SAP

Discuss business intelligence, integration, compliance and a host of other SAP-related topics – implementation, best practices and resources to negotiate the world of SAP better!

March 18, 2010

How to use twitter with SAP for customer service

In the previous blogs I have talked about digital marketing, its tools and its impacts on company information systems.
(http://www.infosysblogs.com/sap/2010/01/how_could_digital_marketing_im.html#more)

Today instead I would like to focus on and to discuss how social tools like twitter can be used for customer services, highlighting possible uses as well as giving an example of a solution developed by SAP for the CRM suite.  

Continue reading "How to use twitter with SAP for customer service" »

SAP in Transition Economies: Part II

In my last post on SAP in Transition Economies, I shared with you my observation, of organizations in and around the Caspian Sea region leaning more towards SAP adoption in the last few years. Let us now look at the probable reasons which might have led to this change of mindset and approach.

Continue reading "SAP in Transition Economies: Part II" »

March 17, 2010

ERP Consolidation Assessment in Pharma Companies:Cross-Divisional or Divisional

Pharma and Healthcare companies may have multiple ERP system lines in their Organization. This could be because of multiple reasons, for example how organization was structured in the past e.g. separate business divisions exist for patent drug production, Generics, Consumer Health or it would have acquired or got merged with other Pharma companies for better strategic fitment. Reasons apart, there is sufficient scope to optimize the total cost of ownership of ERP Systems by consolidation into a Global ERP System. Apart from the benefits arising from IT Infrastructure consolidation, the business case for consolidation of ERP systems will originate from the top management need of having a global view of business, to foster the standardization of the business processes across divisions, to improve visibility across supply chain, to bring efficiency in handling inter-divisional transactions and most importantly to emerge as a customer and market responsive organization.

Continue reading "ERP Consolidation Assessment in Pharma Companies:Cross-Divisional or Divisional" »

March 08, 2010

Healthcare Analytics- Enhancing performance

As the Hospital industry focuses to overcome the common challenges in terms of improving patient care and controlling operational costs, every hospital wants to enhance its performance. But, Hospitals sans intelligent tools cannot take informed decisions due to lack of an integrated repository of critical hospital information, intelligence reports and analytics tools.
IS-Healthcare provides integrated operational & analytical tools tailored to meet specific standards, processes and the challenges of healthcare industry, focusing on its key solution components

• Ambulatory care management
• Patient Management
• Patient Accounting and
• ISH-Clinical medical system

Tools like Operational Dashboards and Analytical Cockpits integrate transactional and analytical data across domains, departments and service lines of the hospital enterprise to provide enhanced operational control through easy-to-understand summary data, budget simulations for planning purposes, greater ability to meet compliance requirements and drive better operational excellence through information provided by cost and revenue analyses.

 

Continue reading "Healthcare Analytics- Enhancing performance" »

Business Value Articulation for Sustenance - Part 3

Having delved upon business value avenues in my prior posts (Part 1 and Part 2) in this series, let us visit the value articulation aspect. In case of SAP ERP steady state environment, it’s all about bringing out and quantifying the value augmented in the business processes as the business goals and objectives thrive on them.

Continue reading "Business Value Articulation for Sustenance - Part 3" »

March 05, 2010

HRP – Home Resource Planning: An ERP Microcosm touching everyday life

While teaching ERP concepts, we always speak of islands of systems and processes with no major integration and leading to inefficiencies.   On one such occasion I was forced to apply similar analogy towards the current generation professionals who are trying to meet increasingly contending demands between Professional and Personal aspects of life.   Our lives are always inclusive of various such islands of partners, systems and processes such as Employer, Banks, Insurance, Schools, Service Providers, Hospitals, Doctors, Grocery & Retail stores, Government agencies etc.,   On the personal side we always try to play a major integration role between all these different entities and get stressed out in the process.  Hence this thought process and blog.

Continue reading "HRP – Home Resource Planning: An ERP Microcosm touching everyday life" »

SAP in Transition Economies

This is my first blog post ever. In this new journey, there are few things I plan to write about and hopefully they will prove insightful to the readers. However, to set the ball rolling, let me start with something on which I have been actually thinking for some time now i.e. SAP adoption around the Caspian Energy market. I had a chance of working on an SAP Projects in one of the countries adjacent to the Caspian Sea. Here to my utter surprise I found that for years international IT firms have seen this region less as a lucrative enterprise market. On the contrary I felt that this is just ripe for picking, and can turn out to be a priority segment.

Continue reading "SAP in Transition Economies" »

February 26, 2010

How can IT help in implementing Activity Based Costing (Part 2 of 2)?

This week I got a chance to get a view from senior management of two companies on Activity Based Costing (ABC) for their organizations. Neither of these companies is using ABC, nor do they have any plans to go for it in a near future. In this part of the blog series - “How can IT help in implementing Activity Based Costing?”, let’s discuss the perspective of these two companies. Let’s also see how IT can make ABC viable for more and more organizations.

Continue reading "How can IT help in implementing Activity Based Costing (Part 2 of 2)?" »

February 23, 2010

Building Validation and Compliance capabilities:Key Enablers for Pharma IT Offshoring

IT offshoring in Pharma companies is yet to pick up and emerge as a sustainable way of working when it comes to Implementation of IT Projects and Support of mission critical applications. There is no denying the fact Offshoring will bring multiple advantages but still the Pharma companies find it difficult or are hesitant to travel down the Offshoring path.

Continue reading "Building Validation and Compliance capabilities:Key Enablers for Pharma IT Offshoring" »

Copenhagen, Kyoto - Do we have something in it for our Business?

 

Erik Rasmussen, Founder of the Copenhagen Climate Council, explains: "Reducing the emissions that until now have been so linked to our economic growth and betterment will be an enormous, unprecedented global challenge but will also provide significant opportunities for sustainable growth, green jobs, development and innovation."

Continue reading "Copenhagen, Kyoto - Do we have something in it for our Business?" »

Business Value Articulation for Sustenance - Part 2

Upon visiting the basics of business value and continuing the thread of avenues of adding value to the business  in my last blog - Business Value Articulation for Sustenance - let us now look at a few potential  areas that can help to bring this activity in practice. In the subsequent post in this series I will elaborate on how business value can be articulated.

Continue reading "Business Value Articulation for Sustenance - Part 2" »

Using BSP Element Expressions (BEEs) in HCM E-Recruiting

 Using BSP Element Expressions (BEEs) in HCM E-Recruiting:
Introduction:

 I got requirement to add custom fields for Standard HCM E-Recruiting Page, which is totally responsible for particular Infotype . Its can be easy to display custom fields in any standard BSP page, but updating the new custom field in the same Infotype and also to retrieve the same info in different portal BSP page is not a easy task. We should enhance several class methods to implement the same.

 I got an idea to use BEE methods in Class CL_HRRCF_UI_SERVICES .

 Instead of Enhancing class and Layouts we can use the BEEs to do the same with very less effort.

 Benefit:

By using this approach we can save great coding and layout designing effort.

Getting Started:

I am going to add one Drop down BOX in my Candidate-Job Description Standard BSP page.

 

Continue reading "Using BSP Element Expressions (BEEs) in HCM E-Recruiting" »

February 19, 2010

Win the last mile battle by addressing Performance and Usability of SAP Netweaver based Web apps…PART I of IV- Browser Layer

Historically functional requirements have remained the key focus of organizations working with enterprise applications such as SAP. However, in their race to meet the functional requirements of business users, many times non-functional requirements (NFR) and usability may take back stage and are not updated.

Business demands for flexibility and responsiveness have always put pressure on IT departments to increase the speed at which new applications are created or changes are implemented. Newer tools (such as Portal, MDM, Composites etc.) and new way of architecting (SOA, Virtualization etc.) the solution are being used by IT for being quick and efficient to support business of the enterprise. Each of these new tools and architecture has their own demands for NFR (performance, availability and security) and usability.

From performance point of view, following four key layers play important role:

  • Browser layer
  • Network layer
  • Application server layer
  • Database layer

Continue reading "Win the last mile battle by addressing Performance and Usability of SAP Netweaver based Web apps…PART I of IV- Browser Layer" »

February 18, 2010

ERP adoption trends-A Healthy change for Healthcare Industry

The healthcare industry is one of the fast growing industries in the world. Some of the major segments of the Industry include:

• Hospital Management Services
• Clinical and Patient Management Services
• Biotechnology, Medical labs and Research
• Medical equipment and supplies

The healthcare industry on the present day faces many challenges. Some of them include: improving patient care, controlling costs, meeting government regulations and effective clinical services.

Continue reading "ERP adoption trends-A Healthy change for Healthcare Industry" »

February 16, 2010

Business Value Articulation for Sustenance

The question of business value of IT is a haunting element of the evolution of IT as a business enabler. Be it implementation, maintenance or upgrade assignment, the first challenge remains demonstrating business value to the decision makers.

Continue reading "Business Value Articulation for Sustenance" »

February 13, 2010

Pharma Complaint Management:Meeting the Challenges

Inadequate handling and management of Product complaints is one of the top findings in the FDA warning letters to the Pharma and Healthcare companies. Though these companies have Complaint Management systems and procedures in place but clearly there is a need for robust solution to meet the challenges of regulatory compliance, having an advance alert mechanism for relevant business decisions on account of product safety and most importantly of being responsive to customer and regulatory authorities.

Continue reading "Pharma Complaint Management:Meeting the Challenges" »

January 31, 2010

How can IT help in implementing Activity Based Costing (Part 1 of 2)?

My previous blogs series- “Why do you need profitability analysis?” and “Activity based costing for profitability analysis” highlights  the need for profitability analysis and discusses the challenges expected in ABC implementation. As a next step, this blog discusses the role of IT in adoption of Activity Based Costing (ABC) methodology.

Continue reading "How can IT help in implementing Activity Based Costing (Part 1 of 2)?" »

January 28, 2010

How could digital marketing impact your company processes and systems? (part 2)

The increasing spending in digital marketing pushes the companies to re-view its organization, processes and systems in order to sustain the growth and manage effectively the digital marketing initiative together with traditional advertising.

In the previous blog I have highlighted the reasons why the spending in digital marketing is accelerating and the areas in which an extensive use of digital marketing channels could mainly impact the organization.

Now let’s look deeper at the impacts of digital marketing on the company information systems.

Continue reading "How could digital marketing impact your company processes and systems? (part 2)" »

January 27, 2010

Professional Hair Care business: The “STYLE” side of CPG retailing – Part-I

Professional Hair Care - Retailing with style !

The first thought that always comes to mind whenever someone makes a mention of CPG industry - the traditional manufacturer-distributor-retailer business which works in tandem to deliver the goodies to the God in the entire chain - The Consumer! This traditional CPG-retailing is pretty well set over the ages and is perhaps one of the most revenue and employment generating businesses around the globe.

Continue reading "Professional Hair Care business: The “STYLE” side of CPG retailing – Part-I" »

Business Process – Adopting Industry Best Practices (Part 3 of 3)

Key Success factor
- Visible Executive sponsorship
- Effective communication in the organisation
- Stakeholder heavy involvement
- Effective knowledge management
- Clearly defined measures of Success

Continue reading "Business Process – Adopting Industry Best Practices (Part 3 of 3)" »

January 21, 2010

Trade Promotion Management in Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) business

What is Trade Promotion Management (TPM)?

 

 A simple definition is a set of processes that aim to manage promotional spending so that it maximizes sales up-lift, brand awareness, market share, and return on investment.

 

Continue reading "Trade Promotion Management in Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) business" »

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