SAP

Few decades back, Industries were managing all their basic as well as advanced functions manually.  Apart from routine operations under sales, purchase, maintenance, manufacturing and financial function areas, even the gigantic work of planning, communication, data maintenance etc. were all handled through manual efforts. However, today, most of the conventional industries entrust all their daily operations to their IT setup and are extensively dependent on it, in one way or the other. In this 3 part blog series, I wish to share my views on the evolution of Information Technology, its changing role and the changing expectations from the Industrial world. The Part-I today talks of the beginning and early days of the IT era.

Pre-IT Era Conventional Business Organisations:

The Information Technology, as it stands today, encompasses the entire gamut of operations of any organization.  Computerization, as it was referred earlier, however started as stand-alone "products". Before the Information Technology entered businesses as a Business Enabler function, conventional Industries in Manufacturing, Pharma, Auto segments were still managing the entire business through manual and paper work. Needless to say there was huge wastage of man-hours, redundancy and most importantly a large avenue for errors. When "Computerisation" took flight, it had very limited scope and the expectations were also around minimal and simple functionalities. The Corporate world considered Computers as just one of the tools to simplify small tasks and used it as plain Computing Assistant, Office Organizer or Clerical Tool. This was when "knowing computer" meant "knowing to type on the keyboard and print a letter" to many. At the most, Lotus123 was used in place of Calculator to tally manual calculations. Gradually, with widening functionality offerings, the advanced "Information Technology" concept emerged. But the initial computerisation had features and investment suitable for big players only, so it was confined to Defense, Military Organisation, Science Research Institutes only.

Information Technology As Business Enabler - A Big Boom:

The advancement in Computerisation field was so fast and captivating that the conventional Industries in Manufacturing, Pharma, Auto also started adopting office automation, although with minimal applications. Around 1960s, the new "Resource Planning" concept was already in practice in the form of MRP-I, MRP-II. Then came the new wave of "Enterprise Resource Planning", where most of the organisational operations were planned together for harmonized efforts and output. To achieve true harmony, process and data integration across business functions was essential. This forced the organisations to adopt the IT environment full fledged. This way, as the organisational operations were evolving, the IT setup became an important part of the organisational infrastructure. Along with operational assistance, IT provided some new, improved and advanced ways of smart working. Introduction of Internet and the internet communication brought various business stakeholders more closer. The partners in Supply Chain as well as Sales and Distribution network could interact more effectively, thereby improving overall efficiency and quality of operations. Along with the introduction of ERP concept, started the development of ERP Software packages. These were commercial software packages that promoted seamless integration of all process flows of an organization and helped manage all information and functions of a business, using shared data source. ERP packages like SAP, Oracle Apps or application oriented packages in SCM, CRM areas were introduced during this time. Appreciating the advantages these packages offered over the traditional / manual controls, more and more organizations started using these packages. It then became imperative to have a rigid IT network, with able Maintenance and Support teams. All the major players in the ERP space geared up with innovative ways to get deeper and deeper into the IT arena of various Industries.

In Part-II next week, let's look at the further evolution of IT through the stages of initial appreciation and enthusiasm, followed by a chaotic state and then how industries paved successful way through the turmoil.

Posted by Rajashri Telkar at 4:22 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

by Ramesh J Chougule

While we know that discovering a drug costs 900 MSUD and takes approximately 15 years for a pharmaceutical company, there are technological advances like in silico simulations which are helping to improve effectiveness and reduce timelines in the early stages of the drug discovery life cycle. This technology is able to model the interactions and relationships among proteins, enzymes, receptors and chaperones. This gives a representation of various cellular processes, biochemical pathways and the associated cell signals.

These biological events have a very complex nature. Multiple inputs stimulate the pathways and those generate another set of complex outputs in the integrated networks. There are multiple cell types which add the complexity to this and different contexts and environments add as another variable to these developments. Thus, in a hugely complex set up, if we are able to create a simulation model on how a specific drug would react to the specific cellular situation, it will provide immense benefit to the drug discovery process as below:

1. We will be able to narrow down the search for molecules tens or hundreds time faster.
2. We will be able to reduce potentially failing candidates in later stages of drug discovery.
3. It will increase the number of possible targets with a wider and holistic analysis.

While there are definite benefits from in silico simulations, we need to understand the answers to these questions for technology to be ready:

1. The amounts of data processed in simulations is huge - is the technology ready for the same?
2. Certainly the technology solution needs an innovation on the computing speed and ability of handle huge data. Is it looking at something like in memory computing?
3. Building an application wouldn't be a very complex task but building it flexible enough to address and accommodate every individualistic variation is a mammoth task. So how much should be the configurability of this model?

It will certainly prove to be a path breaking innovation for drug discovery and next decade is waiting to see a concrete solution to address this space.

About the Author

Ramesh heads the SAP Life Sciences practice in Enterprise Solutions and manages strategy and planning, program delivery, pre sales support and competency building for the practice. He has published various articles in leading pharma publications. Ramesh will blog on ERP in life sciences, in silico drug discovery, and IT evolution in the pharmaceutical value chain.

Posted by Guest Blogger at 9:44 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

With SAP set to acquire Sybase, SAP customers, mainly in Finance, Media, Telecom and Retail sector will find newer innovative ways to deliver information and distribute data with merger of the two technologies. Other customers will have more innovative process transforming their ERP systems to bring in more productivity.

On the application development side in the IT arena, we can expect niche and newer applications in the mobile segment resulting in better reach of business to customers and prospects.

Enterprise mobility area is going to be a big bet in the coming years with the growing mobile widgets era.

Early 2009 SAP entered into a strategic partnership with Sybase for co-innovating and collaborating to mobilize processes of its ERP - SAP Business Suite software. The mobile productivity applications were built by Sybase to meet the needs of SAP customers with diverse mobile device environments. Perhaps this relationship gave SAP good insight of Sybase technologies and made SAP to pay a premium to acquire these technologies.

The first set applications (not necessarily in order) that can get impacted from this merger, as I see could be :

• SAP Mobile Infrastructure
• SAP CRM, CRM IS-Utilities
• SAP eCommerce

Nevertheless this merger brings in additional development space integration. In the development space SAP has quite a challenging task to position Powerbuilder application development platform from Sybase.

It is quite interesting to watch the development, especially from the product development and enterprise mobility space.

 

Posted by Senthil Muthuvelu at 9:28 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

by Mark Everson

One of the most difficult aspects of high street retailing is managing in store availability in order to minimize lost sales while reducing overall inventory, especially where regular or in season replenishment occurs.

As a retailer, we would always want to satisfy the customer and also ensure that we do not have inventory taking up valuable shelf space and tying up working capital. Therefore we have a delicate balancing act to do between these different demands to always get the sale without having stock rooms the size of the store itself!

Ideally we would like to have the least stock in store at any time, only just enough to satisfy customer demand and replenish when the last item is about to be checked out! This would also translate into reduced warehouse stock with smaller safety stock margins for the inevitable unknown demand.

Historically, we had pretty rudimentary tools to project what demand may look like and usually factored in some leeway to come up with what was believed to be the sell through for the product ranges. This was converted into the supplier orders where some rounding up would have occurred to generate a quantity that would typically put more stock on the shelves than would ever sell.

It is closing the gap in a way that allows us to maintain higher sales while also reducing inventory levels with tools that are accurate and reliable that is a key focus for today's 'bricks and mortar' retailers.

This is where SAP's Forecasting & Replenishment for Retail solution comes in as a dedicated retail only solution of very clever specific algorithms that consider all types of causal factors such as promotions, price changes, weather effects or the results of the store replenishment.  Allied to this its ability to self learn from the results of its replenishment forecasts, we have a tool that can positively affect lost sales while also reducing inventory levels.

A UK retailer found during a pilot that the suggestions from F&R would ultimately lead to increased store availability near 25% while reducing overall stockholding for the sampled range by over 50%...remarkable figures in any ones book! In the highly competitive hard goods market where margins are low and under increasing pressure, this difference can be worth millions.

Other benefits of this accurate forecasting are that collaboration with suppliers has a greater element of certainty leading to reduced changes on both sides, transportation can now be leveraged to greater advantage booking more cost effective transport routes well in advance knowing that fluctuations will be less volatile than earlier and how you manage the warehouse/supply network can be refined to reduce waste or over capacity.

Ultimately one has to trust the solution to deliver the results, as it is often found that human intervention in any sophisticated planning solution typically leads to inaccuracy. The key thing that the stock controllers can do with F&R is to ensure that it is fed with accurate data with at least 12 months history and the solution will produce the results. No matter how intelligent we believe we are, this solution's black box is far more sophisticated and quicker at crunching the numbers and analyzing the data to produce results and can lower costs and maintain your margins.

The biggest challenge a retailer faces with SAP F&R is just leaving it to churn out the results and let it transform your business from one that is dealing with excess stock issues to one that is looking for new ranges to sell!

About the Author

Mark Everson is a Principal Consultant with the Retail CoE. He has more than two decades of rich experience in Business and IT, with 15 years of SAP experience. Mark is the ramp up coach for SAP F&R projects in the UK and Head of SAP Retail consulting, UK. Mark will blog on SAP Retail.

Posted by Guest Blogger at 2:46 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 1 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

by Mark Everson

The set of SAP Retail solutions are out of the box solutions aimed specifically at all Retailers in the market. Over the last 5 years, SAP has invested in the core ERP Retail solutions along with building solutions that can integrate with the core or stand by themselves. These are Merchandise and Assortment Planning, Forecasting and Replenishment, POS Data Mart, EPOS point of sales systems, Workforce Management, Price Optimization and Customer Loyalty solutions which overall make up a strong package to cover all retail scenarios.

So SAP has the processes covered but what does this mean for a retailer who is looking to implement these solutions?

Well first of all there are some inherent themes with SAP that are standardization, integration and data integrity. These alone will test your resolve as SAP demands users to follow processes whose foundation is very much built on these themes and therefore requires a level of support not normally seen with less structured or some point to point solutions.

For example, Master Data is critical to ensure accuracy and integrity of the process so this forms one of the bases for the SAP solution. But what this means to a retailer is the formation of a data group to ensure that the information being loaded into SAP is complete, accurate and timely. On top of this there are normally more elements of data required in SAP than other solutions due to the integration of all the processes within the solutions - this is not a solution where you can change the pack size in the warehouse processes to suit yourself!

But this combination of integrity and integration has some major benefits to your organization. The fact that the information that is garnered from the day to day activities can be analyzed with confidence to support more robust decisions on ranges, shelf quantities and overall stockholdings. Sales information can be quickly retrieved and 'Flash' sales can be analyzed for new product launches within hours of being on sale. This in itself can be the difference between a good season and one where you are discounting to move discontinued lines.
So we have some rigidity built in the processes and I can see that may be of advantage to me in some aspects, but how will my staff manage this? I keep hearing that SAP is complicated?

Experience has shown that the emphasis of SAP Retail (and SAP in general) is to give users the opportunity to be more outward facing into the business or partners, to leverage the information they are getting to refine their actions and results. The solutions automate where possible the transactions to allow the users to manage the results and to spend more time looking at the more valuable or important facets of their operation.

And while doing this it does not make is necessarily more complicated to use than any other tool, in fact it can make life a lot easy on a day to day basis. The critical aspect to using any solution is appropriate and sufficient training and not just in the tools themselves. Too often time is spent teaching users how to do a transaction rather than taking them through the critical process change that is happening and explaining why it is changing, the benefits and the importance of their role in it. This is probably the biggest single learning from any solution implementation and not just SAP Retail.

Much focus may be put at the consumer facing side of the business but not to the behind the scenes aspects that support these activities so there is an imbalance that appears over time. Change Management aligned to the solution implementation is critical to get the most from an implementation and this should be seen as must do rather than a nice to have.

So if I get my staff organized and trained properly, get them to adhere to the disciplines of the SAP solution, will my bottom line improve?

All things being equal, an implementation of the SAP Retail solutions can have a significant impact on your business bottom line by helping to manage costs and ensuring margin maintenance. Some examples of this are in the Price Optimization where this solution can plot and execute the optimal markdown pricing for seasonal items to ensure these items are only reduced to what is required to drive sales therefore holding the margin as high as possible. A German retailer who trialed this solution to compare two identical stores, one being a control store and the other utilizing this solution, saw some interesting results:  the optimized store holding a higher margin for the same items over the period of the trial while maintaining sales - the solution was able to calculate the demand/price ratio more accurately than the store staff.

Another example where costs can be managed this time is in the Forecasting and Replenishment solution where sophisticated algorithms provide extremely accurate store and warehousing replenishment results that manifest themselves in reducing lost sales and inventory at the same time. A UK retailer found in a trial that a 50% reduction in inventory was achievable while also increasing in store availability by nearly 25% for the sampled items.
Another aspect of the SAP solutions is the availability of standard reporting content through the BW solution. Specific retail content has been developed by SAP to give out of the box reporting and this can be refined further to your own requirements. Coupled with SAP Business Objects to give you dashboard reporting and you can visually see what is happening in your stores hour to hour if necessary.

So SAP Retail comprises some very sophisticated solutions while a well executed implementation will help release benefits that will drive you to a more profitable result.

About the Author

Mark Everson is a Principal Consultant with the Retail CoE. He has more than two decades of rich experience in Business and IT, with 15 years of SAP experience. Mark is the ramp up coach for SAP F&R projects in the UK and Head of SAP Retail consulting, UK. Mark will blog on SAP Retail.

Posted by Guest Blogger at 7:24 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

In Part I and II of this blog we discussed about how package applications provide solution for an integrated Customer Care & Billing system. But with extensive package customization the benefits are overshadowed. However, with a pre-configured package solution, much of the customization can be pre-built and adopted as a hyper package thus reducing the realization period. Part III of this blog will provide insight into the pre-configured package solution available from Infosys for Utility Billing and Customer Care functions. Also suggested is to read fellow Infoscion Parmarth's blog on CIS modernization and the need for an integrated customer care & billing system here.

Infosys' Utility-in-a-Box (UIAB) solution is pre-configured package solution for small and mid market energy and water utilities who plan to upgrade from legacy CIS to a modern integrated Billing and Customer Care platform. This solution provides seamless integration to back office processes and utility specific technologies like AMI, GIS etc. The solution resides on Infosys' utility domain knowledge and industry best practices. Built on SAP platform this solution comes bundled with various artifacts and accelerators and can be extended to incorporate specific needs of each customer.

The UIAB solution is based on the objectives discussed in the last part of this blog. It provides for rapid implementation- as fast as 9 to 12 months, which is a fraction of typical package implementation timeframe of a similar scoped project. The scope of UIAB covers the meter to cash cycle and customer service processes, typically in use at most utilities. The box includes bundled developments such as interface templates, reports, forms and legacy data migration templates and bundled documentation such as generic process documents, configuration manual and training manual for the pre-configured processes.

The UIAB is recommended to be implemented using the Infosys proprietary PACE® (Pre-configured & Accelerated CIS Enablement) methodology. This is a unique methodology designed towards accelerated implementation of the packaged customer service and billing solution. The demo driven approach involves key users right from the design phase, captures delta modification to pre-configure solution and artifacts shortens realization timeline. There is a high focus on what you see is what you get ideology.

There are clear benefits to be achieved by opting for a packaged customer service and billing solution. However, UIAB as a pre-configured solution focused on utility retail, goes a step ahead. It provides for a rapid implementation, it is a pre-tested quality solution and an overall lesser risk involved in terms of failure post implementation. The UIAB solution from Infosys is presently available on SAP platform and is built on ECC (IS-Utilities) and CRM. A detailed document on UIAB can be downloaded here.
 

Posted by Sathyanarayana Krishnamurthy at 11:28 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

In Part I of this blog we discussed about how package applications revolutionized Information Technology consumption. But with time even package implementations are beginning to see extensive customization and delayed realization. Part II of this blog will provide insight into how can a customer adopt a package that requires least amount of customization in terms of development and accelerate realization.

System Integrators have a key role to play in leveraging the learning from the industry and reuse the accumulated knowledge by offering pre-configured package solution.  So what is a pre-configured package solution? In a nutshell, it is standard packages configured to the industry specific processes covering statutory need of the geography bundled with must-have custom developments along with documentation, tested and made available as a hyper package that is ready to be deployed with minimal tweaking to customer requirements.

What all can be there in a pre-configured solution? The process starts by identifying and configuring the industry and geography's best practice processes that are required to be configured. These processes are also documented at a generic level. Must-have customization due to regulatory or compliance reasons and specific to the industry/geography, where not supported by the package, is identified. These are then built and incorporated into the package, along with relevant design, documentation and testing and training material. Further, templates are built for common objects for data migration like customer, invoice etc. Integration interfaces with common third party systems can also be pre-built, for example interface with a credit score system. 

How is a pre-configured system implemented? The standard waterfall methodology may not be the right approach to implement the pre-configured system. A more demonstration driven iterative approach is recommended where the customer reviews the pre-configured processes including the customization and then a delta discovery phase leads to changes required in the configured processes and need for new customization.

What are the benefits? As you see the clear benefit is reduction of customization because a lot of standard 'gaps' have already been developed and made available in the pre-configured solution. Thus the realization of this solution is expedited. The pre-configured solution already is based on industry and geography's best practice processes and hence there is no need to re-invent the wheel. Only customer specific requirements are incorporated during the implementation. Considerable time is also saved in testing, documentation and training. The templates are made available early in the project to the legacy owners to start work. Change management and new system adoption is easier since user involvement is high from early stages.

Part III of this blog series will discuss on the Infosys pre-configured package solution available for utilities industry and is based on the SAP platform.

Posted by Sathyanarayana Krishnamurthy at 9:35 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

All of us use search in our personal lives, and more often than not we come to the conclusion, searching for information on the internet is far easier than looking for information in the corporate data warehouse. Why do we reach such a conclusion and why can't the corporate data warehouse be more searchable and not tied to cryptic data dictionaries? Well, the way corporate data warehouses stores information today is more optimized for read, write and update than actual information analytics. The row based information storage is optimal for a transaction system, but not so much when it comes to information analytics, also "ability to search" a key element of contextual exploration is missing from our data warehouses.

 

SAP Business Objects Explorer (blade) 2.0 is a latest attempt at alleviating these challenges. The tool combines search and exploration with columnar storage and in memory analytics to deliver information discovery at accelerated speeds. At the center of this application is a BWA (business warehouse accelerator), an appliance that is responsible for columnar indexing, storage and dynamic aggregation. The extreme information processing capabilities comes from a scalable MPP (Massive Parallel processing) architecture of the appliance that is used for data access as well as OLAP aggregation. One top on this columnar index is a keyword based contextual search using open source Lucene, a high performance fully featured text search engine. This search functionality combined with information crunching in memory promises to deliver instant answer to on the fly questions and provides users with a self service environment to search and explore information.
 
Naturally not all is hunky-dory with this tool, those familiar with SAP BW, will understand that there is no support for the columnar indexing for display attributes, texts and hierarchies initially, also you may not explore in multiple dimension at once, finally it works with prebuilt data model and keywords for contextual search needs to defined before hand. It will be interesting to see how this tool fares in the market, given the fact that it's tied in some ways to the way we consume information. Hunch around the causal relationship in the data can be discovered, without having the IT to build a report for the same. At the same time IT does not need to be concerned about developmental lifecycles as well as user experience, a typical pain point for the BI technologist, as there a standard user experience, all that is being delivered is access to data.

Posted by Varun Kumar at 9:00 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

Using package software solutions for Enterprise Resource Planning Solutions (ERP) or Customer Relationship Management (CRM) for enterprise business transformation is very appealing. The reasons are many, not the least of which are:

•          Speed: Accelerated implementation

•          Knowledge: Built on industry best practices

•          Simplicity: Pre-integrated application suite or "stack"

 

Companies often speak of "vanilla" implementations where there is a strong reliance on "out-of-the-Box" functionality to drive process and organizational change.  However, it is a mistake to rely on software alone. Although fast implementation to achieve a target ROI is desirable, there are some risks that must be addressed. 

Typical pitfalls include: underestimating the complexity of the integrations in a legacy environment and not accounting for the substantial change management effort required to transition users to new processes.

 

There are several mitigations that can be used address this:

 

1.     Focus on Value: The first key step is to understand the value that the transformation should achieve for:

a)      "company" (i.e., shareholders) and

b)      "customer" (trade customers, end consumers, and internal employees)

 

By mapping out your key value and operational levers, you get clarity on the change initiatives and required capabilities to drive the biggest benefits.  This is your transformation "compass".

 

2.     Build Scenarios: Categorize and prioritize the business scenarios within your target operating model.  Then drive capability enablement based on the value your scenarios will generate, the ease of implementation and leveragability.  Use this decision framework to determine where you should use "out-of-the-box" functionality and where it makes sense to customize.

 

3.     Leverage Conference Room Pilots (CRPs): Validate the target operating model through content-rich simulation and ensure that all elements are aligned to achieve the business objectives. Face failure. Learn. Improve and move forward.

 

4.     Blueprint, Prototype and Validate: Identify gaps between desired business capabilities and system functionality. Present options and work with the business to agree trade-offs (e.g., "Out of the box" vs. Process Change).

 

5.    Drive Adoption and Accountability: No surprises. The impact on the organization must be assessed and acted upon at every step.  The goal is to ensures that end-users are prepared for the change, know what is expected of them and are held accountable for delivering against new KPI targets.

 

This approach helps you to decipher between what you will get vs. what you will need (i.e., "out-of-the-box" functionality vs. your company's specific capabilities required).  Package solution vendors do build and refine their software based on the best practices of their clients, but what works for one Fortune 500 company won't work for another. The Conference Room Pilots will surface the gaps early in the solution development process.  These should include:

•             Software gaps  

•             Process changes

•             Impacts to the organization

I'd be interested in hearing about your point of view and your own experiences driving business transformation, leveraging leading enterprise software packages.

Posted by Brandon Bichler at 3:07 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

In Part I of this blog we saw why there is a need for an Integrated Customer Care and Billing System. In Part II we will see how package applications today offer a modern IT platform to Utilities.

Package applications unleash a flexible and scalable platform where a utility can build and meet its requirements of the modern and changing era. These packages were created and are being continuously upgraded with the industry specific requirements in mind. For Utility Customer Care and Billing requirements, these packages in addition to focusing on the core utility retail functionality are also future ready to take on initiatives like AMI/Smart Metering.

With package applications, the focus is more on the business process and less on technology. These are technologically sound and can take the stress of huge data volume and complex, parallel processes. Hence, it relieves the utility and the system integrator from the nuances of getting the technology and platform right and rather focus on correct process mapping and achieve desired business outcomes.

Package functionality is both scalable and flexible. New features can be quickly added without compromising on performance of existing functionality. Increase in data volume or process complexity can be easily accommodated. A rate change, for example, does not require modifying thousands of lines of code and can be accomplished in a simplistic non-invasive manner. All this translates to massive savings in costs and time.

Package vendors consistently deliver industry and regulatory specific as well as technical enhancements to keep the package updated and relevant to the changing operational and customer environment at utilities. This frees up the utility from application centric issues and it can continue to focus on its core business operations and initiatives.

So what are the functionalities these packages have to offer to utilities? The complete meter to cash cycle is available; ready to be configured, customized and adopted. The standard processes can be quickly understood, minimally customized and becomes ready for adoption. Functionality spans from meter and meter data management to billing and from customer service and financials to even industry data exchange.

Essentially package applications have made technology easier to consume. These have been better than custom built from scratch application. But even package applications have their limitations. The rate of change of requirements and new initiatives is so high and radical that package vendors are unable to keep pace. This results in heavy customization of the standard package during implementation to accommodate new requirements leading to a longer realization phase. Read fellow Infoscion Sathya's blog on how to minimize your customization & accelerate your realization here.

Posted by Parmarth Naswa at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

SAP acquired Business Objects in 2008 to provide customers with a full suite of business intelligence and information management solutions on a single platform with deep integration to SAP Business Suite and NetWeaver. The intent was to offer SAP customers with a market leading suite of reporting, analytics and dashboard capabilities. We have come a long way since then - on the ground SAP Business Intelligence (BI) customers are faced with multiple challenges like widening stack of products, evolving roadmaps, and frequently changing product names. In the below sections, we evaluate some essential steps of this evolution from a technical as well as business perspective.

While tool coverage, openness, rendering focus on functionality the integration aspects between SAP Business Objects and SAP NetWeaver BW and their corresponding challenges need the due consideration, very aspect on integration acknowledges the presence of two separate platforms, coupled together with BAPI and Web Services introduces technical challenges/constraints, that need to be taken to conclusion to realize the complete benefits SAP business intelligence platform has to offer.  Before customers can commit to the new SAP BI platform (NetWeaver BW and Business Objects tools) they need to consider protection of investments already made especially since cost is a significant deterrent for moving towards Business Objects tools given this is a premium offering subject to additional licensing and consulting costs. Customers need to carefully evaluate and balance the tool's value additions to the licensing and consulting costs. ROI and benchmark studies summarizing the technical and business challenges are thus a must before embarking on the SAP Business Objects journey. 

These challenges can be categorized based on the implementation phase as well as existing landscape, for e.g. tool fitment, migration issues and architecture may be more relevant challenges for in the initiation phase of the project; a SAP driven organization embarking on a new SAP Business Objects implementation may not have to worry about migration issues; similarly, if an organization already works with BO, change management and usability may not be a challenge while performance of the solution may apply. The technology and business challenges and life cycle stages below need to align to provide a consistent and stable roadmap to organizations for flawless implementation of the SAP BI platform. 

To summarize, the integration between the two platforms is still evolving and the new release planned in late 2010, will bring in substantial improvement in this regard. It is expected that BEx Queries and Business Objects Universes will converge into a single, common semantic layer and going forward all innovation and development in SAP BI front-end will be focused on SAP Business Objects solutions and their integration to SAP NetWeaver BW and BW accelerator, considering this it becomes imperative to stick as close as possible to standard functionality in the front-end deployments, as programming might be difficult to migrate automatically, also expected is the update on the pioneer project (Advanced Analysis).

Posted by Meyyappan M M at 4:40 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

The recent global recession has forced many manufacturing companies to look into extreme cost cutting measures and liquidate their inventories. With the world now in a stage of economic recovery, consumers are opening their wallets again and are demanding more goods, leading to an increase in production output for manufacturing organizations. But rather than simply ramping up productivity, workforce and inventory levels to pre global recession levels, many manufacturers are first carefully investigating now how they can accommodate the increasing demand with their existing organization and production assets. After an era and years of industry wider restructuring, with increased globalization, mergers and acquisitions,  many global organizations however now come to the rude awakening that their existing tools, structures, processes and data don't provide them the insights they are looking for to make sound strategic and operational decisions.

In order to better understand their operations and become agile and efficient enough to swiftly react to future market fluctuations, many manufacturing organizations now begin to harmonize their data and transform their business processes.  These desperately needed strategic and corporate wide initiatives of data harmonization efforts and business led transformation projects should also consider an evaluation of suitable best-of-bread tools and solutions from SAP such as SAP NetWeaver Master Data Management (SAP NetWeaver MDM) and SAP Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence (SAP MII) framework. These tools and solutions not only help facilitate meaningful and efficient creation, validation and execution of data but they also provide a framework to instill some discipline into the organization and - if implemented the right way - can lead to flawless end-to-end business transactions and reliable enterprise data.

 

Posted by Dirk Leifer at 1:44 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

Thanks largely to the recent global recession, many organizations were forced to take a hard look at their IT spend and find more cost effective ways to invest their reduced IT budgets. Alternate IT service contracts such as value-based or outcome-based pricing became more popular providing clients with greater means for cost control and tying stringent budgets to result driven service contracts.

Tying service work to outcome allows client and service provider to focus on what's really important: the value of what is produced regardless of the resource input and how it is produced. Manufacturing companies understand very well what level of production outputs are possible using various levels of the variable input. Using this analogy from the manufacturing world, for value or outcome based contracts it shouldn't matter what levels of input (e.g. number of resources, location, skill set) the service provider is using as long as he is getting the job done and will achieve the agreed upon results.

Infosys has successfully deployed value and outcome based engagement models to its global client base.

 

Posted by Dirk Leifer at 5:27 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

Organizations have increasingly sought new, innovative, and (often) expensive ways to get a 360° view of the customer - the reality is that the customer doesn't exist. Customers are many and varied, they have different needs, different motivations, different ways they want to interact with companies and different expectations from the you. Too often companies undergo well-intentioned transformations in pursuit of meeting the customer's needs, only to end the project in frustration having spent millions and never having achieved their goal. The problem is that the companies start out with a goal that is too poorly defined. And when the solution is being developed, it is swamped by trying to solve all the ills the company has let fester for years (or decades).

 

By eliminating "The Customer" and focusing on specific customer segments, companies can bite off manageable chunks, achieve success and build upon that success.  This may seem like a simple and obvious approach, but organizational barriers, politics and a tendency to treat front-office transformations like the ones done for the back-office make this an elusive goal.  The three major components necessary to embed customers into the solution design are:

 

•       Persona: Distillation of customers into the profile of a customer

 

•       Scenario: Vision of the "to-be" business, what capabilities are

            necessary to meet the needs of the persona as it interacts with the

            company through the value chain

 

•       Conference Room Pilot: Workshop that tests the vision of the "to-be"

            business through personas and scenarios to meet the projected value

            as supported by the elements of the solution (process, organization and

            systems)

 

Infosys helps clients transform their front office by focusing on delivering customer value.  I'd like to hear from you on this subject: have you recently completed a front-office transformation, are you in the middle of one, or are you planning one?

 

If you prefer a face-to-face discussion, please join me at SAPPHIRE in Orlando on Monday, May 17th at 12:30pm in Theater 2 (Industries) or afterwards at 1:00pm in Discussion Room 2 (Industries).  I look forward to seeing you there.

Posted by Brandon Bichler at 2:48 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

IT fragmentation is the rule today. Each business function or department in organizations has their own definition of business processes and master data. Like any master data, Customer master data is typically stored in an array of systems, among them sales force automation (SFA); customer relationship management (CRM); and enterprise resources planning (ERP). Every system has its own definition of the business data designed to support its own features and functions. However, cross department processes such as order to cash, supply chain, procure to pay define how an enterprise works to build customer value. These are the processes that are inhibited by current IT fragmentation. These are the processes that break down due to the different definition of the same business data across application boundaries. This heterogeneity means information is inconsistent in different parts of the organization, and leads to complications in exchanging and synchronizing information.

Organizations have service oriented architecture (SOA) and business process management (BPM) initiatives to rapidly deploy cross department processes. However, SOA and BPM do not deal with the fragmented data problem directly. These will enable companies to rapidly deploy composite cross department processes across these applications but these new processes will "break" as services will need a common definition of master entities or master data to effectively communicate.  

Given such a strategic role of MDM, it should not be looked purely as IT initiative; a bias carries over to many MDM vendors and IT departments within organizations.  Thinking of MDM to cleanse and aggregate data is a shortsighted approach. Any data cleansing or data integration exercise will soon be obsolete because new data is constantly being introduced and existing data is being modified. Further, clean augmented quality data for a departmental application will not bring the full advantage to the organization. SOA and BPM can propagate and expose the master data to the cross department processes. Together, MDM, SOA and BPM can create cross department processes that work to build customer value. 

Would be interested in your throughts and comments ..........

Posted by Ashish Tewary at 4:35 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

The implementation and change management processes in a validated environment is often viewed as very complex and time consuming one. Sometimes the process is made so complex that people start forgetting the real purpose of validation and start viewing the process as an inevitable evil to meet the compliance.

The US-FDA defined validation as "confirmation by examination and provision of objective evidence that software specifications conform to user needs and intended uses, and that the particular requirements implemented through software can be consistently fulfilled". FDA has mandated this to ensure the safety and efficacy of the products that reach the end customer. The focus on the extra safety in validated environments is coming from the fact that some of the processes / functionalities that are implemented in the system, if not functioning well could impact the safety and efficacy of the consumer. For example the manufacturing processes running on the ERP system has direct influence on the drug manufacturing where as the software's used for calibration of equipments directly influence the accuracy of medical devices. So it is evident that we need to look at validation in more specific terms than at the environment / system level.

Ideally the processes that are incorporated shall ensure quality of the deliverables and reduce the re-work and overall cost. Every step introduced in the change management process shall be weighed against the benefit that it is going to bring. Processes that do not add value shall be removed. So it is extremely important to define a process that is simple but at the same time does not compromise on the quality.  Here the failure consequence from a business criticality stand point shall drive the decisions. This should be the same for regulated and non-regulated industries.

Once the above exercise is completed, it is important to study additional dimensions such as:

1. Stability of the IT Application / Package: Is it a well tested and tried out product from a trusted partner. Can we rely on the quality of the vendor testing?
2. Scope of Validation: What are the processes that may have an influence on the safety and efficacy of the consumer? In most of the cases this scope which we normally call as GxP relevance is only in the range of 5-20 %.

The already defined process shall be further tightened to ensure high degree of assurance on delivering the expected outcomes where the processes are "GxP Relevant". So it is extremely critical to:

1. Define the Requirement: Only when the requirement is clearly defined it can be verified whether the outcome is meeting the expectation.
2. Perform Impact Analysis: This is the most important step as it bring out various details like, impact of the change in terms of users & processes, type of change and lead to the definition of next steps such as what is getting changed (process, objects, documentation etc), what is the type of testing required, who all need to test it, whether it is touching a GxP relevant process etc.
3. Identify the testing scope: It is important to cover all the relevant test cases to achieve a high degree of assurance.
4. Identify the requirements for documented testing: If the test is touching a GxP relevant process, then it is important to have documented testing. The purpose is multifold.

• It helps in ensuring that all the relevant cases were considered for testing. 
• It helps in documenting what is tested and what are the results obtained thereby providing the traceability in case of an issue.
• It helps in bringing clear ownership and accountability to specific individuals.

The life sciences companies shall aim to optimize the validation processes by carefully identifying the areas where they are relevant. There is ample scope to leverage this to improve the overall predictability and quality of the systems.

Posted by Ravi Sanker R at 3:12 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

Most utility companies in the world are decades old.  Their CIS and Billing systems still run on old world technology platforms. Undoubtedly these systems, even today, meet the daily customer care and billing operations but one thing that is affecting them is the principle these systems were built from: these systems were built to last but not for change. The current trend in the utility industry is however all about change: in ownership structures, in regulation, in customer service, in reliability, in new technology etc. These changes can only be realized by having a modern and integrated Customer Care and Billing platform.

So what are the challenges of the old world CIS system? The challenges can be summed up in a single phrase: "inflexible and non-scalable".
The typical legacy CIS is inflexible to changes and therefore any enhancement or functionality addition requires huge investment in terms of time and cost. Technologically, the old world CIS is a composite application that is made up multiple small and large applications running in coherence to achieve a required functionality. Not all granular applications are on the same technology making the integration more complex. Usually there are multiple areas where same data is maintained and therefore required to be consistent. A change to any one application becomes highly invasive and has a ripple impact to integrating applications. Hence there are serious costs and time investments in terms of massive code changes and re-testing and you have a dwindling expertise base in terms of skilled resources.

And how is the CIS non-scalable? With advent of new initiatives and technologies there are requirements for large scale data and complex processes adoption. For example, addition of interval metering data to a consumer set adds significant amount of data volume. This data volume can be almost 30 times more and as a result will impact almost every job processed. For example the metering and billing batches will require additional capacity to complete in the same batch window time. This cannot be achieved by only enhancing hardware. The platform needs to be scalable. Similarly, integration of newer applications say for AMI or to support industry data exchange in a deregulated environment requires complex processes to be adopted. Only a scalable platform can adopt such complicated process without impacting any existing processes.

Changing ownership structures in utilities is driving a whole lot of mergers, acquisitions and divisions. The existing CIS systems fail to address this change. These systems are not scalable to work post consolidation and are inflexible to be split under separate business functions.

Thus the old world technology platform is unable to provide the flexibility and scalability to meet the technical and business objectives of a utility. Additional time and cost investments can prolong the life of the old world CIS system, but these investments will be sunk once the platform is forced upon. Hence the earlier modernization is adopted; the better it is for the utility.

So what is the solution for modernization? The solution is to have an integrated customer care and billing platform that is highly flexible and scalable, would enhance customer service, increase efficiency of both front and back office operations, improve billing runs and help increase revenue collections. A scalable and flexible solution will enable utilities to be equipped for taking advantage of the opportunities required for these changes and new initiatives like AMI/Smart metering.

Package Applications today offer this modern integrated customer care and billing platform to utilities. Read the next part of this blog here to understand what all features does a package solution for the Utility Customer Care and Billing can provide.

Posted by Parmarth Naswa at 11:08 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )