As part of the carve-out of CURRENTA from Bayer AG, MEGATRON Professional IT-Services GmbH took over the migration as a subcontractor of the general contractor Tata Consulting Services Deutschland. In conjunction with the software manufacturer Macro 4 GmbH, the complete OMS landscape was set up at CURRENTA and the existing printers from the Bayer Group were migrated to CURRENTA. Due to the interdependencies within the Bayer world, CURRENTA still serves as OMS provider for other Bayer carve outs, such as the subsidiaries CHEMION and TECTRION, After the migration, MEGATRON Professional IT-Services took over the operational services for the complete OMS solution and still operates it today. Since 2022, MEGATRON has been the direct provider of the EOMS solution for CURRENTA without the involvement of TCS. Since the project language at CURRENTA for implementing the EOMS was English, the description now follows in English.
The Output Management System Service enables a rapid and reliable output of documents out of ERP systems like SAP®, regardless of the document format or destination, be it print, e-mail, fax or archive.
The service includes provisioning of Output Management System Environment
The service includes the connection from the enterprise applications to the output management system environment as well as the following activities: Installation and provisioning of the OMS environment (hardware and software infrastructure components) and the required system components including StreamServe form development environment, routing server with form preparation and server systems for connection of different output channels like printer, fax, e-mail or archiving systems.
The OMS system management comprehends all planning tasks for the utilized system components:
The service includes the following activities:
Fail-safety is done by running the servers as virtual servers on clustered virtual hosts. Productive logical OMS definitions within SAP®are configured with a backup destination OMS server and instance. In addition the Columbus OM versions 4.3 (and above) provide built-in failover functionality. When sending queue entries to (next/remote) instances there is a failover instance to specify. The other services are installed in the way, that they are exactly set-up the same way up and running on each OMS server that can directly be addressed by productive SAP®systems.
The Output Management is based on or dependent from several services.
Linux standard server maintained/supported by TCS Infra Team
LAN-, WAN, DNS-, Firewall service provided by Currenta
Fax services, provided by the related team within the Bayer Business Services GmbH and by OpenScape
Database Services, supported/provided by Currenta Database Team
The output management system is a solution, which comprises business critical application services with the following features and distribution channels in the sense of document logistics:
The Output Management is based on the Columbus OM, StreamServe and Columbus Administrator, operated on server with operating system Linux.
In addition the OMS servers are located in different network segments to fulfill the security guidelines. These guidelines regulate that only dedicated server-to-server connections are allowed between the different network segments. This measure prevents the network from intruders and other IT based attacks.
Currenta GmbH & Co. OHG is using the SAP® R/3 three-tier architecture (Production, Development- and Quality Assurance).
The OMS for production consists of the Columbus OM SAP® gateways for CMP and CGP and the central OMS print server on 2 systems.
The OMS for DEV/QA consists of CGD, CMQ, CMD and CGQ SAP® systems including the Columbus OM SAP® gateway and the central OMS print server on 2 systems.
The Columbus OM gateway and the Columbus OM instance on the central print server are exchanging status feedback via RFC callback mechanism via SAP® BC-XOM interface. All print output of the SAP® applications will be passed through the BC-XOM interface and trans-ferred from the Columbus OM SAP® gateway and to the central print server.
The central print server is VMware based and provides fault tolerant mechanism.