Anyone who works on SAP APO projects knows that the CIF is extremely unappealing to work with, has a poor and confusing user interface and constitutes a long term maintenance problems for clients. The problem that you say distributed to other parts of APO and ERP, is also related to the CIF itself. However, I would ask you to review the 99% value that you quoted. The CIF has far more than 1% of the blame for its maintenance woes.

SAP has designed a solution with the CIF that has so many options for how data will be represented in APO that it creates significant problems, and makes for a fragile interface. At the heart of it, I don’t trust SAP development to make the right decisions with integration products, because they have proven themselves to be not very good at it. I can point to SAP XI/PI as another integration product that SAP has had major issues with. The problem is that companies are not buying the CIF or XI/PI because it competes well with companies that really do integration well, but because the products come with the SAP brand. There are simply a lot of things that SAP does not do well. Integration, data management, document management (i.e. Solution Manager). If you rely upon products that could not survive outside the SAP universe, you end up disabling your company’s abilities to accomplish its goals. This must be differentiated from IT’s or a consulting company’s goals. As long as their budgets are increasing, even if poor functioning products are provided to the business, IT and consulting companies are usually pretty happy. However, I am proposing to broaden the analysis of what is “good.”

A qRFC is not fundamental to any design, many interfaces have no qRFC and run much better than the CIF. In fact RFCs are known as slower than direct table connections. (of course this is impossible in SAP) The problem many SAP consultants have is they consider SAP an innovator in every area. SAP is not a respected company in integration. The only integration business they have is integrating to their own products. I should not have to do much more than bring up the work “IDoc” to illustrate this point. Look at Informatica’s products some time to see what a real integration vendor looks like.

I don’t think you have read posts like this before, because posts that are so openly critical of the CIF are very rare. I have read many CIF articles saying how great the CIF is, while I go back and have to troubleshoot the most elementary details that should be taken care of by the application. Much more common are puff pieces that are written about how the CIF can be relied upon. If you look at most best of breed vendors, most don’t have any experience with the CIF and assume the mythology about it (that it easily and in a low maintenance way connects ERP to SCM is true). I have been telling them that the CIF is weak, and a good place to question if its as “automatic” as SAP says it is in sales presentations. SAP is makes incorrect statements about the CIF all the time. The question is, do you get anything of value with the CIF. After enough years of working with the CIF I would say no. Given my experience with building custom integration adapters, I would prefer to spend the upfront effort to make an integration harness who’s design I can control. There is more up front work, but much lower long term maintenance.

SCM Focus does not sell (or pedle, you mean peddle) any software solution or middleware, so your assumption there is not correct. SCM Focus has the most stringent rules on restricting commercial influence over writing of any information provider in this space. You can read about them in the post below:

http://www.scmfocus.com/writing-rules/

We would be for instance less biased than yourself. As you make money from SAP projects, and therefore have an affinity for SAP. Its quite amazing how many SAP consultants consider SAP to always be the best solution, and will defend SAP against the most accurate criticism. We make money from SAP projects as well, but we don’t think that should confuse us into thinking that all of SAP’s products are good.

The main reason the post as created was because I thought it was important for others who don’t work with the CIF to know what a weak product it is. You have to understand that the CIF is presented to executive decision makers as if it is some time saving application, that it naturally integrates ERP with APO. This is false. The CIF is a lot of work, and continues to be work during the entire time that APO is live. This should be understood by executive decision makers. This relates to how they staff the project, and they should not be kept in the dark by consultants who want SAP work, or by SAP that seek to create a highly simplified scenario of integration that tilts the customer in favor of implementing and APO module because of the CIF.