How to Maximize the Business Value of Your SAP Software In an Era of Changing Economic Times White Paper > Usability

Transcription

1 How to Maximize the Business Value of Your SAP Software In an Era of Changing Economic Times White Paper > Usability

2 TABLE OF CONTENTS Executive Summary... 1 Business Challenge... 2 Solution Description... 3 Benefits... 4 Background... 6 Target Market... 7 Case Studies... 8 Summary... 10

3 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY The 2009 recession brings with it an immediate and imperative need for the creation and deliverance of Business Value within today s organizations. While businesses look to weather the storm of the current recession, they look for ways of creating efficiencies, increasing productivity, streamlining processes, and reducing waste. Companies need to achieve more with fewer people. They need to identify and implement solutions that will bring maximum value with minimum resource expenditure. And, they need to minimize or eliminate their sunk costs like those spent on training and retraining of their staff, or investing in solutions that do not create lasting benefits. SAP ERP is a powerful tool that helps companies take control of their entire business via an enterprise system capable of addressing multiple needs. And, there are ready opportunities to enhance the current SAP footprint to extract the maximum benefit and Business Value from it. These benefits are achieved by matching each company s business processes to their SAP system. They are achieved by leveraging the SAP system to its fullest and creating approaches that give companies an edge on the competition. A technology that enables this type of quick and high-impact value is GuiXT by Synactive. GuiXT is an embedded solution within SAP ERP. Companies leverage GuiXT to enhance their SAP systems and create measurable Business Value in the following ways: 1. Increase productivity, efficiency, and data integrity 2. Reduce training time and increase user comprehension 3. Increase speed, ease of navigation, and ensure a comprehensive data footprint for management The GuiXT suite of solutions enable companies to deliver rapid, risk-free, and lasting solutions that resolve real challenges and create measurable Business Value. This document provides the details of where, how, and why opportunities for making high-impact, real contributions to a company s bottom line is a reality in a fast, portable, lasting way with the minimal use of resources. Enjoy. 01

4 BUSINESS CHALLENGE Businesses in most, if not all, industries face a multitude of challenges during the current (2009) recession. Many of these challenges require great strategic and tactical planning and execution to solve. Other challenges, those of a more Macro-economic nature, are nearly impossible to quickly overcome and require careful planning for longevity in order to outlast them while the Macro-economic turnaround takes shape. All of the issues that companies can hope to tackle should be ranked and prioritized by the value they bring to the business. Using limited resources, companies can consider where they can realize the most benefit, with the least amount of capital and resources used, in the quickest path to a final and deployable solution. Some of the areas of interest where Business Value can be achieved are: Days of Inventory reduction leads to value in finished goods Days of Receivables faster payments from customers shortens the time to cash cycle Headcount Reduction/Avoidance absorbing business growth without growing headcount Headcount Productivity gaining headcount efficiencies or effectiveness leading to more gains Headcount Turnover reducing undesirable turnover and saving on the cost of hiring, training, and interviewing Factory Uptime (Optimization) increase productive factory hours Scrap Reduction reduce scrap due to errors, waste, or planning processes Risk Avoidance process controls that minimize costly errors or double payments and ensure that the business is running without data or production loss Time To Market (TTM) getting to market ahead of the schedule or ahead of the competition Etc Meanwhile, the challenge is to find a fast, easily deployable, effective, and long-lasting solution that will help in the above areas with a minimal draw on both capital and labor resources. 02

5 SOLUTION DESCRIPTION GuiXT Solutions by Synactive Inc. are proven and risk-free ways of quickly identifying areas of improvement within your business and resolving them by improving the already capable SAP ERP footprint. GuiXT, for the past 11 years has assisted a multitude of companies in matching their SAP ERP systems to their internal processes and thereby creating efficiencies that lead to increased productivity, reduction in error, reduction or elimination of the need for training and retraining of staff, and creating a cleaner, more robust data profile for reporting needs. GuiXT is a software solution that is embedded in and bundled with SAP ERP. It enables you to achieve the following enhancements with minimal effort and is deployed with ease while surviving through the upgrade processes: Reduce training time and increase user comprehension Increase productivity, efficiency, and data integrity Increase speed, ease of navigation, and ensure a comprehensive data footprint Change standard ERP terminology to those of your organization s pervasive business terms thus eliminating ambiguity and uncertainty Reduce manual data entry by automating redundancies Rearrange your ERP tabs and fields to match those of your internal processes Hide unused fields and create validations for all of the fields necessary to achieve a complete set of mandatory data Consolidate multiple tabs and screens within your transactions and create a streamlined and easy to navigate environment Consolidate multiple transactions into one screen and ensure that users provide all necessary data without expending extra effort. 03

6 BENEFITS Enabling the GuiXT functionality within SAP ERP creates the following benefits: 1. Increase in productivity creates direct Full Time Employee (FTE) benefits thereby enabling a redeployment of resources to other areas of the business 2. Increase in efficiency improves employee experience and reduces training and retraining burden from the company and management 3. Speed, clarity, and ease of navigation creates enhanced customer satisfaction and leads to more happy and reference-able clients 4. Automation and validation reduces the time required to navigate through systems and ensures a more comprehensive data set for management reporting 5. Consolidation and streamlining creates a cleaner and more scalable environment that is more conducive to retention of existing workforce without the need for additional resource expenditure 6. Survival of enhancements through upgrades ensures that your investment is preserved and additional resources are used for additional enhancements 7. Ease and speed of deployment ensures that you can create a multitude of enhancements in a very short time with near immediate results 8. GuiXT can enable Mobile, Web, and Offline environments for your SAP ERP application in addition to the traditional SAP GUI The following page provides a first hand look of a Purchase Requisition transaction that was streamlined and rearranged to match the company s processes, products, and industry language using GuiXT. See next page: 04

7 BENEFITS Purchase Requisition before GuiXT Purchase Requisition after GuiXT 05

8 BACKGROUND Founded by Dr. Gerhard Rodé and Thomas Ewe Dr. Gerhard Rodé Initiated and developed the ABAP TM programming language at SAP AG Thomas Ewe Developed the Merlin/GuiLib DLL Developed the SAP GUI for Java at SAP Labs Core runtime bundled with SAP R/3 since 4.6B Selected by SAP as CSP (1998) SAP America Leverages GuiXT Supported in the OSS (SAP Support Portal) Bundled in SAP NetWeaver Business Client Bundled with ITS 6.20 Installs on client desktops and scripts are stored in the SAP server No special hardware is required GuiXT is activated from SAP GUI & SAP NetWeaver Business Client by clicking ALT + F12 or selecting Activate GuiXT menu item Once activated, GuiXT starts automatically every time the SAP system is launched 06

9 TARGET MARKET The following areas of interest are among the most sought after for GuiXT enhancements: 1. Sales & Distribution (SD) Helps to optimize all the tasks and activities carried out in sales, delivery and billing. Key elements are: presales support, inquiry processing, quotation processing, sales order processing, and delivery processing, billing and sales information system. 2. Plant Maintenance (PM) Equipment servicing and rebuilding. These tasks affect the production plans. 3. Materials Management (MM) Supports the procurement and inventory functions occurring in day-to-day business operations such as purchasing, inventory management, reorder point processing, etc. 4. Quality Management (QM) A quality control and information system supporting quality planning, inspection, and control for manufacturing and procurement. 5. Production Planning (PP) Used to plan and control the manufacturing activities of a company. This module includes: bills of material, routings, work centers, sales and operations planning, master production scheduling, material requirements planning, shop floor control, production orders, product costing, etc. 6. Project Systems (PS) This Module is where you can manage your projects, large and small, including make-to-order, plant shut downs (as a project), third party billing (on the back of a project). 7. Financials and Controlling (FICO) General ledger, book close, tax, accounts receivable, accounts payable, consolidation, special ledgers, cost elements, cost centers, profit centers, internal orders, activity based costing, product costing. 8. Human Resources (HR) People are the important part of this SAP module, including employment history, payroll, training, career management, succession planning. 07

10 CASE STUDY 1 Steelscape used GuiXT for RF/Mobile development: CHALLENGE There was a need to make SAP transactions available on hand-held devices Goal was to keep development to a minimal level RESULTS GuiXT and GuiXT Mobile enhanced Steelcape s user interfaces, improved employee productivity, and facilitated better shipment tracking. Steelscape processes about 3000 scans a day, using about 200 man hours. With GuiXT that is reduced to 17 man hours. (12X faster) Before GuiXT After GuiXT Scanning Coils in Shipments 4 minutes 20 seconds Assigning Coils to Delivery 2 minutes 4 seconds (30x faster) Creating Truck Shipments 12 screens, 4.5 min. 3 screens, 20 sec. Creating Rail Shipments 13 screens took 10 minutes Single screen done in 1 minute (10X faster) Man Hours for 500 coils in 24 hrs 114,000 minutes 7,500 minutes 08

11 CASE STUDY 2 Canada Post optimizes HR appraisal process using GuiXT: CHALLENGE There are no employee names or numbers on the initial PPPM or PPPD screens, making it impossible to differentiate between the appraisals listed without clicking on additional icons to go to another screen. As more and more appraisals are tied to a People Manager, it became more time consuming to find a specific appraisal. There were problems with ensuring correct appraisals were displayed/updated without having the personnel number of the Line Manager and employee indicated on the individual appraisal screen. RESULTS Canada Post cited that using GuiXT increases productivity and user satisfaction by simplifying the screens and streamlining the processes. Through GuiXT, Canada Post can reduce training costs and eliminate the usability barrier between the users and the business processes. Before GuiXT After GuiXT Training Hours per Person 18 hours 2 hours Data Efficiency / Productivity 104 key-strokes 33 key-strokes Time to Complete HR Appraisal 50 minutes 15 minutes Support Calls 216 calls 26 calls Error Rate 20 % error rate 1 % error rate 09

12 SUMMARY By leveraging the proven and risk-free GuiXT suite of solutions within their SAP ERP software, companies can battle the challenges of the current recession by creating real and measurable Business Value. This is achieved by streamlining of processes, matching of business methodologies and specific language to SAP ERP enterprise systems, and by reducing errors and inefficiencies while increasing comprehension and productivity. The GuiXT suite of solutions are easily deployed in a rapid manner. They survive through upgrades and create enhancements that represent portable and lasting Business Value and sound investment. Companies can use GuiXT to introduce a variety of platforms to their existing SAP ERP systems. These include Mobile, Web, and Offline platforms in addition to the traditional SAP GUI footprints. Synactive assists companies by providing Accelerators, Quick Start Programs, and All-in-One packages. Synactive assembled these services to accompany its GuiXT suite of solutions by leveraging its 11 year history of enhancing SAP ERP systems and by conducting annual Voice of Customer (VOC) research and integrating its findings into its solutions. To find out more about how GuiXT can help your company create an edge over the competition, or to receive a free Business Value Potential Assessment, contact Synactive, Inc. at or visit 10

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