About our client
The client for this case study is a manufacturer of public transit fare systems for point of sale, validation, as well as fare media, audio, and vending equipment. The manufacturer is located in the Chicago metro area, and has one manufacturing facility and distribution center. Annual revenue for the company is approximately $150M.
Requirement
As the company grew, it got to the point where the legacy systems were no longer providing the necessary visibility to effectively run their business. Too many different systems were used to manage the various processes, and these systems were not integrated with each other. This led to contradicting data sets, and inaccuracies in inventory, financial statements, as well as controlling and profitability analysis.
The client evaluated several ERP platforms and due to the vast amount of integration between the various modules, they decided to proceed with SAP and thus, approached us for resources in various SAP modules.
Solution
We deployed around 24 resoursces under various SAP modules, like a project Manager, few onsite functional consultants and and off-shore technical consultants etc.
Our client not only needed SAP to accommodate this flexibility, but also a standardized business process for controlling and profitability analysis. Our consultants overcame this challenge by leveraging variant configurations (VC) to give the client the flexibility they needed in the manufacturing process. Variant configuration is particularly helpful in an environment where there are a large number of combinations of components in the finished product. Another challenge was integration of the pre-existing serial number business process with the implementation. Every finished product has an individual serial number. Controlling and profitability analysis need to integrate this serial number throughout the manufacturing process. Materials get assigned to serial numbers, and need to be reconciled. Finally, the serial number needs to be validated by the system prior to creating an outbound delivery.
Result
By using a team of experienced consultants with cross-functional experience in multiple modules, our consultants were able to deliver a high quality implementation. Given the vast amount of integration, it is important to have experienced consultants who understand not just their specific modules, but also how those modules integrate with other modules in SAP.