Pacific Coast Building Products: Orchestrating with SAP Enterprise Support and SAP Solution Manager

Transcription

1 SAP Customer Success Story Engineering, Construction, and Operations Pacific Coast Building Products Pacific Coast Building Products: Orchestrating with SAP Enterprise Support and SAP Manager

2 Pacific Coast Building Products Inc. Industry Engineering, construction, and operations building materials Products and Services Manufacturing and distribution of building materials, contracting, and shared services Web Site SAP s SAP Enterprise Support services, SAP Manager application management solution To drive greater agility, operational excellence, and innovation, Pacific Coast Building Products Inc. (Pacific Coast) chose the SAP Manager application management solution to enable application lifecycle management. Now we can quickly document and extend our business processes, says Eric Vota, director of solution design at Pacific Coast, which provides IT services. With guidance from SAP Enterprise Support services, we reduced the time needed to do this from weeks to a few days. 2

3 Building a family of companies nationwide Based in Rancho Cordova, California, Pacific Coast supports many facets of the building industry. However, its mission has remained the same since it first opened its doors in 1953: to provide outstanding service and quality products to its customers throughout the United States and to foster strong customer relationships. To do this, management has always focused on improving business processes at the corporate level, across its 40 distribution centers, and the 9 companies that make up the Pacific Coast family of businesses. For example, to simplify operating processes for in-store staff, we built a cockpit that acts as a single entry point for commonly used transactions and programs, explains Vota. The cockpit prefills master data based on each user and location, accelerating order entry, billing, and related processing. The process optimization doubled the possible throughput of customers in stores and dramatically reduced the possibility of keystroke-related human errors. Pacific Coast shares its SAP software specific IT expertise with other companies through its branded BestXperts consulting services. 9 companies In the Pacific Coast family of businesses 3

4 Using IT to drive innovation and efficiency As a thriving, forward-looking company with an extensive landscape of SAP solutions, Pacific Coast has a history of using IT to drive innovation and operate efficiently. In recent years, we ve seen dramatic increases in business demands on IT, explains Vota. People expect flexible and rapid deployments of new applications that are properly governed to minimize risk and business downtime. As a longtime SAP customer, Pacific Coast knows that SAP has adapted its product development strategy to help companies meet these types of demands. For example, SAP is continuously enhancing SAP Business Suite applications through enhancement packages, finding ways to deliver its software to mobile platforms, and creating new possibilities with in-memory technology. States Vota: At Pacific Coast, we decided to revisit our core business processes to ensure that we had a stable, lean, and efficient platform to leverage these new technologies and drive process innovation, simplification, and optimization. We believe that agile IT organizations that can effectively adapt to new innovations are best positioned to succeed and hold a distinct competitive advantage over other companies. Eric Vota, Director of Design, Pacific Coast Building Products Inc. 4

5 Laying a solid foundation with SAP software In our industry, we know that any building intended to last well into the future requires a solid foundation, explains Vota. Applying this principle to our business, we wanted a solid foundation for managing and extending our core processes so that they continue to meet our requirements in the future. After evaluating their options, Pacific Coast chose to use the SAP Manager application management solution to operationalize application lifecycle management, or ALM, in the areas of process documentation, blueprinting, extension, and monitoring. We wanted to maximize our investment in SAP Enterprise Support services, which use SAP Manager as a single source of truth regarding the business processes we support with SAP software, says Vota. The business-process blueprinting functionality offers a way of describing business processes in a common language between the business and IT. Eric Vota, Director of Design, Pacific Coast Building Products Inc. 5

6 Working with SAP Enterprise Support for a smooth deployment Pacific Coast used expert-guided sessions provided through SAP Enterprise Support to accelerate its implementation of ALM methodology. In addition, it deployed the software s business-process blueprinting tool to model new activities and steps and extend business processes. Explains Vota: In preparation, we implemented reverse business-process documentation functions so that we can automatically capture used process steps and import this data into a business-process library. This data serves as a baseline for process extension. Pacific Coast already had relatively extensive process documentation, but SAP Manager uses data from actual system usage, statistical data, and contextual information such as master data to create a complete, up-to-date process-step repository. The IT department can use the results of this analysis to generate a process extension implementation project within SAP Manager. Because the IT department now had a central repository of used process steps, it could revalidate documentation of current, in-use processes at any time. This process repository can be used for all other ALM processes that depend on process documentation for operation. Pacific Coast deployed the business-process blueprinting functionality. As a result, based on the static process documentation, it can now manipulate and design business-process chains in a highly visual manner. Process steps are imported into the businessprocess blueprinting tool, where they can be modeled and orchestrated. 6

7 Embracing ALM across the business Leveraging the business-process blueprinting functionality of SAP Manager, Pacific Coast can describe business processes using a common language shared by business and IT. Even more important, people can model and view processes across system boundaries and adapt them as part of a collaborative process. Pacific Coast uses business-process analytics within SAP Manager to analyze data about how its business processes are operating. This allows IT to identify the most heavily used programs and transactions the best targets for optimization. Business-process analytics also enable the IT department to identify potential process gaps and instances of noncompliance with standard operating procedures. For example, we can quickly identify issues by looking at processing backlogs and slowdowns in document throughput, notes Vota. We can see indicators that activities, such as planning and forecasting, are being conducted manually outside the software deployed to centralize and streamline these activities. This information can be used to guide a productive conversation between business and IT regarding root causes, solutions, and innovations that could be applied to address a certain situation. 7

8 Driving operational excellence and innovation Leveraging SAP Manager, Pacific Coast s IT organization can support two parallel and equally important work streams: driving operational excellence and enabling innovation. Both work streams require full process transparency, which the IT department achieves using ALM processes supported by SAP Manager. For example, IT can perform reverse business-process documentation and then map the custom-code footprint, resulting in a documentation baseline to drive operational excellence. For instance, we can leverage this foundation to expand our capability for monitoring business processes, says Vota. Even a small improvement in frequently called transactions can have a dramatic effect on overall system resource availability. For example, we can simplify the logic of the most frequently called dialog steps and deliver large efficiency savings to the users. With guidance from SAP Enterprise Support, IT was able to reduce the time required to carry out the reverse business-process documentation and analysis process from several weeks to a few days. By increasing the efficiency of the process, they reduced the number of resources needed to complete it from six people to just one person or in terms of time, from five weeks down to five days. We want our IT department to embrace the new IT, which is proactive about identifying ways to improve the business and ALM will help us achieve this goal. Eric Vota, Director of Design, Pacific Coast Building Products Inc. 8

9 Pacific Coast Building Products Looking to the future Looking ahead, Pacific Coast plans to enhance its ALM support by deploying the new process observer functionality available through the latest version of the SAP ERP application. We plan to integrate it with SAP Manager so we can monitor the efficiency of individual transactions not just overall processes, says Vota. For example, Pacific Coast will be able to send proactive notifications to business people responsible for transactions so they know when a transaction is about to be delayed. This will give them time to address issues early before they impact customers and service-level agreements. CMP18778 (12/06) Copyright/Trademark Privacy Impressum 9