurance Group  (Lähivakuutus)
The Local Insurance Group comprises 84 insurance associations plus Local Insurance Mutual Company and the Federation of the Local Insurance Group. The Local Insurance Group is Finland's 5th biggest non-life insurer in terms of premium income. The Group has some 530,000 customers and it has responsibility for almost 1,800,000 policies.

Teamware Calendar is a flexible time management tool that helps people organize group meetings and book shared resources like meeting rooms or common equipment. The Teamware Office Event Server is an event-based mechanism to pass topic messages to subscribing external systems upon such events as creation or modification of an appointment, receiving or sending an email, etc. Event Server implementation follows open technologies and standards.

SAP Business Communications Management provides an advanced, all-IP communication solution for multichannel contact centers and contact-intensive, multisite organizations. It replaces traditional communications systems hardware with a software-based IP telephony solution that can help make interactions with customers and partners more effective.

---