Recent SAPtips Consulting Projects

At SAPtips, we heed the call of our subscribers. We've been asked to “go beyond the articles” and provide expert support for our readers' SAP projects. Here are a few tales from the trenches.

Payroll Upgrade to Enterprise 4.7 for International Manufacturing Project

One of our major SAPtips customers, a manufacturing business based in the U.S. with a number of international locations, is undergoing an upgrade to Enterprise 4.7 for their SAP R/3 applications. Amongst other R/3 modules, they are heavily using Finance and Human Resources.

Our SAPtips team has been helping them to migrate to R/3 Enterprise smoothly and well under the original budgets they had planned. The client likes the fact that our consultants can deliver the work much faster because they "have been there, done it before." The customer feels that SAPtips practices what they preach through the SAPtips Journal.

Our lead consultant has helped the customer do a smooth migration of the critical Payroll application and is also guiding them on using additional functionality from SAP HR and Payroll applications that they were not using before, including off-cycle payroll and SAP's new Wage Type reporter. Our consultants are also creating "How To..." documentation that will assist the user teams in their subsequent functional work. The customer team feels that SAPtips gave them superior value and service beyond basic upgrade support.

Order Management and Reporting for a Plastics Manufacturer

We got a call from an SAP user that was having trouble viewing a “one screen” shot of the sales activity of their customers and partners. We were able to bring in an expert ABAP and BW developer who worked with this client to help them customize a BW-based “one stop shopping” report that allowed them to quickly review the details on specific customers.

This new query has helped them to quickly identify missing customer information and “cleanse” their all-important sales data. To pull this off, instead of working in detailed ABAP code, our SAPtips consultant designed an InfoSet report—a much more efficient use of his billing time, and one that saved the client from the ongoing hassles of maintaining custom code.

Our consultant used an SQ02 transaction to design the InfoSet and an SQ01 transaction to design the query. The query was then used as an extractor for the company's BW system, and the final results were easily accessible to the team's users via their normal BW reporting channels. Since no project is complete unless the users are happy, our consultant made sure the users were comfortable using this new query to capture and analyze the customer data they needed.

Full SAP Implementation for SAP Small Business User (Builder and Contractor)

Is it possible to implement a huge product like SAP in a small business setting and deliver value to the customer? Based on a recent SAPtips consulting engagement, that answer is a big-time yes! We received a call from an SAP small business customer in the contracting field ($50 million revenue range) who was looking to implement the entire SAP product suite to support the following core business processes: inquiry management, quotation creation, sales order creation, billing and revenue recognition, and, last but certainly not least, effective and easy user reporting.

To help our client address these goals, we placed a consultant on the project who had broad functional SAP knowledge across the core modules they were implementing, including FI/CO, SD, MM, and HR. Our consultant understood the integration points between these modules and how to “tie it all together.” This SAPtips expert was able to guide the company through an initial go-live, with a “stage one” focus on the core financial submodules of FI-GL, AP, AR, and a bit of CO as well. His broad SAP knowledge fit in well with our client's desire to roll out the core areas without too much customization.

The implementation process began with the design of the supply chain and project plan, and our consultant helped the client to link up the supply chain and order management processes to the appropriate cost centers. In the contracting business, tracking labor costs is critical, so the HR payroll and time management functionality was also “turned on” and linked in. The idea for the initial go-live was to provide support for these key processes without getting bogged down in costly customizations, and our SAPtips consultant helped the user to meet that goal.

One “sticky wicket” was the integration of a specialized third-party software program that was used on the engineering and design side. Bills of materials generated from that software were successfully pulled into the SAP system for tracking and processing. After the go-live, the benefits of the implementation were immediate. The quoting process was simpler and faster; comparisons between different suppliers and quotes were a breeze, and centralized control of all projects and reporting on project groups was now possible. And the financial managers were more than a little happy—they were able to quickly generate an accurate, updated balance sheet because new data was automatically posted to the respective General Ledger accounts.

Now that the company has accomplished this much, and established that SAP can provide value to their business without spiraling installation costs, they've asked our consultant to stick around for more fun. Next on the horizon: full-scale purchase-to-pay processes using MRP functionality, and the configuration of the CO-PA module to analyze the profitability of business segments. The implementation of SAP Asset Accounting for the management of corporate assets is also on the wish list. Sounds like our consultant is going to be a little busy!

SAP Business Connector Project for a Financial Services Company

Recently, we got a call from an SAP customer who was looking for an SAP Business Connector expert. They wanted someone who could help them develop an XML-based solution to export purchase order data from their R/3 system, which they would then send to their main computer supplier. In the course of one serious week, our SAPtips consultant was able to provide a Business Connector-driven solution that generated the proper xCBL format required by the external supplier.

In addition, he was able to improve the functioning of the interface by developing an exception-handling mechanism to deal with any processing errors. Using TRY and CATCH sequences, he set up the system so that if an error occurred during the creation of the xCBL carrying the purchase order data, an email notification would be sent to the proper purchasing manager. The exception-handling process also ensured the delivery of the xCBL documents if transmission errors were experienced due to network interruptions or other factors.

Before the week was done, he also provided for an audit trail for each purchase order generated by the system, so that any future questions on a particular order could be easily answered. At the end of the assignment, our consultant wrote up a detailed report on the project, documenting what had been accomplished and making recommendations for functionality enhancements. The closing document wasn't exactly casual break room material, but it stands as an excellent record of the project's milestones.