Inside SAP Yearbook 2013

Issue 19 | Spring 2012

www.insidesap.com.au

The independent magazine for SAP professionals

Yearbook

2013 BIg data, Cloud

trends shaping the market

ANDREW BARKLA

AMbitious growth PLANs for SAP ANZ

PP 255003/09024

Your essential Resource 2012 Awards customer excellence

CASE STUDIES EPA, FRUCOR, Australand

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See our company profile and case study in this issue.

Passion for Excellence.

Commitment to Delivery.

Lodestone specialises in: Strategy and Business Process helping clients create customer value, improve operational excellence and manage risk.

Solution Definition turning established business strategies and objectives into pragmatic solutions which can easily be implemented. Including the Implementation of our newly SAP Certified Expense Management Solution.

Lodestone is a global management consultancy, committed to designing and delivering solutions that enable international, national and local companies to thrive in today’s complex business environment. We help our clients define measurable business benefits that we will achieve together, using our teams of client-focused consultants, who combine a passion for excellence with strong process and SAP skills and deep experience of transformational change in their industry.

Solution Implementation designing and delivering solutions by leveraging our extensive knowledge and expertise in the delivery of complex programs.

IT Transformation shaping IT to optimise the ability to deliver measurable value to the business during and after Business Transformation.

To find out more about Lodestone call 02 8571 8300, email info@lodestonemc.com or visit us at www.lodestonemc.com

20 Inside SAP magazine

CONTENTS

8

14

31

46

50

56

6 Editor’s note

Interviews 8 Taking the helm at SAP ANZ: Andrew Barkla

12 Stream-ing ahead: Gough Venter, Dawie Gerber and Stuart Dickinson

Events 14 Recognising excellence in 2012 17 SAUG Summit 2012 + SAP Forum Australia

22 An InnoJammer who can’t code: Jelvie Grech

Features 24 Building intelligent transport systems 27 Placing your bets on big data 31 Public sector pushing into the cloud 34 2012 Top 10 Most Influential People in SAP

38 Mastering SAP Visual Intelligence: David McAmis

40 Four quarters to Accounts Payable efficiency: Frank Volckmar

42 Digital evolution drives the future of SAP learning: Lynton Howes

Case studies 46 A platform for modern regulation: EPA Victoria

49 ASG improves operational visibility and transparency: Frucor Beverages

50 Moving test data into the fast lane: Mercedes-Benz

52 ‘ Boring’ data migration – just what the property developer ordered: Australand

55 Unifying ERP across nine Asian countries: Kimberly-Clark

56 Extracting value from information assets: Vale Australia

SAP service provider profiles 60 Hayes Technology Group 62 Lodestone Management Consultants

63 Wipro Technologies 64 ASG Group Limited 65 Systems and People

66 SUSE 67 Esker 68 BackOffice Associates 69 Manhattan Associates 71 ReadSoft 72 Revelation Software Concepts 73 CSC 74 PwC Avantis Information Systems 76 Retarus 77 Harms Consulting 78 Interpro 79 Windsor Business Solutions 80 Compuware Corporation 81 Everjoy Consulting 82 Redback Consulting 83 TIK Consulting 84 Acuity Search 85 SAP service provider directory

EDITOR

The independent magazine for SAP professionals

Managing Editor/Publisher Freya Purnell t. (02) 9929 5465 m. 0412 602 579 freya.purnell@insidesap.com.au

From the Editor The Inside SAP Yearbook is our flagship edition of the year, and always provides us with an opportunity to reflect on the changes we have observed in the SAP ecosystem in Australia and New Zealand over the last year. What we have seen in recent times is certainly some consolidation, with a number of acquisitions – just to name a few, PwC acquiring Avantis, Datacom acquiring Enterprise Support, Kony Solutions acquiring Sky Technologies, and most recently, at a global level, Infosys acquiring Lodestone Management Consultants, while locally, UXC-owned Oxygen Business Solutions has acquired Stream (and in this edition, we speak to them about what the deal means for the two companies – see page 12).

We’re also seeing a new level of sophistication and confidence in the market, as companies place their bets on emerging technologies rapidly shaping the enterprise. SAP continues to articulate its broadened strategy, now encompassing not just ERP but database and technology, mobility and analytics. Andrew Barkla assumed the role of SAP ANZ president and managing director just a few months ago, and while he is positive about the opportunities this wider solution set presents, he concedes that the great challenge for SAP and the ecosystem is to remain close enough to its customers and their business challenges to be able to guide them through investing in the new technologies, and yielding the most value from them.

Read our interview with Barkla on page 8.

Elsewhere in this edition, we discuss the trends around big data, and the potential for cloud in the public sector, following SAP’s landmark Business ByDesign deal with NSW Trade and Investment. On the analytics front, David McAmis discusses how to get the most from SAP Visual Intelligence, while Lynton Howes examines the implications of the digital evolution for SAP training and education.

As alwasy in our Yearbook, we also have a wealth of case studies, as well as a directory of SAP service providers, so you can make your next SAP project your most successful yet.

We hope you enjoy this edition.

Freya Purnell Managing Editor, Inside SAP

6 Inside SAP magazine

Journalist/Editorial Assistant Eleanor Reader t. (02) 9929 5465 eleanor@flapjack.com.au

Creative Director Justin Knights t. (02) 9929 5465 m. 0425 292 075 justin@flapjack.com.au

Advertising Sales Laura Blackwell t. 02 8011 4822 m. 0412 685 864 laura@flapjack.com.au

Editorial Advisory Committee Anna Cridland (Axient), Stuart Dickinson (Oxygen Business Solutions), Paul Hawking (Victoria University), Wendy Hill (SAP ANZ), Calvin Kally (KALtech), Kevin Killey (IBM), Iain Macleod (CSC), Mick Windsor (Windsor Business Solutions)

Contributors Jelvie Grech, Lynton Howes, David McAmis, Frank Volckmar, Kirsten Wade, Anne Widjaja

Published by FlapJack Media Pty Ltd Suite 7, Level 9, 122 Arthur St North Sydney NSW 2060 ABN: 93 142 878 135 © 2012 FlapJack Media Pty Ltd. Inside SAP is published four times a year by FlapJack Media Pty Ltd. All rights reserved. No part of the publication may be reproduced in whole or part without the written permission of the publishers. FlapJack Media Pty Ltd makes no representation or warranties with respect to this magazine or its contents including, without limitation, material communicated by third parties. FlapJack Media Pty Ltd does not warrant that the information available in this magazine is accurate, complete or current. Opinions expressed are those of the respective authors and not necessarily of the publisher. Neither FlapJack Media Pty Ltd nor any persons involved in the preparation of this publication will be liable for any loss or damage as a result of use of or reliance upon advice, representation, statement, opinion or conclusion expressed in Inside SAP magazine.

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Interview Andrew Barkla

Taking the helm at SAP ANZ In July, Andrew Barkla took up the role of president and managing director of SAP ANZ, left vacant by Tim Ebbeck earlier in the year. Barkla joined SAP from senior regional roles at Unisys and PeopleSoft. He spoke with Freya Purnell about what’s on his agenda for the next 12 months, the challenges ahead for SAP, and the role of the ecosystem in helping SAP ANZ double in size by 2015.

Freya Purnell: What attracted you to the role at SAP? Andrew Barkla: I’ve been involved in the application software business for much of my career. When I got the tap on the shoulder, I was running Unisys Asia Pacific in Japan and was also on the executive board globally.

I’ve been spending a lot of time talking to customers about some of the disruptive trends like big data, consumerisation of IT, cloud, and mobility. I can see a big shift happening in technology at the moment – a shift that I believe is bigger than the shift we saw when the internet was deployed in the commercial and government sector.

The fundamental reason [I decided to join] was you’ve got the largest application software company in the world making huge bets on the innovative technologies of tomorrow – cloud, mobility, SAP HANA. To be quite frank, looking at the investments that SAP was making and the assets the company has in its customer base, it was just too good an opportunity to turn down.

FP: Since joining SAP eight weeks ago, what have your immediate priorities been, and what is on your agenda over the next 12 months?

AB: My immediate priorities have been getting out and listening to our customers and our partners. In my first seven weeks I met 77 customers and around 20 partners, so I’ve been doing a lot of listening, understanding how we’ve been performing and whether we’re delivering on the expectations they have of us, and getting an understanding of where they are with SAP and what opportunities the innovation portfolio is going to bring to the table. I’ve also been spending a lot of time with our people, again gauging our focus on customers and on making our partner and customer community successful.

Going forward, it really is about driving a growth agenda, and is very much around bringing innovation to the table for our customers – whether that’s a customer trying to save money because of some of the challenges they face, or organisations that are looking to take advantage of new business possibilities and solve new business problems with a set of new market categories

8 Inside SAP magazine

that we just didn’t have two years ago.

BusinessObjects added analytics, Sybase added database and technology in a mobility platform, we’ve added SAP HANA into the mix around database and real-time in-memory computing, and then of course the cloud with the acquisition of SuccessFactors and Ariba – all of those present a whole new set of possibilities for customers and for the ecosystem. So that will be my focus; just ensuring that we have the new innovative technologies in front of our customers, not for technology’s sake, but looking at industry and business problems and trying to solve them.

FP: From those initial discussions with customers and partners, what is your sense about how they feel about what SAP has been delivering up until now?

AB: Generally across the board I’ve been really impressed. Most of the customers I’ve talked to have been extremely complimentary, and many of them are in that consolidation phase from an applications perspective – they have completed the ERP foundation, and the exciting thing is that now they have this platform in place, they’re looking at how they get the benefits of being more agile and more responsive, and how they extend the platform, leveraging some of the new technologies to deliver front-office benefits that are relevant for their industry.

FP: With so many shifts taking place right now, and so many different solutions that SAP is offering, how should customers be trying to work out where to invest to yield the greatest value?

AB: We’re at a point where you don’t know what you don’t know. I’ve met with some customers who know what they want, but they’re not sure what they really need. From a pragmatic perspective, it comes back to looking at the markets they are operating in, and looking at their own business strategy and the challenges that they have in executing that, and then engaging with us to

“We are setting out to double the size of the business by 2015. We can’t do it alone.”

help them identify how they can best take advantage of some of these new innovations, on top of the investment they’ve made, to deliver business benefits aligned to their strategies.

I think actually one of our big challenges in engaging as we go forward is getting linked back into the business challenges. We were certainly there, front and centre, through the shift into ERP. Those were transformational decisions made by customers at the time. As I look at the future challenges, we have to get back in front of the business to really understand how it aligns to the strategy and the business problems of today, and not just show up with a technology product proposition. I think one of the big challenges we’ve got is working with our ecosystem to get ourselves back in front of the business and having business-relevant conversations.

FP: So what do you see as the role of the ecosystem in the future?

AB: It’s helping us understand, particularly from an industry perspective and from a customer perspective, what are the business problems we need to be engaging around. Of course we have many ecosystem partners and channel partners who have very deep industry knowledge, and in some cases, very deep departmental or functional knowledge, and we need to leverage and take advantage of that knowledge.

We are setting out to double the size of the business

by 2015. We can’t do it alone, we just can’t grow that quickly without really enabling both the channels and the ecosystem to help us grow and help us solve those customer business problems.

FP: Which market segments do you expect to be strong contributors to that growth?

AB: All market segments. If you go to government at the moment, there are significant budget challenges at the state and federal level, and that presents a real opportunity to do things differently. Getting better data and analysis on citizens and the services that can be provided presents opportunities for SAP HANA. When they’re looking at significantly reducing the cost of their shared services operations, cloud becomes a significant proposition.

In the mining and resources sector, we’re looking at increasing our investments in Western Australia and strengthening our alignment with our partners and ecosystem to prepare ourselves for growth in those markets. The retail sector is facing significant challenges, so we’re working with them on both lowering costs and getting better engagement with suppliers, through procurement solutions to improve supply chain and giving them a stronger online presence.

So there are things happening and challenging each of the industries, and we serve over 24 industries that are presenting opportunities. SAP is not just applications,

Andrew Barkla Interview

“The greatest challenge ahead will be leading our customers into and through the innovation that’s available to them... because a year ago, we didn’t have some of the technologies that we have available to us today.”

and now we have the five market categories that are giving us a chance to understand the problems that customers have and bring these new solutions and innovations to the table. I’m pretty bullish, as you can tell.

FP: How does the level of available SAP resources in the Australian and New Zealand market affect your thinking about growth?

AB: In Australia and New Zealand, if we’re setting out to grow 30 per cent and double the size of the business, we will need more skills and more talent. How do we go about doing that? One dimension is growing the ecosystem, being more strategic with our alignments and our transparency about our focus areas and how we grow together, improving our enablement of the ecosystem and channels, that will play a big part in it.

Our ecosystem equally sees the opportunity of the additional four market categories to complement the core, and to grow new SAP customers. I’m seeing in my conversations a reinvigoration of the ecosystem in investing in SAP HANA, in mobility, and supporting implementations of SuccessFactors and Business ByDesign. We are all looking at growing at the same time, so that’s one way we have to fulfil the opportunities in concert with our own channels and ecosystem, and then of course we are looking at growing our own services business to support that.

This will be a challenge, and I don’t underestimate the challenge. In this day and age, we leverage global delivery centres, and we’ve got rapid deployment solutions in place for most of the portfolio. The cloud is a different paradigm in terms of how quickly you can implement and the amount of resource that’s required and the risk. I think that also assists – you don’t necessarily need as much resource to set up and support the cloud solutions as you would have three years ago for an on-premise style solution.

FP: How do you see the maturity of the SAP Australia and New Zealand market compared to the Asia Pacific region?

AB: Australia and New Zealand is a mature market.

What we need to be careful about is it’s also a market

10 Inside SAP magazine

that’s very innovative and there is a lot of early adoption of technology here. Let’s take the cloud for example – in the US, cloud is penetrating about 85 per cent of organisations, and in Australia it sits at around 65 per cent. We’re not that far behind, and we’re catching up very quickly. Because Australia and New Zealand is a mature market, it is looking to innovation to better expand into adjacent markets in Asia, and to compete more effectively. Businesses will either thrive or fail in a mature market now with so much innovation going on in technology.

It’s very different to Asia. Markets like China, India and Indonesia are still significant growth markets for the ERP platform in its own right, and that’s different from Australia and New Zealand.

FP: For SAP ANZ as a company, what are the greatest challenges you’re facing here?

AB: That’s a tough question because I just feel so positive about everything I’m seeing at the moment. The greatest challenge I think will be leading our customers into and through the innovation that’s available to them. We are going to need to spend more time with the business leadership in our customers, helping them look at some of the challenges they have in front of them, and think differently about how they solve some of those problems – because a year ago, we didn’t have some of the technologies that we have available to us today.

Our customers can put down what they want on an RFP, but understanding what they really need is going to be a much more collaborative process with somebody like SAP and our ecosystem to really think through some of the game-changes that can be delivered based on what is huge innovation in our industry. So getting that business connection and that insight with our customers into what’s possible is probably our biggest challenge at the moment.

Imagine if we only began to think about mobility in a year’s time, and the time that we would have lost competitively if we delay really understanding how the technology and the opportunity around mobility is applied to our business. I think what people don’t understand is how quickly things are changing. With so many shifts going on at the same time, businesses are going to change dramatically.

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Interview Stream acquisition

Stream-ing ahead SAP technology consultancy Stream was founded by chairman and innovation director Gough Venter in 2004 with a focus on SAP NetWeaver. Since then, joined by business services director Christiaan du Plessis, managing director Dawie Gerber and operations director Joel Stehr, the company has grown to encompass both consulting and technology services, with annual revenues over $10 million and offices in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth. In August 2012, Stream was acquired by UXC-owned SAP software and services integrator Oxygen Business Solutions. Freya Purnell spoke to Venter, Gerber, and Oxygen CEO Stuart Dickinson about the future for the company.

Freya Purnell: How did you grow the Stream business?

Gough Venter: I founded the business with a clear focus on becoming brilliant in the area of SAP Netweaver technology. I knew I had to surround myself with brilliant technical people, so after about a year I convinced Christiaan du Plessis to join the business. We slowly started building up new accounts as well as support contracts. From the start, a stable annuity income around support was very important. We’ve never had a dedicated sales team, so it was largely about using our own networks and growing existing accounts.

We grew into the Canberra market with our key partner, Redback Consulting. We then grew Melbourne off the back of some substantial accounts.

We got to the point of being an SAP Partner, and winning our first Customer Award of Excellence. That felt like a real milestone to say, OK, we have achieved a fair bit in our technology space, so what’s next? We took an interest in growing our ERP services and becoming a SAP Channel Partner, so we convinced Dawie to join in August 2009 due to his experience in this space.

Dawie Gerber: When I started, the vision was to just keep growing, and bring some business development experience to the party to grow the organisation specifically in the NetWeaver space. SAP asked us to consider becoming an SAP Channel Partner. We started talking about opportunities, and Joel [Stehr] joined us and we started the consulting business.

We became an SAP Channel Partner in July 2010, and we had our first deal within six weeks. We just took off from there, and created a few innovations. We sold our first chunky one and that underpinned that we did the right thing and the markets believed in us.

GV: People asked why we maintained separate technologies and consulting branding [for the business]. We needed to keep a strong identity with our existing large enterprise accounts as technical leaders, while growing a whole new aspect of

12 Inside SAP magazine

the business in the ERP space. We knew the end goal was to operate as one brand, but a staged approach helped us maintain what we had built up.

DG: Then we had our first approach in March last year.

GV: Oxygen gave us a call out of the blue, but at the time we had actually been approached by another group. Within the space of a few months, we had M&A people contacting us too. We never put ourselves out on the market, I think we were just ripe for the picking. We had a few deep and meaningful conversations about it, but we didn’t want to change our culture – that was key. People gravitated towards being in an environment where they can feel really comfortable. The culture suited them, they joined us for a reason and we weren’t going to compromise on that at all. So we really wanted to do the people side of it on our terms.

The first conversations with Oxygen had just made it so clear to us that this was like a bigger Stream in a way. Even the way UXC manages its brands, the identity of those brands means a lot. It feels very well-managed and well-structured, but the brands are fairly autonomous and we could just merge into that very seamlessly without disrupting our customers and employees. We could give our employees a great career path without affecting their short-term goals.

DG: With some of the other organisations that approached us, there would have been a massive cultural shift, and we would have had to change a lot sooner, which would have made the transition not as smooth, there would have been a lot of unhappy customers and staff. And that was ultimately what it was about – staff and customers, because that’s really the value of the organisation.

FP: Stuart, what attracted Oxygen to Stream?

Stuart Dickinson: UXC is an acquisitive company. Oxygen was acquired by them in 2006, and we have an acquisitive

Stream acquisition Interview Stuart Dickinson

Gough Venter

nature. That’s been a little bit hard to do for the last couple of years, because of the macro environment, but we have now got to the stage where it is possible again. What attracted us to Stream was really the people and the directors. We knew the team, it’s a small ecosystem, so we knew that we could work with these guys. UXC is trying to become the leading SAP partner in Australia and New Zealand. So we thought that Oxygen could help accelerate Stream’s business and their ambition, and we saw that they could also help us grow our business. Scale is an important part of the equation but it’s also really important to have deep capability in technical areas and the channel. It was about putting all that thinking together and being very clear that yes, one plus one would equal more than two.

GV: The interesting thing is that our customer base is widely spread. We don’t cover too many of the same accounts, so collectively we can only capture more of the market and span a wider range of industries.

SD: The other reason we were interested was the Stream team has developed some really good IP. Our view is by having access to that to take it to a broader range of customers, that would just help grow that process as well. So we can obviously bring quite broad coverage from a customer perspective to that opportunity.

GV: We have a good model for developing IP and it feels like a starting point for a new era for the Stream R&D, to merge with Oxgen’s like-minded people, and grow that into something really substantial.

DG: While we’re good at developing IP, we are not necessarily good distributors of products, and that’s where Oxygen gives us that next jump up in terms of accessing a network of people and customers. We have ambitions to go over to Western Australia and a few of the untapped regional areas.

FP: How will the integration work going forward?

SD: The culture is really important to us in making sure that we leverage the best out of everything. The day one model is the same as the day -30 model – the two organisations are effectively operating as themselves. Over the next 12 to 24 months, where it makes sense, we will create some integration, and it will predominantly initially focus around the back office – making sure we get the leverage out of IT, development platforms and systems, financing and HR. But

Dawie Gerber

the brands and the go-to-market will continue to exist as they do. With the resource pools, while there will be some crossleveraging and we’ll be exploiting that as much as we can, they will operate separately. And in 12 months’ time we’ll have a look at where we’re at. In terms of the brand, Stream will effectively become an Oxygen company.

FP: What is the growth strategy for Oxygen and Stream?

SD: UXC is very clear. It is seeking to become the leading alternative to the multinationals across the Australia, New Zealand and Asian market. When we bring that to an Oxygen and Stream level, the ambition is the same but in the SAP space. So if we want to lead that market, that means we’ve got to continue to grow. Western Australia has not been a big presence, so that’s something we’ll look at. We will have a look at offshore markets. We have a very strong relationship with the United VARs network, which is a global alliance of Gold Channel Partners, and that gives us access to some of those markets as well.

The other thing from a growth perspective is as SAP technologies emerge, we will follow those where it makes sense – that’s about things like cloud, we are making significant investments in mobility and building out our story on mobility. It’s about following where the customers are, and making sure we can support them in how they want to grow, and accessing new markets and opportunities, so we can continue to spread the good word. When I took over in April, my strategy was effectively to double the size of the business over three years, so that’s what we are working towards, and the Stream acquisition is obviously a good part of that.

DG: The interesting part is that we set our budgets at the end of last year for the next calendar year. Before we even had these conversations, our targets were quite aggressive already.

So overlaying this is actually a bit of an additional kicker, we are going to naturally get some growth happening.

FP: How have Stream customers viewed the acquisition?

GV: All our key accounts have welcomed the change, which is such an important thing for us. It’s testimony to the fact that they don’t feel threatened by the change; in fact, most of them feel that they will benefit from it. Everyone that I have spoken to sees it as a very similar engagement to what they have experienced in the past, which is very positive.

SD: We’re just very excited and looking forward to being better together.

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AWARDS

Recognising excellence in 2012 Bringing together the best success stories SAP has to offer, the SAP Customer Awards of Excellence celebrated 33 different projects undertaken by customers and partners over the past year. Eleanor Reader reports.

This year, 56 projects were submitted to the judging panel in the hope of taking home an award from one of the 11 categories.

The awards have become an important part of SAP tradition over the past 12 years, placing special emphasis on the role partners play in transforming their customers businesses’ for the better.

In 2012, for the first time, there were up to three winners in each of the award categories, with the award ceremony held at the Sydney Opera House on Thursday 16 September.

All submissions were reviewed by an experienced panel of independent judges, which included Ian Harvison, general manager information technology (CIO), Komatsu Australia; Andrew Barkla, president and managing director, SAP Australia and New Zealand; Barry Simpson, chief information officer, Coca-Cola Amatil; and Kirsty Garrett, SAP director of services for QLD, WA, NT and SA. Nominations were assessed on criteria which included the strength of the relationship between customers and their partners, technology providers and SAP; how effectively they used their available resources; how they have understood and adapted to changing market conditions, and how they showed innovation, creativity and originality.

Here we highlight a few of the winning projects.

Best Run Analytics Customer: ANSTO Partner: Innogence With the aim of shortening its manual, complex and lengthy annual planning process, ANSTO and Innogence implemented the new B1 report platform based on SAP BusinessObjects 4.0.

Digitising and automating the entire process ensured a flexible, scalable and reliable solution that shrunk the annual planning process from five months to two.

Best Run CRM Customer: Australand Property Group Partner: BluLeader Australand had a variety of computerised systems which directly enabled their critical business functions. Over the past decade, these systems had become dated and it was time-consuming to support and deliver business enhancements. In April 2010, Australand embarked on an SAP ERP implementation project to replace this core platform. A strong collaboration between Australand and BluLeader resulted in improving communication and time management, increasing sales and reducing costs for the business.

14 Inside SAP magazine

Best Run ERP with Channel Partner Customer: Allied Mills Partner: Extend Technologies Allied Mills is a leading food ingredient manufacturer, and when its custom-built grain procurement application became difficult to maintain, the company sifted through the market for a better solution. Implementing SAP Global Management software enabled to company to remove interfaces and slashed the time spend on maintaining vendor data, among other improvements.

On the project, Allied Mills general manager, finance, Andrew Balwin says, “We’re now more nimble in our procurement activities, and this allows us to support our customers more effectively. As our business grows, we know our SAP software is able to scale with us.”

Best Run SAP ERP Customer: Corporate Express Australia Pty Ltd Partner: IBM Global Business Services The acquisition of 71 businesses by Corporate Express resulted in a lack of consistent and integrated business processes that threatened their growth. IBM Global Business Services’ SAP team worked with Corporate Express to map out an extensive business transformation project – using a suite of SAP applications.

“With the new SAP software, we can scale the business at a much more rapid rate, with fewer resources, which allow us to be more aggressive in going to market. The IBM GBS team provided us with the robust infrastructure that we can rely on to support the business as it continues to grow,” says Garry Whatley, CIO, Corporate Express Australia Limited.

Best Run SAP Upgrade Customer: Landmark Pty Ltd Partner: SAP Works A complex upgrade of Landmark’s system resulted in any supporting upgrade documentation being stored haphazardly across network file shares, content repositories and in printed documentation. Often this meant that it was impossible to trace the origin of a change and confirm its necessity once the upgrade was completed. Landmark chose SAP WORKS to upgrade their SAP landscape without any risks involved.

Best Run Value Realisation Customer: AGL Energy Limited Partner: TCS AGL, with TCS as the system integrator, went live with Project

2012 Customer Award of Excellence winners: the full list Best Run Analytics Customer: ANSTO Partner: Innogence

Best Run Analytics with Channel Partner Customer: Dulux Group Partner: Oxygen Customer:Jemena Partner: Oxygen

Best Run CRM Customer: Australand Property Group Partner: BluLeader

Best Run Finance Customer: Ausgrid Partner: PwC

Best Run Database & Technology Customer: Visy Industries Partner: Innogence

Best Run ERP with Channel Partner Customer: Valley Longwall International Partner: Stream Accepting the award for Landmark and SAP Works: Keith Lilley, Jamie Newman, Mario Tieppo and Tony de Thomasis

Customer: Allied Mills Partner: Extend Technologies

Best Run HCM Customer: Australia Post Partner: SAP Australia

Best Run Innovation Customer: Fonterra Partner: SAP NZ and Norway Customer: Zimmer Partner: Ciber Customer: Linfox Partner: FourPL Winning for Best Run Value Realisation: Sujoy Pathak (TCS), Paul Sternberg (Accenture), Jason Clark and Stephen Mikkelsen (AGL) Spectrum in 2011, which involved providing SAP IS-Utility Billing solution to over 20,000 AGL commercial and industrial (C&I) customers. The solution has provided an integrated, low cost ‘single source of truth’ for AGL and its C&I customers, which account for $3 billion of AGL revenues. A clear win-win for AGL and its customers, the SAP IS-U solution has set AGL apart in this highly competitive Australian energy market.

Deborah Hadwen, chief executive officer, TCS says: “Once again, we are delighted to be working closely with AGL. Project Spectrum is a classic example of the coming together of the world-class SAP solutions and TCS innovation to create a concrete value proposition to the immediate customer, AGL, and its clients. The resolve and commitment of AGL, combined with its diligent teamwork with TCS, ensured that the project went live in time and within budget.”

The independent magazine for SAP professionals

Best Run SAP ERP Customer: Department of Human Services Partner: None Customer: Corporate Express Australia Pty Ltd Partner: IBM Global Business Services

Best Run SAP Upgrade Customer: Landmark Pty Ltd Partner: SAP Works Customer: True Alliance Pty Ltd Partner: PLAUT IT Customer: Australian War Memorial Partner: PLAUT IT

Best Run Value Realisation Customer: AGL Energy Limited Partner: TCS Customer: SingTel Optus Partner: Accenture Australia

Events

SAUG Summit 2012 + SAP Forum Australia The SAP Australian User Group and SAP Australia joined forces this year to host a major three day event in Melbourne, bringing together SAP customers, users and partners. Freya Purnell was there to report on some of the highlights.

SAUG unveils rebranding at Summit opening session SAP Australian User Group (SAUG) chairperson Ian Harvison unveiled the new brand for the user group at the opening session of the SAUG Summit 2012 + SAP Forum Australia in Melbourne.

The new brand incorporates the three core deliverables for the user group – networking, influence and knowledge.

Harvison also gave attendees the first look at the user group’s revamped website, which will soon be launched and features the new brand.

“Importantly for us, we will have a single repository of data on our members,” he said. “It’s a very exciting change for the user group to have the opportunity to share knowledge and network with other members [through the website], which we haven’t been able to do in the past.”

The new brand and website are only part of the work SAUG has been doing over the last 12 months to examine its mandate from member organisations.

“It has been a pretty full year in terms of what we have revisited and taken back into our member community as a user group,” Harvison said.

Also in train are a number of changes to the SAUG’s Constitution, reducing the number of Committee members from nine to eight; instituting a two-year term for committee members, with 50 per cent rotation each year; and the removal of the BusinessObjects category of membership.

These changes were voted on at a Special General Meeting on 31 August.

In addition, Harvison announced that the annual SAUG Plenary will become a two-day event in Sydney, to be held in 2012 on 22-23 November at the Australian Technology Park.

Engagement next frontier for technology There is a shift from technology simply being focused on managing transactions to facilitating engagement, according to Constellation Research CEO and analyst Ray Wang.

Wang presented the closing keynote on the first day of the SAUG Summit 2012 + SAP Forum Australia.

There are five consumer trends driving this shift – mobile, social, cloud, infographics and big data, video and unified communications.

“Things are happening in real-time, people are taking advantage of social, mobile and unstructured data. We’re moving to a person-to-person world in which context is important,” Wang said.

However the shift from transaction to engagement does not mean enterprises should abandon their transactionally-based systems, but engagement platforms needs to be layered on top.

“It’s what we do with this transactional layer that will help us to get to the engagement platform,” Wang said.

While there is plenty of innovation happening outside the SAP world in terms of point solutions and best-of-breed suites seeking to provide engagement platforms, Wang also pointed to areas within SAP that are addressing this emerging need, such as Jam, which creates a social layer in SuccessFactors, and consumer apps built using design thinking that are coming out of the SAP AppHaus.

“They are working at a level that is completely focused around engagement,” said Wang.

He pointed to examples such as the Recalls Plus or MyRunway app as creating a two-way pattern of information to consumers and back again that becomes valuable and tradeable – another shift which has

significant implications for business models.

“If you think SAP is going to be a software company in five years, you’re wrong – they’re going to be an information broker selling information back to you,” Wang said.

Barkla calls on ecosystem to help meet future challenges Andrew Barkla, SAP ANZ’s new president and managing director, called on the ecosystem to help SAP meet the challenges of a rapidly changing business world, in his opening address to the SAP Forum Australia.

“We do not have another 40 years to develop the solutions to tomorrow’s business problems,” Barkla said.

He pointed to the SAP Start-up Forum, a program for young innovators to showcase how SAP HANA can be harnessed to solve business problems, as an example of the type of cooperation it would like to see in the future.

“We need the SAP community, customers and partners, to be writing solutions, developing applications to build on that platform,” he said. “We want millions of people writing applications and designing solutions to business problems that can be delivered to everyone on the SAP App Store.”

Describing SAP as the “most relevant software company in the world”, he said the company’s role is to “start defining the possible futures for our customers so they can do their jobs better”.

Barkla also said he joined SAP from Unisys because of its clear track record of innovation, particularly in the key technology areas of mobile, inmemory, and cloud.

“I had been working with my customers in the region on what we call disruptive trends and how we would help clients address these problems, in mobility, cloud, big data, consumerisation of IT and social computing.

So I did my research and found that SAP was already

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Events “Software companies are now selling into the business. They have the budget, and will make decisions that IT won’t.”

Ben Haines, CIO, Pabst Brewing Company

innovating the answers to these disruptions, and that’s why I’m here with you today.”

CIOs must embrace consumerisation of IT: Haines Consumerisation of IT is an unstoppable trend CIOs and IT departments must embrace, according to Ben Haines, CIO of Pabst Brewing Company, speaking at the SAUG Summit 2012 + SAP Forum Australia.

“Don’t try and block it, you’ll never win,” said Haines.

“It’s the Facebook effect – people expect software to work. If you’re training people to use software for a week, you built it wrong.”

The company provisions cloud apps such as Gmail, Google Apps, Twitter, Yammer, and TripIt to the company through a single platform, and can now redirect staff using non-company approved cloud apps to an officially sanctioned version.

Pabst has also adopted ‘bring your own device’ (BYOD) for mobiles across its workforce, which Haines said has saved a huge amount of time and money around telecommunications decision-making and problemsolving, particularly as 80 per cent of Pabst’s workforce is mobile.

“You do need to have a mobile device management platform to make it secure,” Haines said, as well as clear policies for both BYOD and company-owned mobiles.

Haines also advocates building tight relationships with business decision-makers within the enterprise, both because they are driven to achieve innovation and they often have available budget.

“Software companies are now selling into the business.

They have the budget, and will make decisions that IT won’t. The business is your friend – you have to have a good relationship.”

HANA as detective An innovative application using SAP HANA to identify perpetrators of crime saw Peter Chapman, CTO, enterprise application services, Capgemini, take out second place in the SAP HANA InnoJam Challenge in Palo Alto earlier this year.

Chapman presented his solution at the SAUG Summit 2012 + SAP Forum Australia.

Inspired by the London riots and the challenges police face in identifying perpetrators of crime, Chapman’s

initial concept used SAP HANA to filter and mobile phone data together with mobile tower locations against crime statistics to identify potential suspects.

Due to the large data volumes, HANA was ideal for the task. Chapman was able to load 18 million crime records (sourced from the NSW Government) in under five minutes.

Chapman created an eight-minute video demonstrating his proof of concept, and was subsequently invited to Palo Alto to present it in person for the final competition.

Since the competition, Chapman has been working on developing the concept further.

“We realised that one of the big challenges for the police is the relationship with telcommunications companies,” he said, with expense and time delays creating barriers to using this data as an effective investigative tool.

Instead taking a cue from Google Maps street mapping, Chapman has looked to the huge amount of “public machine information being transmitted” constantly by mobile phones and cars. This information, which is publicly available and reliable in terms of its ability to identify people and vehicles, can then be picked up and broadcast directly to HANA – to potentially be matched to crime statistics.

Describing it as “Big Brother on steroids”, Chapman concedes there may be some civil liberties concerns about information being used in the way, but also points to it being a great example of the potential for in-memory processing to fundamentally change processes within business and government.

“What else can we apply that change thinking to in order to solve problems?,” Chapman said.

www.insidesap.com.au 19

Events

Securing the right SAP skills SAP Mentor and Victoria University SAP academic programs director, Paul Hawking, led a panel session at the Summit on how to ensure you have the right people with the right skills working on your projects. Fellow SAP Mentor and independent consultant, John Moy, and Leanne O’Connor, managing director of recruiter Systems and People, shared their insights.

Starting the search The first step is truly understanding what is needed for a role, which requires a detailed job specification. Then it is time to begin the search for candidates. With the SAP skills market still tight in Australia, O’Connor said the days of simply posting an ad on Seek and finding a good candidate is gone.

“You only get active candidates that way, which is around 1015 per cent of the whole market. You need to tap into the passive market, so using networks to find people is definitely the best way,” O’Connor said.

Moy agreed, saying that he always starts with his personal networks, which, seeing as he has been in the SAP industry since the mid-90s, are quite extensive.

Even when using personal connections, a vetting process is crucial, O’Connor said.

“Even with LinkedIn recommendations, you need to know who is recommending the person. If you don’t know someone and they are out of your network, you need to go through a process of formal and informal reference checking, so you know that they are a valid person with a recommendation that can be trusted,” O’Connor said.

Finding someone with the right background for a particular role is important.

“At least in the development space, I don’t rely so much on years of service. Some people have only done one area, even if they are in the same role for a long period,” Moy said.

When looking at candidates’ CVs, O’Connor said you should look for continuity of employment and long contracts.

“If there are short-term roles, you should ask the candidate to explain the gaps – it might create warning bells,” she said.

Moy only views CVs as a tool for creating context for the interview. Working on the customer side, he went one step further to ensure the candidates he hired could deliver the goods.

“I don’t care if it’s someone from off the street, or from a consultancy, or from a recruiter, I have to vet the person myself,” he said. “When I was a development lead, I built a test and would test them on the laptop. If you have Web Dynpro, for example, in your skill set, there was a tickbox on the start-up screen that would add sections to the questions. Some people came clean straightaway and said they didn’t have the skills.”

Tackling technical interviews Technical interviews are a crucial part of verifying the skills of potential hires, but if you can’t meet someone in person, is there

20 Inside SAP magazine

a risk that the person you only speak to on the phone isn’t the one that will start work?

Moy said that statistically, he knows he has been less successful with phone interviews, particularly where candidates have not completed his test. He also recalls a situation where a colleague contracted someone from overseas on the basis of a phone interview, and was convinced that the person who arrived to do the job was different from the person they spoke to.

O’Connor says while there might be a place for initial telephone interviews to ask some qualifying questions, a faceto-face discussion is definitely needed for a hiring decision. Moy agreed, saying that now there is no excuse not to conduct video interviews if distance prevents candidates from attending in person. However, he also cautioned that there has to be a rule about typing during an interview, having had experiences where candidates were Googling the answers to questions.

Another tip for interviews, according to O’Connor, is asking scenario-based questions.

“You can fairly quickly work out whether the person knows what they’re talking about,” she said. “You do get a better gut feel for people face-to-face.”

During the interview process, hirers should look at a candidate’s body language, their phone manner, and the written language in their CV, including their spelling and grammar.

“I always ask the candidate if they wrote their own CV. You can tell a lot from someone’s CV. It depends what the role is, but if it’s a project director or project manager role, it’s no good if they can’t speak and communicate,” O’Connor said.

As an extra guarantee of competence, O’Connor said in the UK, it’s common do use a trial start, which is a paid day that acts as an extended job interview.

“It might be more relevant for developers, but it can show that they really know what they are talking about,” she said.

Certification While certification does not necessarily provide a guarantee of skills, it is an extra factor that might mitigate risk, but O’Connor reminds hirers to always sight copies of certification.

“I personally worry about just trusting a document. I know one of my colleagues once said that someone sitting next to him was using Google to buy a certification,” Moy said.

Having said that, he said he did find a link between ABAP certification and performance in his test.

“It is harder in the functional areas, because it is really important to have that business experience, but I have found some correlation,” Moy said.

Hawking added that there will be a new initiative coming soon from SAP which will allow customers to check the certification of the consultants they hire.

The last word? Hire slowly and be diligent about screening candidates.

The independent magazine for SAP professionals

Events

An InnoJammer who can’t code Think InnoJam is just for techies?

Think again. Jelvie Grech describes her experience as a non-coder, participating in the 2012 InnoJam, held at Victoria University in August.

I was informed by SAP Mentor Paul Hawking that the SAP InnoJam was being held at Victoria University in Melbourne.

I was hesitant to register at first because I heard people say that “it’s for technical people” and “you need to know how to code”. I am not very technical, nor do I know how to code. There was also the issue of being on maternity leave from my role as a Business Analyst in the Safety and Workers Compensation department of a global logistics company, plus studying part-time at Victoria University, doing the Master of Business ERP Systems degree. I had young children to look after and assignments to complete so trying to find a spare 30 hours to be involved in the SAP InnoJam was a huge challenge. However, my curiosity got the better of me. I watched the video of the SAP InnoJam in Sydney and thought I will just go, contribute in any way that I can, hopefully learn from the experience and most of all, have some fun!

On Sunday morning, I walked into Level 9 of the Victoria University Flinders Street Campus and was greeted by a friendly Rui Nogueira [who runs the SAP InnoJam series].

Then I met Grainne Quinn, who would be one of my team members. We all went upstairs to the room where we would work as a group to come up with a solution for a problem.

After splitting all those who could code, I decided to work with people in Team 1, which consisted of Malinda Kapuruge form Swinburne University, Danny Pham from Victoria University, Grainne Quinn from Lonely Planet, and Fendy Wongso from Discovery Consulting, purely because I had never met or worked with them before.

The theme was ‘Fighting the Bushfires’. We went through the Design Thinking methodology, facilitated by Hester Hilbrecht with the help of Gigi Read, to undertake the process of understanding the problem we were dealing with, coming up with ideas on how to solve that problem and use ‘persona’ and ‘point of view’ to really target our possible solution. Our team decided to come up with a solution for the efficient coordination of emergency services in the event of a bushfire. Before we came up with any solution, we did some research. Grainne and I decided that we would watch videos and listen to people’s accounts of what they experienced in the Victorian bushfires. We shared our findings. We filtered down the list to items we wanted to focus on. Then we brainstormed ideas, picked the one we

22 Inside SAP magazine

thought was possible and started coming up with what that solution would look like and what it would do for our end user.

I really enjoyed the Design Thinking process. It was great to see how it really took us through each step necessary to finally come up with a solution. To me, the most important aspect of the Design Thinking process was the need to come up with a persona and a statement that would clearly communicate what we wanted to do for that persona. Our persona was ‘Russell’, a 45-year-old exfirefighter who got injured on the job and now works at the Emergency Coordination Centre. Russell needs to ensure he has adequate information because he needs to despatch fire trucks to affected areas. It was absolutely crucial that we understood who would be the user of our solution. We needed to understand why they needed to solve the problem they had and how we could provide them with a solution. We also had to recognise what they needed out of the solution.

Our solution was a big screen where Russell would have visibility over any area that is affected. He would also be able to see his resources and their availabilities, and send them directions to the next fire. To do this, we thought we

‘Where’s Wally Now’ app takes out InnoJam

Photos courtesy Chris Paine.

The 2012 InnoJam, held in conjunction with the SAUG Summit 2012 and SAP Forum Australia, was won by the team behind ‘Where’s Wally Now?’, a bushfire status and advice app.

Members of the winning team were Lynda Willshire, Matt Harding, Chris Gunaratnam, Grahame Reynolds, Sarat Atluri and Stevanic Artana. InnoJam is a 30hour competition to conceive and develop a solution using SAP products. This year, teams used the Design Thinking methodology to come up with solutions relating to bushfire crisis situations.

In developing the ‘Where’s Wally Now?’ app, the team used technologies such as HANA, Neo, Gateway and Sybase Powerbuilder, as well as Google Maps and email, to create a solution that would track registered people in bushfire areas, send a series of alerts as the risk intensified, including checklists of tasks to undertake to prepare, and provide a personalised escape route from their location once the situation required them to evacuate.

InnoJam participants said the competition provided access to technology that they may not otherwise have, and provided a framework for thinking about the end users when developing a solution.

– Freya Purnell

could feed data containing weather information, fire details, resource location (GPS), resource availability (status update via handheld device, for example, iPhone), physical blocks, and so on into SAP HANA. We were then going to write some sort of algorithm to provide resources with routes on how to get to the next fire and avoid any roadblocks.

After we finished coming up with our solution and a prototype, we presented it to everyone for feedback. It was great to see the ideas that others came up with. We then had some experts show us SAP’s products, technologies and tools: yy SAP NetWeaver Cloud: Matthias Braun (SAP) yy Sybase PowerBuilder: Mark Bradley (SAP) yy SAP HANA: Jack Boers (SAP), Warwick Tagg (SAP), Rita Kontoudis (SAP) yy SAP NetWeaver Gateway: John Paterson, John Moy (MMG) yy SAPUI 5: Rui Nogueira (SAP) When it was time to start working on the prototype, I could see my fellow team members looking excited and enthusiastic about getting their hands on the SAP technologies. I had a look at HANA and how to view data in tables and link tables together. The problem was we couldn’t see the table we needed. We tried doing different things to get going with our prototype and asked experts for their opinions but at the end of the day, there just wasn’t enough time for us to learn and use what we needed to use. It was disappointing, but the fun was in being able to play with the technologies and

seeing what we could use and what we couldn’t use for our scenario.

We continued working on our prototype the next day.

Since I couldn’t code, I decided to work on our presentation which we had to give in front of the jury – Tas Adams, Rui Nogueira, and Simon Dale. We worked as a team bouncing ideas off each other. Unfortunately we didn’t get to create our prototype, so I presented the idealistic view of what we envisioned it would look like. Malinda and Fendy filled in the technical details. I enjoyed seeing other teams present their solutions. Team ‘Where’s Wally’ won with their impressive fire alert tool (see above).

It was interesting to see how different people can work together collaboratively, bringing our individuality, assumptions, experience, background and learning styles together. We were a diverse bunch of people who seem to fit together.

I really enjoyed the SAP InnoJam because I got to meet people in the SAP community and find out more about their background and what it took to get them to where they are today. It also made me appreciate that business problems need all sorts of people to come up with a solution. Everyone has something different and unique to contribute, which should be valued. We ended Monday by taking some photos and although everyone was exhausted, there was a buzz in the air, the atmosphere really said it all… we all had fun at the SAP InnoJam 2012 in Melbourne.

This article first appeared on the SAP Community Network (http://scn.sap.com/community/events/innojam/ blog/2012/08/29/an-innojammer-who-cant-code), and is reprinted with permission.

www.insidesap.com.au 23

Logistics FEATURE

Building intelligent transport systems The Future Logistics Living Lab threw open its doors recently to welcome a new partner, Trimble, and provide an update on developments towards more intelligent transport systems. Freya Purnell reports.

The Future Logistics Living Lab, based at NICTA’s Sydney offices, is a community of industry and research partners working on solutions to real-life logistics problems. It currently includes more than 20 participants, including NICTA, SAP, Fraunhofer, the Australian Institute of Export, Casella Wines, DB Schenker, Ericsson, ESRI Australia, FourPL, Google, GS1 Australia, Hamburg Sud, Linfox, Ortec, Victoria University, the University of New South Wales, the University of Sydney and the University of Western Sydney.

Transport and logistics solution provider Trimble Navigation recently launched its fleet management system, FleetWorks, in Australia.

The FleetWorks telematics solution, designed for road trucking fleet operators, is a sophisticated positioning solution for fleet management combined with on-board computers and a back-office system. The solution monitors and reports on driving performance and vehicle location in real time, assisting fleets to operate more efficiently, safely and with less impact on the environment.

The on-board computer also offers functions such as logging of driving and vehicle data, navigation assistance,

two-way communication and transmission of transport orders from the InterLAN shipping application.

Tom Scahill, Trimble transport and logistics division, business area director, ANZ, says the solution has already demonstrated significant operational performance improvements across Europe.

“Typically, a fleet will see a return on their investment in FleetWorks after six months through cost savings achieved from a reduction in fuel usage and an increase in driver productivity. Fleets can also expect to see savings from lowered maintenance costs and fewer insurance payouts to repair vehicle damage and workers compensation,” Scahill says.

Due to its open and scalable architecture, the FleetWorks solutions can be implemented with business applications, including SAP’s Transportation Management solution, with many customers in Europe and North America implementing the solutions together, according to Stephen Reid, supply chain solutions, SAP. “The integration capabilities have enabled near- to real-time communications between FleetWorks Mobile Data Terminals and SAP Transportation Management, providing status updates, GPS locating and proof of delivery to all relevant users of SAP,” says Reid.

Stephen Reid, SAP

Dr Glenn Geers, NICTA

Trimble launches transport and logistics solution

24 Inside SAP magazine

2012 REGATTA FOR REDKITE

REGIsTER nOw FOR ThE 2012 sAP EcOsysTEm FOunDATIOn

Regatta for Redkite! the sAP ecosystem Foundation Regatta for Redkite is your organisation’s opportunity to join the sAP ecosystem in a fun day’s competitive sailing on sydney Harbour.

And most importantly raise money to support the families of children undergoing treatment for cancer (www.redkite.org.au) The Regatta for Redkite takes place in the afternoon of Friday, 2 November 2012, out of Middle Harbour Yacht Club in Mosman, NSW. Over 300 people are expected to attend this exciting event, now in its 2nd year.

Your boat’s entry fee of $2500 will support one child and their family through the cancer treatment journey for one year.

The Regatta for Redkite is a unique way to entertain customers, reward employees, network at the post-race function. And of course, enjoy a brilliant afternoon’s sailing on the harbour!

RegisteR now !

Can your organisation enter the Regatta and help support one family?

For entry details and to view the action from last year, go to www.sapef.org Contact Adrian everett on 0414 417 786 or adrian.everett@everjoy.com.au for more details.

Major sponsors

using large volumes of real-time information on freight and transport, or conducting complex calculations for load and route optimisation.

Transportation systems of the future

SAP outlines logistics roadmap Supply chain is a key strategic investment area for SAP, with a mission to become “the world’s best supply chain execution provider, and a thought leader in supply chain convergence”, according to Reid.

Its supply chain execution platform links the back-end ERP system with SAP Transportation Management and SAP Extended Warehouse Management, overlaid by SAP Event Management to provide track-and-trace capabilities, alerts and exception management. This solution is currently in the rampup phase in Australia.

SAP Transportation Management

SAP Extended Warehouse Management

SAP ERP

SAP Event Management

Beyond this, SAP is working together with ecosystem partners such as Trimble to truly extend visibility and decision support across the supply chain.

“We can now provide not only visibility of what’s going on in the back-end of the business, but also what is happening on the road with goods in transit. This is crucial – it provides a customer service capability which hitherto we have had difficulty managing,” says Reid. “It also provides a view for compliance, and we can bring all the analytics that are being stored on in-cab devices back into the SAP Transportation Management system and present it on dashboards within the solution itself.”

Using an end-to-end solution also provides the opportunity to achieve process automation and scalability, and having on-road devices in the mix enables transport operators to obtain realtime alerts and respond to exceptions as they occur.

In line with its broader strategy, SAP is also bringing its mobile capabilities to bear in the transport and logistics space, according to Reid – using mobile devices to interact with backend systems through apps providing track-and-trace or freight capabilities. SAP’s in-memory technology is also being utilised to vastly improve processing response times, especially when

With the role of the Future Logistics Living Lab to drive collaborations to make logistics more efficient, greener and safer, there are several intelligent transport system projects underway, according to Dr Glenn Geers, technology director of infrastructure, transport and logistics at NICTA. Drivers already experience intelligent transport systems through traffic management controls, and the in-vehicle tracking provided by solutions such as FleetWorks take this another step forward. Going even further, Geers says, will see vehicles connected through disparate air interfaces, using the most appropriate system – whether that is via 3G or an extension of Wi-Fi technology.

The brave new world will be vehicles being able to warn drivers of impending events such as collisions, and even for vehicles to communicate and take evasive action without driver intervention. Similarly, in the freight and logistics area, in the future containers could be imbued with intelligence so they actually become part of the transport ecosystem.

“What’s happening now is that there are a huge number of sensors that are being deployed, and this ranges from sensors that are specifically deployed to look at traffic, to social media, timetables, and real-time bus and train systems,” Geers says.

“What you want to do is put that together in some sort of distributed way. Ideally the traffic system will self-organise from measurements it is making in real time. Then you have the cars thrown into the mix – which are all sending and receiving messages, and so they can all become controlled.”

While the technology to facilitate these types of intelligent transport systems is reasonably well proven, the challenge is achieving scale.

“Even the large trials to date have only focused on a small number of vehicles, so they’re staged interactions. When you have multiple six-lane motorways, will it actually work? So getting the whole short-range communication system to work between the vehicles is certainly critical,” Geers says.

Another challenge is gaining support from transport agencies to build roadside infrastructure necessary for these systems.

From a logistics perspective, gaining buy-in from all the respective parties to actually exchange information is also a challenge, because much of the information required is considered proprietary, but Fraunhofer is working on a solution.

“Imagine taking a document which uses invisible ink on the pages, and you only have the key to a few pages. You can see what you need to see, maybe a page on either side of the one you are using, but authorities like the Customs department might have visibility of the entire chain,” Geers says.

With many of the logistics companies using SAP back-end systems, NICTA is also in talks with SAP about the role it can play in the exchange of information in this way, as well as leveraging some of its contacts in the area.

The independent magazine for SAP professionals

26 Inside SAP magazine

Technology Feature

Placing your bets on big data With the variety, volume and velocity of data increasing rapidly, IT executives are faced with the reality that traditional databases and architecture are simply not going to cut it any more. So when it comes to big data initiatives, how do you make the right decisions to achieve the best value? Freya Purnell reports.

The term ‘big data’ may only have started to gain momentum a short time ago, but already it is on the priority list of IT leaders everywhere.

Craig Stires, director of IDC’s Asia-Pacific Business Analytics Research, explored the expanding opportunities and challenges presented by big data at the IDC AsiaPacific Business Analytics Conference recently in Sydney.

Why does big data matter so much now? There are two things changing the market, according to Stires – timing and competitiveness. With any data project, it takes several years for data warehousing efforts to bear fruit.

“By the time organisations that have a big data strategy now start to get results, they will have an 18-24 month lead on competitors, and they’re going to have advantages once they get that right. The organisations which haven’t started now and that will wait until they feel the pressure, they are going to be getting squeezed,” Stires says.

IDC recently surveyed 1000 IT executives across the Asia-Pacific, covering CFOs, line of business representatives, and executive IT, and asked what their top three business priorities were. Across both the IT and business functions, these were looking at acquiring new customers and reducing churn, expanding into new markets, and applying innovation to gain competitive advantage.

Fast-adopting industries Across the Asia-Pacific, there are three key vertical industries that are growing adopters of big data initiatives – banking and financial services, public sector and telecommunications.

Banking and financial services: Always a leader in using analytics and data to drive competitive advantage, big

data initiatives are now being used for the prevention of financial crime, achieving optimisation through customer insight, and for risk-adjusted portfolio management.

Public sector: While not perhaps driven by the same competitive pressures, there are more and more use cases emerging as governments seek to drive better services for citizens. Defence initiatives, projects requiring critical mass in the areas of power, water, diseases and emergency response, and analysing social media sentiment to gauge citizen reaction to events, are among the projects being implemented.

Telecommunications: With huge marketing dollars invested in reducing customer churn, big data initiatives such as peer influence mapping are helping to provide new insights.

At the global level, there are several other industries which are pushing ahead with innovative big data initiatives.

Retail: Particularly in the online space but also for traditional bricks-and-mortar retailing, big data capabilities offer the potential to not only provide new insights into how and why customers buy, but to intervene in their usual purchasing cycle – for example, preventing purchase abandonment by offering time-sensitive offers, for example, as well as cross-session shopping basket analysis, and premium pricing of advertising.

Manufacturing: In addition to enabling better forecasting and supplier and inventory optimisation to reduce holding costs, big data could also assist in identifying preventative maintenance opportunities – and therefore, prevent costly breakdowns.

“Machines are generating huge amounts of data, and a continued on page 30

www.insidesap.com.au 27

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Technology Feature

lot of the time the data is just being used as a measurement to work out when you should shut something down. But what’s more interesting is if at that low noise level, you can start to see trends and patterns that are going to predict a breakdown is coming, you can do preventative maintenance ahead of time,” Stires says.

Energy and resources: Of particular relevance in Australia, big data initiatives could help mining companies obtain more accurate stockpile valuations forecasts, even in highly volatile markets. At the other end of the production cycle, social sentiment analysis on the impact of projects – similar to that used by the public sector – could help companies understand the potential public and community response to a particular development or corporate social responsibility or PR program.

Making the investment IDC conducted a software survey of 500 Australian organisations, asking where they were looking to use big data.

“People talk a lot about social, but the reality is the first wave of big data projects are going to be focused on analysis of operations-related data and analysis of machine or device data,” Stires says. “It’s not big data in the outside world, it’s big data within the company. People are starting with what is going to make sense first.”

Talking to CIOs, there are currently investments being made into three different groups of big data-related projects: 1. Projects driven by requirements for near real-time response, such as customer service, fraud detection, network intrusion, and workflow automation.

2. Projects focused around analytics, using more and better information to improve the operations of the company, including customer insights, complex event processing, modelling external and unstructured or semi-structured data.

3. Projects focused on improving the capacity of infrastructure to cope with big data, covering data centre, private cloud, disaster recovery and data governance.

The big data solutions available currently can be grouped into four tiers: Solutions 1 Decision support 2 Analytics and discovery 3 Data management 4 Infrastructure

Project types Real-time projects Analytic projects Infrastructure projects

“These solutions then need to map over to the technology.

For real-time projects, we look at solutions that are going to span those first few tiers. The areas that involve analytics, we

need solutions that are going to span analytics and discovery and data management, and for those infrastructure issues, you need solutions that are going to span data management and infrastructure,” Stires says.

IDC sees big data as having four key components – volume of data, variety of data types, filtering the data of most value, and velocity of data inputs.

Most CIOs are trying to stretch an inflexible budget over as many of these areas as possible, but this involves making constant decisions about what will be sacrificed. As the business adds in ever more areas for the ‘wishlist’, the need to handle more data, handle it faster, handle larger volumes and so on, also increases.

Stires says that where there has been a change in the environment and the ecosystem is that big data solutions and technologies can now manage more of these requirement simultaneously.

“So what you’re able to do now, which is really different from two years ago, is you’re able to handle more data, you’re able to handle data faster. Being able to do more with the budgets you’ve got is pretty important,” Stires says.

IDC research has also revealed the biggest challenges when it comes to big data. In the Australian market, the top two are the cost of technology infrastructure and looking at what data is relevant, followed by having inadequate analytics skills or staff.

“This comes down to having a stronger business case for that investment. Just saying we’re going to do a big data initiative is not enough – it has to be looking at how we solve business problems,” Stires says.

Creating a competitive big data strategy Stires recommends three key actions for big data success.

“When selecting a business case, look at the areas where there is a specific competitive pain, an area where you think you can make a significant competitive difference. Based on that, you can start to get buy-in from the user group, you can get support from the IT group, you can start to work on funding, you can start to work on measuring it. So select an initiative tied to competitive goals.”

Second, start to build a skills and capabilities roadmap, defining what skills, technologies and capabilities will be needed over time, so that these can resourced adequately.

The third factor is choosing solutions focused around your needs.

“Just pulling in a piece of infrastructure is not going to be enough. Having a company that has some ability to span across those four tiers, and help guide you through and provide some best practices and blueprints, is going to make a big difference as well,” Stires says.

“The decision that you make today and where you start moving is the difference between being able to have that competitive advantage and get that lead or being squeezed.”

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30 Inside SAP magazine

FEATURE

cloud

Public sector pushing into the cloud The possibilities for cloud in the public sector are significant, but can the risks and concerns be overcome? A recent win by SAP suggests they can be, and Freya Purnell reports on how the US is embracing cloud – whether government agencies want to or not.

The last quarter brought news of a significant win for SAP Australia – and in fact, SAP globally – in the cloud. NSW Trade and Investment announced that it had signed a threeyear $14.5 million agreement with SAP to consolidate its ERP system in the cloud, utilising a range of solution including SAP Business ByDesign, SAP Payroll and cloud consulting services.

The project will involve the transition and consolidation of NSW Trade and Investment’s legacy ERP system including 16 agencies, totaling over 8500 employees, onto a single consolidated SAP cloud platform.

On the deal, Deputy Premier and Minister for Trade and Investment, Andrew Stoner, said that the department and its agency expects to deliver savings of more than $12.5 million annually by enabling greater efficiency across the entire organisation, as well as improve both internal and client services.

“By consolidating the department’s ERP systems onto a single

www.insidesap.com.au 31

cloud-based platform, we can now focus more of our energies on building investment and jobs, and generating a positive business environment for the State of NSW,” Stoner said.

SAP Australia president and managing director Andrew Barkla said the solution would align with both the NSW Government’s goals under its Corporate and Shared Services Reform Program and the recently released 2012 ICT strategy.

The deal was a coup for Australia, representing SAP’s largest Business ByDesign win to date, and the first cloud platform win in the Australian public sector. As such, it was the first concrete sign that public sector organisations may see past the oft-cited security concerns with cloud.

On the deal, Dr Steve Hodgkinson, research director, IT Asia-Pacific for Ovum, says the project will be one to watch because it is “charting new territory in government use of cloud services in Australia”.

“The hope is that the multi-tenant architecture and configurability of the SaaS solution will enable the many agencies within the Trade and Investment portfolio to use it as an efficient and flexible shared service. If this hope is realised, it will be an important proof point for the efficacy of the cloud services model as an alternative to more traditional in-house shared ICT services arrangements,” Hodgkinson says.

He added that the timing of the project is good for three reasons.

“Firstly, the benefits and risks of the cloud model are becoming better understood – and the department has gone into this project with a pragmatic, strategic approach and with its ‘eyes open’. Secondly, the maturity of cloud services is evolving rapidly, particularly with regard to the management of the data sovereignty, record-keeping and security requirements necessary to obtain the trust of riskaverse government executive and procurement officers.

Thirdly, the crisis of confidence in the ICT capabilities of agencies, particularly in a shared services context, shows no sign of improving. Recent budget cuts mean that it is now difficult for agency executives to pretend that either the ICT status quo or traditional under-invested in-house approaches to application consolidation and sharing are sustainable,” Hodgkinson says.

Ovum recently investigated the experiences of a variety of public sector agencies in moving into the cloud (although none were using SAP solutions), and found that despite concerns about risk and security, cloud services were in reality better, faster, less expensive and less risky than previous ICT projects and solutions. The results were detailed in a report titled Practical Steps to the Cloud for Government Agencies.

32 Inside SAP magazine

The US experience: driving cloud adoption from the top Also largely driven by budget cuts, cloud has received a push in the right direction in the US from the very top, with the Obama Government issuing its ‘Cloud First’ strategy earlier this year.

Under this strategy, the Office of Management and Budget will require all agencies to include a cloud option when evaluating new solutions for IT deployments, and that they default to cloud where a good option exists. Each agency CIO has been asked to nominate three ‘must move’ solutions they will push to the cloud and migrate legacy options. The aim is to convert up to $20 billion of the current $80 billion annual IT spend to cloud solutions, and to close down 800 data centres by 2015. Cost savings from cloud migrations are expected to be between 25 and 50 per cent.

In other work, the TechAmerica Foundation created the Commission on the Leadership Opportunity in US Deployment of the Cloud (Cloud 2), which brought together representatives of 71 cloud providers, cloud users and other businesses involved in enabling cloud deployment, including Microsoft, Salesforce.com and SAP. The Commission was charged with producing recommendations on how governments could adopt cloud solutions and remove regulatory barriers or policies which might hinder these cloud deployments. In addition to a major report outlining these recommendations, it published a Cloud Buyer’s Guide for government (www.cloudbuyersguide.org), which outlines best practices for cloud procurement.

Jacqueline Vanacek, SAP vice president and cloud computing evangelist, was a deputy commissioner on the Cloud 2 Commission, and says while the ‘Cloud First’ policy “acts as a rallying cry and single point of focus for the government”, cloud initiatives were already underway.

“Because they are so cash-strapped, many agencies in the Federal Government have been compelled to look for more cost-effective solutions to do their work. So they have been considering different cloud services and deployment models,” Vanacek says. “There has been an ongoing emphasis on driving down the cost of IT through a series of steps, starting with data centre consolidation, then migration to the appropriate cloud deployment models.”

The release of draft reference architecture for cloud computing from the National Institute of Standards, which provides a standard for cloud service and deployment models, has “absolutely galvanised the world”.

“That’s really excellent to create a starting point from

“Agencies that require the highest level of security for their work will build their own ecosystem of private or community clouds.”

Jacqueline Vanacek, SAP VP and cloud computing evangelist

which we can have an international dialogue about the cloud opportunity. I just returned from Kazakhstan, where I met with government officials to advise on cloud to modernise government and stimulate their economy. They are Central Asia’s economic powerhouse, who can influence their entire region via their cloud investment. They are yet another example of the impact cloud can have around the world,” Vanacek says. [Note: You can read about Vanacek’s Kazakhstan experience in her article in Forbes: www.forbes. com/sites/sap/2012/09/26/cloud-paves-the-new-silk-road-forkazakhstan-in-central-asia/.]

So given this strong push towards cloud, how is the US tackling the common concerns about security and managing risk?

“To do business with the US Federal Government, there are requirements in procurement and security authorisation according to the new FedRamp Program. So vendors have to develop their business to become approved government solution providers, if they’re not already in compliance,” Vanacek says. “The state and local governments in the United States are not quite so bound by those rules; however, if certain vendors are already compliant with FedRamp, then states are comfortable choosing those vendors.”

In addition, selecting the right cloud model for the level of security required by the agencies is also crucial.

“Agencies that require the highest level of security for their work will build their own ecosystem of private or community clouds,” Vanacek says. “Promotional work or citizen outreach by agencies can be done in the public cloud like that provided by Amazon, because the level of scrutiny for the data is not a concern as it is for the defence-based agencies.

There are some issues with adoption however – including data jurisdiction issues and a mismatch in procurement processes.

“One of the problems is that the procurement process, which is fairly labour intensive, doesn’t support the ability to take out your credit card and buy infrastructure on Amazon in a matter of minutes. There’s a big gap between the way procurement gets done and the way cloud services can provide instant IT access,” Vanacek says.

But assuming these challenges can be overcome, what might the cloud environment look like for government in the US in three to four years?

“We’ll have a patchwork adoption of cloud across agencies for different kinds of workloads. I’m very optimistic about the discussion around how to drive economies of scale with a standard cloud architecture or a cloud ecosystem. This way, federal agencies can share resources and leverage standards

where they most benefit, but those agencies with unique requirements, as for security, can have their needs met as well via a separate deployment,” Vanacek says.

And while it may seem like Australia is a long way from gaining this type of momentum on cloud, research indicates otherwise, she says.

“Our sentiment analysis clearly shows Australia as one of the four leading voices in the cloud conversation online.”

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Case study: Recovery.gov The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 mandated an official US Government website for information sharing to “foster greater accountability and transparency in the use of funds made available in this Act”. It is a public information site where citizens can look up how their tax dollars were spent in the economic stimulus package.

It was the US Federal Government’s first solution to move to the cloud. The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board (RATB) adopted an Infrastructureas-a-Service solution because the cost savings over an on-premise solution were “tremendously compelling”. Multiple vendor applications, including SAP BusinessObjects Explorer for business intelligence tools, and Microsoft SharePoint for content management and global data warehouse, were implemented on the Amazon EC2 Cloud to facilitate time-based analysis and reporting. In addition, advanced geospatial analysis and mapping capabilities were implemented to allow users to explore their communities of interest for funded initiatives and other attributes like unemployment and diversity.

“Recovery.gov is a benchmark success for government transparency because it took only 22 days to implement from feasibility study to production. And making government more transparent through public disclosure of budgets and funding is a hot topic all over the world,” Vanacek says.

The move to the cloud resulted in both lower IT costs and the ability to add capacity on demand to support fluctuations in user access. The expected savings were about $750,000 during the current budget cycle.

Source: Cloud Buyer’s Guide

www.insidesap.com.au 33

TOP 10

2012 Top 10 Most Influential People in SAP How we found the 2012 Top 10 Now in its fourth year, the Inside SAP Top 10 Most Influential People in SAP has always sought to identify the top influencers in the SAP ecosystem, as voted by our readership.

To this end, we undertake a multiple-stage process to arrive at the Top 10. Through the magazine and www.insidesap.com. au, we called for nominations of those who had been influential in the SAP community over the last year, in three categories: yy Most Influential Community Contributors (for those who contribute to the SAP community through education, mentoring, technical leadership and so on); yy Most Influential Project Leaders (for those working for or on behalf of an SAP customer on SAP projects); and yy Most Influential Partners (for those in the SAP partner community).

Community Contributors Paul Hawking, Victoria University As SAP Mentor and SAP academic program director in the School of Management and Information Systems at Victoria University, Paul Hawking is no stranger to our Top 10 Most Influential People list.

With his wealth of knowledge around ERP and his growing list of industry accolades, it is no surprise that in 2011, SAP employed Hawking to develop a university curriculum for the new BusinessObjects 4 solution.

In 2011, Hawking also collaborated with fellow Top 10 member and SAP Mentor Tony de Thomasis to develop a new NetWeaver-based subject for Victoria University. It was the first time such a subject had been taught anywhere in the world.

Hawking’s knowledge of both the academic world and SAP afforded him a number of opportunities to present at various SAP and SAUG events in 2011. Hawking was also instrumental in enabling the SAP InnoJam to be conducted in Australia for the first time as part of the SAUG Summit 2011.

It’s easy to forget with his active contribution to the SAP community that Hawking is first and foremost an academic.

In addition to his day-to-day teaching responsibilities, he continued to promote a number of events designed to give students practical experience with SAP, including the Australian Universities SAP Dashboard Competition and the Supply Chain Simulation game – in 2011, taking these to the next level with more participants and greater involvement from SAP and industry.

34 Inside SAP magazine

Readers of Inside SAP then voted online for the nominee they felt was most influential in each of the three categories.

This reader vote accounted for 50 per cent of each nominee’s final score, while the remaining 50 per cent of their score was generated based on a submission by the nominees, covering a range of areas including significant projects undertaken during 2011, awards or recognition received, community involvement and other achievements demonstrating influence. Our highest scorers in each category were then named in the Top 10.

We would like to thank all our readers and the nominees for participating in this year’s awards, and congratulate our 2012 Top 10.

The Top 10 was published in the Autumn 2012 edition of Inside SAP. Last year also saw Hawking named as top contributor on SCN for the SAP University Alliance Program and as SAP University Alliance Program Outstanding Academic for Australia 2011, an award given in recognition of the contribution and leadership Hawking had demonstrated to assist Australian universities to incorporate SAP solutions into their curricula.

– Kirsten Wade John Moy, Australia Post As SAP user interaction and mobility architect at Australia Post, during 2011 John Moy worked as the SAP development architect for a new browser-based Point of Sale solution for 4000 Australia Post outlets. Yet, despite the demands of his day job, Moy still managed to find the time to become one of the most influential mobility experts in the SAP community. For Moy, becoming an SAP Mentor in April 2011 was only the first of many achievements during the year.

In September 2011, Moy and his fellow team members achieved second place in the SAP InnoJam event at SAP TechEd 2011 in Las Vegas for the ‘Do I Know You’ app. Moy had already developed two successful apps since the beginning of the year – the Android apps ‘myHelp for SAP Professionals’ and ‘NetWeaver UberGeek’.

Moy also presented at a number of high-profile SAP events in Australia on the topic of mobility. However 2011 was most importantly the year that firmly established him as one to watch

TOP 10 in the SAP blogosphere.

“You spend years consuming this material in various communities [like the] SAP community… just being able to give back and actually have people benefit makes you feel good,” Moy says.

– Anne Widjaja Tony de Thomasis, Acclimation Gaining inspiration from the 2000 movie Pay It Forward, a movie about doing good deeds for other people and then seeing those deeds multiply, Tony de Thomasis spent most of 2011 adopting the concept to help university students secure jobs upon graduation, in addition to his ‘day job’ as SAP NetWeaver practice lead at Acclimation.

At Victoria University, de Thomasis lectures and mentors fifth-year Masters students in SAP. Mentoring hasn’t just been beneficial for the students, it has also opened the door to new opportunities for de Thomasis.

“It’s amazing when you pay something forward how many strange things come your way,” he says. “I ended up getting picked to go to SAPPHIRE NOW in Orlando and I took the story of the course that I was doing to the Influencers’ Summit. They have a little get-together with some of the major influencers in the new SAP ecosystem and I found myself telling this story to [SAP founder] Hasso Plattner.”

De Thomasis presented at the SAP Run Better tour in New York and at SAP TechEd in Las Vegas, as well as numerous SAUG and SAP events in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne, and was part of the winning team for the first Innojam in Sydney.

De Thomasis also stresses the importance of maintaining hands-on experience in new SAP technology. He was able to run the first Solution Manager 7.1 course in Australia, and during the year, created Solution Manager roadmaps for over 20 companies in Australia and New Zealand.

– Kirsten Wade Adrian Everett, Everjoy Consulting If being the director of SAP recruiting specialist Everjoy Consulting wasn’t keeping Adrian Everett busy enough, his volunteer work for the SAP Ecosystem Foundation (SAPEF) certainly will.

In 2011, Everett founded and launched SAPEF, together with a number of the representatives of the ecosystem, as a not-for-profit organisation providing these companies with a unique opportunity to achieve their corporate responsibility goals by raising funds and awareness for Redkite, a charity focused on providing support for children and young

people with cancer and their families.

The SAPEF was formed specifically to run the SAP Ecosystem Regatta for Redkite, with the inaugural event held in November last year. It saw over 150 SAP customers, partners, suppliers and professionals come together to compete, network and have fun, but most importantly, raise much-needed funds for Redkite.

“Certainly for year one, we exceeded the expectations of what we were looking to achieve,” Everett says. “The inputs and feedback we got from the SAP ecosystem reflected the benefits of the work we did in terms of actually raising $35,000, which was a lot more than anticipated.

“Our target this year is to actually double our revenue figures to $70,000 for Redkite, and double the number of boats from 15 to 30,” Everett says.

Pulling together such strong support for a good cause is complementary to Everett’s day job, providing recruitment solutions in areas including SAP and business intelligence. 2011 was an equally successful year for Everjoy.

“Everjoy Consulting is continuing to achieve 100 per cent growth and we are reaching new markets constantly, which is helping us to expand rapidly,” he says.

– Kirsten Wade

Project Leaders Jennifer Vasseleu, NSW Government Department of Finance and Services Whether it was implementing SAP systems at Taronga Zoo, or providing IT services for financial and HR/payroll transactions in NSW Government agencies, Jennifer Vasseleu has thoroughly enjoyed the projects she has been involved in.

Beginning her career in HR and rising through the ranks to senior corporate services roles, Vasseleu was nominated for our Top 10 this year for “leading the SAP team for the implementation of the ServiceFirst SAP system for a number of years, resulting in a shared service system that supports over 30,000 people across multiple NSW Government agencies”.

As business development manager for ServiceFirst, a shared services provider within the NSW Department of Finance and Services, Vasseleu moved 12 agencies from various HR/payroll and financial systems to SAP over the last year.

In addition to building and rolling out the systems, there is a significant change management effort associated with such a significant program of work.

To assist with a successful transition, Vasseleu has focused on educating new users to ensure they are ready and willing to use the new tools.

Also critical has been taking the time to understand the needs of different agencies – essential to deliver an efficient solution that gives customers immediate benefits.

During 2011, Vasseleu has also contributed to growing the

www.insidesap.com.au 35

TOP 10 SAP expertise within ServiceFirst. She has mentored project managers in the ServiceFirst Enterprise Program Management Office, guiding them through SAP transition projects. She also conducted ‘Introduction to SAP’ workshops for a number of government agencies transitioning to a new system.

Internally, her achievements were recently recognised with two ServiceFirst Staff Recognition Awards, for ‘Responsibility’ and ‘Collaboration’.

– Freya Purnell Rebecca Hanna, Australian Government Department of Infrastructure and Transport Government has been a strong sector for SAP in recent years, and Rebecca Hanna has been involved in driving some key projects in several large departments.

Hanna spent most of 2011 at the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations (DEEWR), where she was responsible for growing and developing its SAP Human Capital Management (HCM) solutions.

This included implementing Performance and Development Management solutions, a Career Development Framework solution for IT specialists, and the analysis phase of a departmental Enterprise Learning solution.

Then in September 2011, she moved to the role of director of the SAP design, development and support team at the Department of Infrastructure and Transport, where two major implementations are underway – a performance management solution and the SAP BusinessObjects Disclosure Management solution.

“Our organisation is the first in the public sector to use Disclosure Management,” Hanna says, adding that being at this leading edge can be a bit daunting, with no other agency to share information or experiences with.

“There’s that fear of being caught somewhere between the sales pitch and the reality – sometimes it’s quite minimal, and othertimes it can have a massive impact,” she says.

“We’ve been lucky with this implementation, our partner has paved the way, and SAP has been very helpful and open to supporting us.”

Her move to Infrastructure has involved branching out from just focusing on HCM to managing all aspects of a department’s SAP solutions.

Many in the SAP user community would also know Hanna from the SAP Australian User Group. She served as a committee member for five years and as secretary for two years.

While she has stepped down from the committee, she remains involved with the SAUG as the HR Public Sector Special Interest Group lead.

“It’s quite a challenging role, but incredibly rewarding when all the pieces fall into place,” Hanna says.

– Freya Purnell

36 Inside SAP magazine

John Ansley, Linfox Logistics The Linfox Logistics business operates more than 3.2 million square metres of warehousing and nearly 5000 vehicles across 10 countries. More than 18,500 people are involved in delivering supply chain solutions to customers. As you might imagine, technology is a critical part of running these operations seamlessly, and John Ansley is the man in charge.

Ansley joined Linfox in 2009 with a wealth of information technology experience, having worked at BHP, SAP, EMC, Rio Tinto and Roche Pharmaceuticals, and is currently the president of supply chain solutions and chief information officer for Linfox Logistics.

The role of SAP at Linfox has come a long way since it was initially used in the back office areas of the company for the first time 13 years ago.

“It’s expanded now to be our major platform for both transport and warehousing,” Ansley says. Linfox has had, on average, a new go-live on an SAP solution every month for the last two years. “This has helped provide solutions to many of our multinational customers.”

Linfox continues to strive to find new ways forward for the transport and logistics industry. Under the guidance of Ansley, Linfox joined with a wide array of fellow industry partners and founding members SAP and NICTA, to form the SAP Logistics Living Lab. Opened in 2011, the Living Lab is dedicated to creating new information technology for the transport and logistics industry, and is the only one of its kind worldwide.

Ansley and his team have also created a three-year SAPcentric strategy to bring together many SAP and partner products. These products include SAP BusinessObjects, SAP TM9, SAP eWM, Ortec SCM, SNET Safety Suite, SAP HANA, SAP BW and SAP ECC6.0.

Ansley draws on his knowledge of SAP in his role as one of four Steering Committee members on the Australian SAP CIO Council.

– Kirsten Wade

Partners Gough Venter, Stream 2011 was all about stepping up for Gough Venter and Stream.

Venter, who is the Stream director of consulting services, led a team to secure a fouryear support contract for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC).

Winning the contract showed how Stream could take on the big names when tendering in large enterprise. Venter says, “I spearheaded the bid and then had to wear multiple hats, firstly

TOP 10 being the bid manager, then the account manager and support manager. Having an amazing team at Stream to support me made all the difference.”

The ABC, together with Stream, was awarded the SAP Customer Award of Excellence for Best SAP NetWeaver Project in 2011.

Other projects during the year included a large program in the mining industry in partnership with PwC, involving 14 Stream consultants and an innovative approach to mobility. In 2011, Stream also worked on further developing its support practices and processes, in tandem with achieving Gold Partner status with SAP. Venter puts Stream’s success over the last year down to a focus on growing its capabilities.

“We’ve always had smaller support contracts that we could manage on a case-by-case basis, but now, to get to this scale, we had to actually put ourselves in a position where we didn’t just manage support in an isolated way, we had to do it as a process,” he says.

Learning from its experience with the ABC and other support accounts, Stream has since hired some key staff and most recently a national support manager to “allow people to have a clear focus rather than wearing too many hats”. With the more structured approach, Stream is expanding its regional offices with some recent big wins in Queensland.

– Kirsten Wade Note: Since the Top 10 was announced in March 2012, Stream was acquired by Oxygen Business Solutions.

Stuart Dickinson, Oxygen Business Solutions As Oxygen Business Solutions’ general manager – consulting and solutions, Stuart Dickinson leads its team of 150 SAP consultants based around the country.

In 2011, Oxygen was rewarded for its innovative work at the SAP Customer Awards of Excellence, taking out the title of Best SAP CRM for its Integria Healthcare project, and Best SAP ERP with Channel for its work with Pacific Hydro. Among other projects during 2011 were an SAP Business All-in-One implementation at Trility, a graphical works scheduler implementation at Newcrest and an Amcor technical upgrade to ECC6.0. The company now has 12 awards to its name, and Dickinson couldn’t be more pleased with its success over the last year.

“Delivering a number of successful projects and getting our customers recognised through the SAP rewards process has been particularly satisfying, as has been continuing to drive our practice and add great team members to the organisation, so we will continue to grow and build,” Dickinson says.

Oxygen has also kept up with the rapid pace of change in SAP by launching several new capabilities during the year, including a technology partnership with Sybase Australia, the release of hosted cloud solution Oxygen on Demand,

and the launch of SAP Business All-in-One implementation capability in New Zealand. Oxygen was granted SAP Partner Centre of Expertise status for SAP BusinessObjects solutions across Australia and New Zealand, and became the local representative of the United Value Added Reseller Alliance.

Oxygen also maintained its activities in the ecosystem – through sponsorship and support of the SAP Australian User Group and the ‘Mastering SAP’ series of events with Eventful Management, and became a founding member of the SAP Ecosystem Foundation.

“The Ecosystem Regatta was a good example of the community starting to work together, and trying to put something back as well, and I’m hoping that we will see more of that over the next couple of years,” Dickinson says.

– Anne Widjaja and Freya Purnell Note: Since the Top 10 was published, Stuart Dickinson was named CEO of Oxygen.

Iain Macleod, CSC As CSC’s ERP solutions director, Iain Macleod has overseen a shift by its SAP practice to become a strong player in the government sector, particularly in the area of defence. During 2011, CSC won some major projects in this area, which it will be working on during 2012 and beyond, with Macleod heavily involved in securing these deals.

Another highlight for Macleod has been achieving wider engagement and coverage in the natural resources market, particularly in oil and gas.

On the agenda in 2011 for the CSC SAP practice were projects at INPEX, Superpartners, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, and Woodside, which included a mobility project.

While Macleod says Australia’s two-speed economy is affecting the SAP market as well as the rest of the economy, CSC is in something of a sweet spot, with its strengths in government and natural resources – sectors still travelling in the fast lane.

“Government are big investors in the next generation of business solutions, and in the SAP ecosystem we are seeing the benefit of that investment,” Macleod says.

In natural resources, exploration is ramping up around natural gas and coal seam gas, while commodity prices for coal and iron ore are making these operations more profitable.

“There’s a huge investment in new mines and infrastructure, and improving what is already there. The natural flipside is that it translates into IT spend, because systems underpin all that.”

For its part, CSC kept pace with these changes with a number of launches in 2011 – Infrastructure Utility for cloud in support of SAP solutions, built on Vblock Infrastructure Platforms from the Virtual Computing Environment Company, and a Mobility Solution Gallery that leverages the Sybase Unwired Platform.

– Freya Purnell

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Analytics FEATURE

Mastering SAP Visual Intelligence In this excerpt from his book, David McAmis discusses the move from BI to analytics, and the key workflow steps when using SAP Visual Intelligence.

There is an old saying that ‘the only constant is change’ and that is certainly true for business intelligence (BI). From the very first ‘green bar’ reports off mainframe data to mobile BI applications running off in-memory data stores, there has been tremendous change over the past three decades.

Recently, there has been a shift to move away from business intelligence into analytics. To me, the difference between the two is that with business intelligence, organisations looked to turn raw data into decisionmaking information that they disseminated through the organisation.

With analytics, organisations are looking to discover meaningful patterns in that data, and use it to help improve their performance. There are many examples of where this ‘analytic thinking’ is coming into play. In the private sector, companies are looking to improve profitability and reduce costs, while in the public sector, for example, hospitals may be looking for ways to provide better care and reduce delivery costs.

This new wave of analytics has also given rise to a new breed of information worker – the ‘Data Analyst 2.0’. Up until now, data analysts would normally take multiple data sets (delivered through a BI solution or exported directly from the source system) and dump them into Microsoft Excel for further analysis. This scenario is played over and over each day, in organisations both small and large.

This is often referred to as ‘Excel hell’ and forces the data analyst into a role where they the majority of their time exporting data and manually updating spreadsheets.

The other limiting feature is that the data that is available is normally delivered through existing reports or export capabilities, so their view of an organisation’s data is limited to what has been made available to them.

With the shift to analytics, data analysts are looking for a better set of software tools to help them with data discovery, data enrichment and more. And in the market, there are a number of ‘point solution’ vendors who have created tools to try and capture this segment of the market.

Vendors like QlikView, Tableau, and so on have created tools to aid the new ‘Data Analyst 2.0’ to combine multiple data sets, enrich the data and visualise the results.

The only problem is that with a point solution, it is difficult to deliver this content to your entire enterprise and even MORE difficult to leverage the enriched data set for

38 Inside SAP magazine

ad-hoc reporting, operational reports and dashboards.

SAP Visual Intelligence is a revolutionary new data discovery tool that can be used to acquire, manipulate and merge data sources without any back-end ETL, database development or scripting. Supporting this new breed of information worker, Visual Intelligence enables data analysts to pull together disparate data sources and produce stunning visualisations and data sets, which can then be shared with others, including writing the data back to SAP HANA. This data can then be leveraged by the entire SAP BusinessObjects product suite, so users can create ad-hoc and operational reports from this data set.

When using SAP Visual Intelligence, the workflow for data analysts has four steps: Acquire, Enrich, Visualise and Share.

Acquiring data Visual Intelligence can acquire data from a variety of sources, allowing you to bring in multiple data sources from: yy SAP HANA yy SAP BusinessObjects universes yy Microsoft Excel files yy CSV files, and yy Relational databases (Sybase, Oracle, SQL Server, Teradata and so on).

Enriching data Once you have acquired a data set, the process of enriching data starts with defining the semantic elements in the data. Semantic elements may include measures as well as time and geographic hierarchies. Visual Intelligence can automatically detect these semantic elements or you can create them yourself.

You can also extend your data set by creating formulas and using the built-in functions that are included with SAP Visual Intelligence. Unlike other reporting tools, Visual Intelligence takes this enrichment a step further and allows you to manipulate the data set. For example, you may to create a custom grouping for products, or do a searchand-replace to change the data (i.e. replace ‘NSW’ with ‘Northern Region’). You can also merge multiple data sets together, mashing up data from different data sources into

SAP Visual Intelligence enables data analysts to pull together disparate data sources and produce stunning visualisations and data sets...

SAP Visual Intelligence can be used to easily visualise complex data sets.

one coherent data set.

This manipulation of data is an essential part of the workflow that a data analyst may have done in the past, only with Visual Intelligence that manipulated data set can then be shared with a wider audience to use for their own analysis and ad-hoc reporting.

Visualising data If a picture is worth a thousand words, then Visual Intelligence is worth a million. Using the built-in charts, geographic maps and tabular visualisations, you can create multiple visualisations by simply dragging and dropping dimensions and measures.

These visualisations can then be viewed as part of the document, or shared with other users via email or through SAP Streamworks.

Create geographical hierarchies and visualisations in a few clicks.

Sharing data sets and visualisations And finally, when it comes time to share your work, Visual Intelligence allows you to not only share the visualisations, but also share the enriched data set that you have created. You can publish this enriched data to SAP HANA, which then can be consumed by the other SAP BusinessObjects tools, including Web Intelligence, Crystal Reports, BusinessObjects Dashboards, Explorer and more.

Combine multiple data sets and share the data with other users.

Summary Using SAP Visual Intelligence, data analysts have a rich, interactive toolset that allows them to move beyond ‘Excel hell’ where they can acquire, enrich and share data like never before.

The independent magazine for SAP professionals

For more information on SAP Visual Intelligence, visit www.saphanaexperience.com.

David McAmis is technical lead – SAP BusinessObjects for PwC Avantis Information Systems. Mastering SAP Visual Intelligence by David McAmis is published by Kuiper Publishing (ISBN 978-0-9807458-9-4).

Enrich and manipulate the data to identify key trends.

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Automation FEATURE

Four Quarters to Accounts Payable Efficiency The Accounts Payable (AP) department has just installed the latest in technology, along with a best practice process for managing supplier invoices. Expectations to exceed the business case are high; executive support is ready to go; behaviours need to change, and AP needs to make it work. Where do we start and how do we meet the business objectives? Frank Volckmar outlines a framework for using these new systems to achieve AP efficiency.

On the face of it, using a new, automated AP system looks like a relatively simple exercise. Centralise processing, digitise invoice content, apply business rules, automatically workflow exceptions, save digital paper trails and evaluate performance against target metrics to identify opportunities for further improvement.

Most organisations do well selecting and implementing software and then struggle with using it well. Leading the changes from old business practices to new processes is challenging, particularly for first-timers asking for trained AP staff and business personnel to adapt.

Finance and AP managers need instruction on how to use the system to maximise organisational efficiency and to drive the changes through the business. Achieving a respectable return on investment (ROI) for investing in an automated AP solution, like any IT solution, takes a combination of leadership, influence, measurement, process improvement focus, coaching and drive.

The framework outlined in this paper may be executed in four quarters or could be done over eight to 12 quarters. It all depends on the organisation’s appetite for change, starting point, leadership and culture.

This framework is based on working with 10-20 leading organisations in Australia and New Zealand, each of which

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have achieved their goals at different rates, and have consistently said they underestimated the amount of change management required.

Achieving 50%+ straight-through invoice processing (STP) is the outcome most finance managers are looking for by implementing automation solutions.

Maximising STP requires a combination of factors: a high percentage of purchase orders to invoices; a culture of continuous process improvement within the finance department; optimising optical character recognition (OCR); pushing suppliers to submit invoices directly to AP by email; and adherence to process rules.

The journey to STP only starts once the proper tools are in place and the focus must be on learning to use those tools to maximum advantage. OCR and workflow integrated into the company’s ERP are the right tools. Teaching people how to use them effectively is the challenge.

The journey generally follows four stages: 1. ‘Building Accounts Payable capability’ by structuring AP team roles, metrics and skills to use the new system and focus on continuous process improvement. Acquiring these new skills requires a different team culture and the assumption that the current AP team members are able to adapt has been the cause of stress and pain for many finance managers. The hard decisions to move the business forward need to be made to allow change to happen.

2. ‘Living by the rules’ happens once the AP department has confidence in the new system and is comfortable with the

process changes. It’s now time to leverage suppliers to drive change within the business by starting to impose the new rules.

3. ‘STP automation’ is the process of continuing to tighten the rules, optimise AP processes and modify workflows based on feedback and from the business and learning. It also marks a shift by the AP team from “in the process” to “on the process” as they start to drive continuous improvement.

4. ‘Fine-tune’ the process by consolidating changes with all stakeholders, sharing successes and setting new targets for improving AP performance.

Four Quarters to Efficiency First Quarter Focus on building AP capability in using the new system, driving process changes and adapting to a culture of continuous improvement once the menial tasks are automated.

The key activity is redefining AP roles for efficiency. Roles need to be allocated according to skills and attitude, with metrics adapted to suit. Most teams benchmark weekly performance against invoices processed, invoices in backlog, suppliers optimised, OCR capture rate, invoice cycle time, approval cycle time and purchase orders completed in advance. Emphasis on particular metrics will change as the team improves and the bottleneck shifts, and they may also differ according to business issues. The bottom line is metrics need to be tracked weekly and the team encouraged to implement new approaches to improve results. This may result in changes to roles and the organisational structure, so reasonable flexibility is required.

With change comes the need to over-communicate. Suppliers and business managers will have questions and concerns that need to be addressed and they should be centralised and resourced by AP. Inquiries should be tracked by reason and the opportunity used to communicate the benefits of the change.

Communicate process changes and benefits to suppliers and the business, along with providing easy-to-follow instructions and training material, as required.

Second Quarter The primary focus shifts to working with suppliers to assist the business in living by the rules.

Trying to drive the change to a strong PO culture is difficult through internal influence. It is accomplished much more easily by offering suppliers consistent payment performance in exchange for submitting invoices with purchase order numbers, in a suitable OCR format, and by email. Let your suppliers request purchase order information from your business managers, rather than trying to force the change top down; it’s far easier.

Assuming suppliers have already been advised invoice processing performance is being improved, it is now time to formally communicate the following: yy Invoices received without purchase orders or containing incorrect information will be returned to the vendor. yy Invoices received by email are received and thus processed faster than those received by post. yy All invoices should be emailed or posted to Accounts Payable addresses, not to business managers, for prompt processing.

yy By speaking to Procurement, some suppliers may have an opportunity to improve terms in exchange for mutual benefit.

The AP department continues to optimise operations by benchmarking performance, optimising suppliers and tracking processing exceptions. Naturally a supportive dialogue with business managers while these changes are being made needs to be maintained and is necessary for identifying and evaluating potential improvements to further increase productivity.

Third Quarter All stakeholders should now be abiding by the new process and systems. The AP team is ready to enable and/or improve levels of STP of invoices. If comfortable, the team should now have the system only show capture and matching exceptions or errors to AP operators.

Invoice rejection practices introduced to suppliers and business managers earlier in the process should now be enforced. Some teams may streamline AP even further by asking suppliers to follow-up directly with delinquent approvers if reminders aren’t effective.

The AP team now has the benefit of nine months of operating experience. In addition, they have detailed information about exceptions (improvement options) to further refine or augment workflows to suit specialised needs.

Fourth Quarter The last quarter of the transformation is dedicated to consolidating all the process and behavioural changes by communicating and sharing benefits with stakeholders.

The AP team deserves special recognition for delivering business outcomes by completely transforming their culture from a reactive business component in the process to a proactive, process improvement-driven management team.

The AP team may continue to align resources to better suit the business and start looking further a field for additional improvement opportunities and setting new targets.

Next Steps AP team performance and productivity is greatly impacted by other processes and parts of the business. The next step is to look at these interfaces and improve the adjacent processes. The following options should be considered: yy Using a supplier portal to provide a self-help tool for suppliers inquiring about invoice status and payment date. yy Promote the use of purchasing cards (P-cards) for expenditures under $3000 to $5000, depending on your business. yy Reduce supplier numbers and improve the vendor master data management process to ensure all vendor data is correct. yy Once the process is running efficiently and supplier relationships are well catered for, the Finance team may start evaluating moving operations to lower cost locations, or considering outsourcing options.

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This is an extract of ReadSoft’s white paper on ‘Four Quarters to Accounts Payable Efficiency’ – download the full paper from www.readsoft.com.au. Frank Volckmar is Managing Director of ReadSoft Pty Ltd (Australia).

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Learning Feature

Digital evolution

drives the future of SAP learning SAP training programs must use the advantages brought by digital evolution in order to engage a new generation of learners, as Lynton Howes writes.

Let me share a story about the first time I taught a room of budding SAP users who were aged almost exclusively under 25. I had a great set of training materials – brief but engaging slides, and realistic but not overly-complicated hands-on activities. Shortly after I walked into that room full of excited, boisterous, Generation Y trainees and commenced the learning, I sensed that I had to immediately adapt my delivery style if I was to survive the day. Almost instantly I noticed that they could not leave their smartphones alone, nor could they resist surfing the internet whenever there was a spare moment. Yet somehow when I questioned them it didn’t seem to affect their learning or recall. They were lightning quick with the system, collectively chatty and relentlessly questioning me on topics other groups would typically just accept.

Let me also share some trends. Infographics are in; lengthy descriptions are boring. LMS2.0 is in; the old LMS format is dated. HTML5 is in; Flash is soon to be a relic.

Hybrid learning is in; blended learning is old-school. And mLearning and social media-enabled learning platforms… well, they’re just plain new!

The digital age is whistling us along at a phenomenal pace, making it hard to believe that most of the technology we take for granted today was absent 20 years ago. And it’s offering up new tools to dramatically increase the effectiveness of SAP learning programs just as quickly.

This article will explore how these advances translate into the latest developments in systems learning, and how these can be applied to SAP learning programs to yield optimal learning outcomes, and hence maximum success and costeffectiveness for the project.

Different strokes for different folks A teaching revolution is happening in our schools and universities, as the recognition that digital natives – those who have spent their entire lives surrounded by all the toys and tools of the digital age – actually think, process information, and learn differently (Prensky, 2001). They like their information fast and furious, are prodigious parallel-processors, prefer to scan than focus, and prefer graphics over text (think Instagram, Pinterest and infographics). This generation is now entering the workforce in droves, triggering a corporate learning revolution, as I experienced first-hand. If you’re a digital immigrant (someone who has adapted to the digital

42 Inside SAP magazine

environment) and have a stake in delivering training programs, it’s critical to be aware of the requirements of this group and provide suitable learning offerings, in the same way that you must if you are catering to a group of more mature users. The key is choice – providing learning options so that users can gravitate towards those which they find most enjoyable and effective.

The eLearning evolution: good and becoming excellent eLearning materials – developed for the large screen (desktop or laptop) – are becoming more powerful and widespread learning aids, as software providers compete to make the development of rich, interactive materials easier (and cheaper) to develop. Realistic, natural-sounding avatars walk the learner through engaging content which emulates a personal training experience, and can include content branching based on the (real-time) assessed level of the participant, customised feedback, and game-like quizzes for effective assessment (which feeds directly through to a Learning Management System). For SAP end-user training, the future is very bright for eLearning, as most organisations won’t be doing away with desktop computers any time soon.

The mLearning revolution: a rising star, despite the challenges In terms of the latest developments and the potential for widespread adoption, mobile learning is where the real action is at. The extraordinary advances in mobile devices in the last 10 years have cemented their place in our digital future. We are at the very cusp of an mLearning revolution, due to the ubiquity of mobile devices (that is, tablets and smartphones), the fact that nearly everyone is “wearing” one at all times, and the huge potential they bring in terms of functionality. Think of apps for these devices, which make use of accelerometers, cameras, eyetracking, geolocation, and so on, and how the features of today’s mobile devices can be imaginatively applied to learning. They are allowing us to create entirely new ways of learning. This huge growth potential is the reason why software such as Adobe Captivate and Articulate Storyline is being rushed to market with new versions which can publish directly to HTLM5 (the latest version of HTML, which permits greater interactivity).

It’s moving away from the classical ‘push’ approach towards a more effective ‘pull’ learning styles, and empowering users to create support content and organise learning groups themselves.

There are challenges, though – not all features of HTML5 are supported by even the most modern browsers.

Apple devices, which represent 35 per cent of the smartphone market (Sadauskas, 2012) and 75 per cent of the tablet market (Griffith, 2012), do not support Flash, meaning that shockwave (.swf) files, a common publish format from screen capture software, will not work – hence the rush towards HTML5.

Critically, mobile learning content must be created for mobile devices – it cannot be simply converted from eLearning content. From a technical perspective, this is due to screen resolution variance, the different interaction methods between mouse clicking and finger-tapping, and the size of finger tap areas. More importantly, mobile learning is a different learning experience, suited for shorter sessions which yield small chunks of information, accessed at the moment when it is required. It permits untethered, anywhere, anytime learning – perfect for recapping concepts while waiting for the bus or just-in-time quick reference on the job.

Social learning: more pull, less push While eLearning and mLearning are opening up new possibilities for training effectiveness, there is one key ingredient missing – other people. Informal learning, or social learning, is about the learning that goes on outside of formal learning, and involves reading, listening, watching, or talking to others. A good example of this is when you receive an error message when using SAP, and ask a colleague for help to try to quickly resolve it. If a colleague is not available, you might Google the error message. The logical extension of this is to use the new tools available, such as wikis (for knowledge bases), Twitter or discussion forums (for information-sharing and problem-solving), or a dedicated social media platform, such as Elgg, to enable a more participative, social and collaborative learning ecosystem. New generation Learning Management Systems, dubbed LMS2.0, which are learner-centric rather than provider-centric, integrate well with the tools mentioned above.

It’s about moving away from the classical ‘push’ approach towards more effective ‘pull’ learning styles, and empowering users to create support content and organise learning groups themselves. When this occurs, user engagement and adoption follow.

Bringing it all together for maximum benefit Yet, nothing can enable and empower the learning experience like a great trainer. The technical tools and devices deepen the learning experience during delivery, and cultivate the learning once the classroom training is complete, but a great SAP trainer bridges the gap between people and systems, interprets all the information that’s ‘out there’ and contextualises it clearly.

At Adapt2 Consulting, we believe that there will always be a place for human interaction in training, especially SAP training, where the learning of particular transactional tasks is typically integrated with complicated processes.

Using great trainers and the latest educational tools delivers more rewarding, engaging, efficient and truly hybrid learning experiences, as well as catering for a range of learning styles.

This ensures engagement and adoption of the system by users, so that the capital investment delivers a prompt return on investment. If you are investing in the latest SAP features, such as HANA, portal-based ECC access, mobility solutions, and BusinessObjects, shouldn’t you be looking to complement that technology with the very latest in learning methods?

Alternatively, you may be looking to run your ‘business as usual’ training more efficiently. In either case, maximum benefit will be realised by those who can adapt to these new tools quickly and effectively. Adapt to the digital evolution.

The independent magazine for SAP professionals

References Griffith, C. (2012, March 20). The Australian/AustralianIT. Retrieved from The Australian: http://www.theaustralian. com.au/australian-it/apple-set-to-maintain-lead-with-newipad/story-e6frgakx-1226304501543 Prensky, M. (2001). Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants. On the Horizon.

Sadauskas, A. (2012, May 17). smartcompany/industry.

Retrieved from smartcompany: http://www.smartcompany. com.au/information-technology/049728-google-androidcaptures-half-of-the-australian-smartphone-market-asapple-iphone-sales-slip.html Lynton Howes is a director of Adapt2 Consulting. Together with his business partner, Marié Lambrechts, they have over 20 years of experience delivering innovative change and training programs for SAP implementations across a diverse range of organisations and industries. Follow Lynton on Twitter at @adapt2consult.

www.insidesap.com.au 43

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46 The independent magazine for SAP professionals

SAP case studies From implementing comprehensive management platforms to complex data migration efforts, the case studies in this edition discuss how organisations large and small are using SAP solutions to achieve their objectives.

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50

EPA Victoria: A platform for modern regulation

49 Frucor Beverages: ASG improves operational visibility and transparency

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50 Mercedes-Benz USA: Moving test data into the fast lane 52 Australand: ‘Boring’ data migration – just what the property developer ordered 55 Kimberly-Clark: Unifying ERP across nine Asian countries 56 Vale Australia: Extracting value from information assets

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www.insidesap.com.au 45

EPA Victoria STUDY CASE

A platform for modern regulation Project scope Scope for Phase 1 yy Customer Service yy Approvals (licence, RD&D, Works Approval, 30A) yy Operations (e.g. inspections, desktop assessments, remedial notices) Scope for Phase 2 yy Sanctions yy Investigations and Prosecutions yy Landfill Levy yy Annual Performance Statement for Licences yy Approvals (groundwater, audit report, referrals, waste) yy Waste Transport Certificates yy Financial Assurance

The Environment Protection Authority (EPA) Victoria has recently gone live with the first phase of a major SAP project to support its compliance and regulatory activities. Freya Purnell reports.

Background The Environmental Protection Authority (EPA) Victoria is a statutory authority which reports to the Victorian Parliament through the Minister for Environment, Climate Change and Innovation. Its role is to be an effective environmental regulator and an influential authority on environmental impacts.

In 2010, a report by the Victorian Auditor-General found that poor information practices were hampering the agency’s compliance and enforcement practices.

Following this report and the appointment of new chief executive John Merritt, EPA Victoria embarked on an organisational reform program focused on transforming the authority’s services, processes, systems and

46 Inside SAP magazine

information management, with the aim of better aligning EPA’s operations to compliance and enforcement activities.

This would improve its overall productivity internally as well as externally.

SAP ANZ general manager, state and local government, Kal Marshall, says one of the findings of the AuditorGeneral’s report was that the authority had transferred many of its responsibilities to the private sector.

“One of the reasons they had given up so much of the regulatory responsibility was that the processes and systems they had didn’t support the real world that they needed to live in,” Marshall says.

EPA Victoria needed new systems to underpin its refocused mission, and so conducted an RFI/RFP process,

“It is really leveraging our case management capabilities, some public sector collections and disbursements technology and pulling all that together into a regulatory reform package.”

Kal Marshall, general manager, state and local government, SAP ANZ

with SAP Australia and Extend Technologies selected to work on the project.

Because the reform program will underpin EPA for the next 20-30 years, the authority needed to future-proof its processes, and take advantage of the latest technologies to gain an integrated and holistic view of its clients, stakeholders and communities to help deliver on its objectives and improve organisational performance.

SAP CRM was selected as the cornerstone of the reform program to support EPA Victoria’s move to being a “modern regulator”, according to Carl Muller, EPA Victoria business services reform manager.

“SAP would provide the tools we need to manage the majority of our core regulatory work and how we interact with the community, business and stakeholders,” Muller says.

“The project was really to review and replace our existing and ageing systems, to refine the access to information that is available to us, and integrate our processes to really improve data and information management.”

Max White, managing director of Extend Technologies, says EPA Victoria selected SAP because of its global track record and reference sites, with the new CRM 7 solution providing “the icing on the cake”.

“This was probably one of the first times it had been seen and offered in Australia,” White says.

Phase-by-phase implementation The solution is based on SAP CRM 7.0 EHP1 with Investigative Case Management (ICM), Portal, Business Warehouse, BusinessObjects and SAP ERP, and is being implemented in two phases. The first phase went live at the end of July 2012. The SAP CRM solution supports EPA in the execution of its duties and centres around customer service, core approvals and licensing, compliance inspections and the generation of regulatory notices.

“Our first phase was really putting in the footprint of the SAP CRM tool. It covers how we manage and deliver our compliance activities, such as undertaking field inspections of a site, and how we respond to pollution events,” Muller says.

In the second phase of the project, the solution’s footprint will be expanded across the organisation.

This phase will include the implementation of the SAP Investigative Case Management module and the expansion of EPA Victoria’s external-facing self-service portal, and is

due to go live in early 2013. “[This phase will cover] how EPA manages relationships with external parties, how we manage our internal planning and monitoring of our regulatory activities, and we’ll be expanding our compliance activities to include our prosecution process,” says Muller.

The SAP solution being implemented integrates with existing systems, standardises processes and streamlines operations.

“As the EPA evolves, the system will be required to evolve as well, and this is where Extend and NTT DATA Group’s expertise will come into play,” White says.

According to Marshall, the opportunity for the EPA now arises from “a coordination of processes and of workflow, document management, calendaring, and embedding quality cash management into their processes”.

From SAP’s perspective, it is a core system of government, as distinct from the traditional SAP strengths of the back office of HR, Finance and Payroll.

“This is a very different system for SAP to be involved in, although we are doing more and more of these. But it is really leveraging our case management capabilities, some public sector collections and disbursements technology and pulling all that together into a regulatory reform package for the EPA,” Marshall says.

Managing the challenges of transformation The project is a particularly significant change management and transformation undertaking for the EPA Victoria. White says the nature of government, in terms of a commitment to consultation, brought some challenges to the project, particularly with the pressures of delivering such a comprehensive solution in around 16 months.

“When you’re in such a big transformation project, getting outcomes is really the order of the day, rather than talking about process all the time. That was initially pretty hard, but we have brought them along,” White says.

Both Marshall and White credit the strong engagement of EPA Victoria’s leadership, particularly CEO John Merritt, with the success of the project to date.

“With the way the key stakeholders have embraced the system, they now have a wishlist that’s fairly long in terms of other functionality that they would want to turn on for their users and for their customers. That will see us continue a very close relationship for many years to come as they take advantage of more functionality,” White says.

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The Urban Matters initiative

Organisational results The capabilities already implemented in the project’s first phase already represent a significant turnaround for the department.

“They can now bring up information when they get phone calls, state the policy, state the regulations and provide the right information. In terms of user confidence and morale in the department, it’s probably at an alltime high, according to the CEO,” White says. “An EPA inspector can now be on the road and do a couple of site inspections a day, whereas before they might do one a fortnight. So from a productivity point of view, it is an enormous gain simply through automating the processes, and moving all the paperwork into the system.”

From a ‘big picture’ perspective, the transformation program will help support EPA’s effective and accountable environment regulation.

“We’ll see an improvement in compliance management, both from licenceholders and EPA’s management, and an improvement in environmental issues resolution, so we’ll be able to target our efforts,” Muller says. “We should also see an improvement to the service we provide to the community of Victoria, industry and government, primarily through improved productivity and increased confidence. We should really see EPA being able to support the realisation of a healthy environment for Victoria through identifying and targeting environmental risks, and being able to provide accessible advice to both community users and industry.”

While Muller says they are already monitoring the benefits realised in the first phase, these broader benefits are expected to accumulate over time.

“I think over time we will see those benefits realised in anywhere from six months to a year-plus, after the solution really gets bedded down and people start to see the benefits of what the solution and the data can provide.”

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48 Inside SAP magazine

SAP ANZ’s Kal Marshall says the development of the EPA’s platform for a regulatory framework also has huge potential to be applied across other government agencies.

“Fundamentally the work of any government agency that is a regulator is a common set of practices. We are doing another implementation at the Department of Primary Industries, and it is a platform for the regulation of commercial and recreational fishing,” Marshall says. “It fundamentally uses the same technology base as case management. You can look at health department inspections, social welfare, there are many different areas we can apply this technology to.”

The project with EPA is part of SAP’s Urban Matters program, an initiative which was launched in May, with the primary focus to help urban governments – in Australia, state and local governments – deliver better-run cities. Within this strategy, SAP addresses five key aspects: supporting the fundamentals of good government; empowering public officials to be more productive; increasing community engagement and openness; driving innovation around government service delivery; and improving urban resilience to help ensure public safety and security.

“It acknowledges that technology needs to support a much better integrated set of business processes to better serve the new wave of citizens coming through, and that when a citizen engages with their local government or their state government, they shouldn’t really have to identify themselves and fill in forms and write down their name and address because the agency should already know who they are,” Marshall says.

Under the Urban Matters banner, SAP has started work with Accenture on implementing a new ERP, asset management and HR/Payroll platform for Brisbane City Council, and discussions are underway with governments in each state about potential projects in areas such as human services, tax and urban management, public safety and security, and multi-agency situation awareness.

“There is a fresh awareness that we are moving very seriously into the core business of government,” Marshall says.

In the future, SAP hopes the Urban Matters initiative will help governments to improve citizens’ engagement with them.

“It really is that simple. If you walk in the doors of a government agency to identify yourself, and they know who you are, that should provide a very different experience for constituents,” Marshall says. “Fundamentally if you look at government, it’s getting many of the public service people out of the back office and into the front line of service delivery, because if you just look at the EPA example, the productivity gains through automating their processes is not one or two times, it’s five to ten times. But it’s a long and slow process in government in Australia.”

Beverages CASEFrucor STUDY

ASG improves operational visibility and transparency for Frucor Frucor Beverages is the market leader in energy drinks in Australia and New Zealand. It also makes fruit juices, fruit drinks, pure waters, sport waters, soft drinks and milk drinks.

Frucor’s Australian operation is a $200 million business that produces between 80 and 85 different lines and moved approximately eight million cases of product in 2011. The business operates from four 5000m2 warehouses in Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria and Western Australia. Frucor also has two warehouses in New Zealand.

The challenge Frucor was already using SAP ERP for routing, goods issuing and billing in Australia and New Zealand. While its New Zealand warehouses had implemented SAP’s Warehousing Module (WM), Frucor’s Australian warehouses were essentially manual operations – resulting in management lacking full visibility of stock at warehouse level.

As Brendan O’Connell, Frucor’s northern logistics manager, says: “It was evident that we needed a more robust warehousing system that would allow us to embed strong standardised processes across the country and form a stable platform to accommodate future growth.”

Other requirements included: information about shelf-life expiry dates, traceability, the ability to accommodate specific customer requirements, more accurate stocktaking and greater efficiency. The first decision, however, was to determine which warehousing system would be best for Australia; whether to use SAP’s WM, as the New Zealand operation had, or opt for a different system that would connect with Frucor’s SAP ERP system.

SAP’s WM supports warehousing processes by making it possible to define and manage complex warehousing structures, optimise material flow using advanced put-away and picking techniques, and process goods receipts, goods issues and stock transfers quickly and easily.

To ensure work is performed efficiently and at a reasonable cost, warehouse staff require a simple, easy-to-view control of each individual process. SAP WM uses a radio-frequency (RF) solution, which provides fast, error-free data communication between the warehouse and the SAP system via RF terminals.

Frucor chose to use SAP WM because of its reliability and the ease of connectivity with the existing ERP system. Rather than emulate the New Zealand system, Frucor seized the opportunity to develop a brand-new blueprint and implementation for Australia.

After completing a pre-blueprinting exercise and building a business case in order to justify the necessary investment, Frucor invited three companies to tender. It chose ASG Group Limited because of its specialised logistics expertise and because it was a SAP Partner. Frucor was also keen to work with a local company rather than a large international organisation.

The solution The implementation timeline was tight. Planning began in January 2011, with all four warehouse managers involved and ASG providing insights into the WM capabilities. Frucor’s team was then able to compare current and future processes, confirm the blueprint and develop a fixed scope for the project. The final blueprint was approved in March 2011.

The plan called for ASG to build and test the system and use the Queensland warehouse as a pilot to go live in mid-May. If this project was successful, the remaining warehouses would be converted one by one, with completion in October.

Coincidentally, Frucor had also decided to migrate its SAP and business intelligence systems from New Zealand to Australia during this timeframe, with the actual migration taking place the week prior to the first WM conversion.

“We understood the risks involved,” says Barbara Ciancio, Frucor’s SAP project manager. “We knew our first warehouse would go live in a brand-new environment that may not be stable, but in the end the WM project was not affected.”

The Queensland implementation took place in mid-May as scheduled, with no interruption to processing. Staff left on Friday afternoon and returned on Monday to find cut-over completed.

However, it became apparent shortly after the Queensland implementation that refinements to the picking area were necessary. ASG’s advice was to optimise the picking area by splitting it into short-dated stock and long-dated stock.

ASG implemented this change in a ‘mini-cutover’ in Queensland and incorporated it into the WM for application in the remaining three warehouses.

The New South Wales implementation took place as scheduled in July 2011. Both Victorian and West Australian implementations were bought forward a month to August and September respectively.

“The project was delivered on budget and in a month less than the proposed timeline. This meant that we were ready in ample time for our peak summer season,” Ciancio says.

The benefits O’Connell says that the WM system more than delivers on Frucor’s wish list.

“Now we have full transparency and visibility across all our warehouses in Australia and New Zealand. We have strong standardised processes and a strong platform that will accommodate future growth, and we now have good shelflife visibility which allows us to better manage our customer requirements,” he says. “Finally we have a more efficient warehouse with optimised pick paths, better stock rotation and space management, and fewer errors in receiving and picking.

This, of course, leads to a better stocktake and an increase in general accuracy.”

This case study is sponsored by ASG Group Limited.

www.insidesap.com.au 49

Mercedes-Benz CASE STUDY

Moving test data into the

fast lane

Mercedes-Benz accelerates projects with required test data and saves 25 man-days annually on QA refreshes with Gold Client Solutions.

Mercedes-Benz USA (MBUSA), headquartered in Montvale, New Jersey, is responsible for the distribution, marketing and customer service for all Mercedes-Benz and Maybach products in the United States. MBUSA offers drivers the most diverse line-up in the luxury segment, with 12 model lines ranging from the sporty C-Class to the flagship S-Class sedans and the SLS AMG supercar.

MBUSA is also responsible for the distribution, marketing and customer service of Mercedes-Benz Sprinter Vans in the US.

The challenge In 2000, Mercedes-Benz USA implemented SAP Finance and Controlling, followed in recent years by Parts Logistics, Materials Management, Sales and Distribution, and Production Planning. With five business units running on two instances of SAP, the environment has become progressively more complex. The total SAP system now houses two terabytes of data, with pricing tables alone adding up to 400 million records.

With as many as 20 independent DEV or new implementations ongoing at any point in time, all with specific needs for fresh data, quality assurance (QA) refreshes were performed monthly. The refresh was

50 Inside SAP magazine

important because without updated data, developers would be forced to test in QA instead of DEV, slowing down projects. Yet refreshing the entire QA dataset for one project – the only option – would disrupt other projects that had already created their test data and needed the QA environment to remain stable.

“It was getting cumbersome to do a full refresh quarterly,” says Tom Lavin, Basis administrator at MBUSA. “We had to schedule regular system refreshes since different developers needed different pieces of data for testing. We had to perform a full refresh to get everyone what they needed.”

The primary issue caused by the refreshes was that they took the non-production systems offline for several workdays in the middle of the week, which would negatively affect ongoing projects. Mercedes-Benz wanted to be able to provide developers with the data they needed for testing on an as-needed basis while reducing the number of full refreshes required per year.

The company also wanted to be able to protect version information.

The solution After thoroughly investigating its options, Mercedes-Benz

“Having the ability to get a more stable QA environment was very valuable to us. We save six to seven man-days’ worth of time on each refresh – four times a year – which adds up to 25 days a year.”

Tom Lavin, Basis administrator, Mercedes-Benz USA

determined Gold Client Solutions from Hayes Technology Group would best fit its needs, allowing data selection on virtually any parameters developers needed between full refreshes. It would also allow the company to keep costs down by utilising existing infrastructure rather than purchasing new servers.

Another determining factor was Gold Client’s ability to maintain number sequences for entries such as sales data.

“If there is a problem in production, normally it can be difficult to recreate it in the QA environment,” says Lavin.

“With Gold Client Solutions, we can copy the exact data of the situation in to QA, right down to maintaining proper number sequences, and debug it there to discover the source of the problem. When we have a fix, we can promote it to production with more confidence that we’ve resolved the problem.”

Implementation took roughly one week, including training Basis team members on using the tool in day-today scenarios. The Client Construct part of Gold Client Solutions allows the company to refresh full master data in QA, while Data Echo provides the ability to select more targeted data for specific purposes.

When Mercedes-Benz upgraded its Service Parts Logistics system, Gold Client’s data refresh capabilities saved significant manpower. The team was able to build unit testing clients on the DEV system rather than having to create a full new QA system. Mercedes-Benz then used Gold Client’s intelligent data transfer capabilities to pull in a month’s worth of transactional data from production.

As a result, they were able to perform upgrades and required development while bypassing the need to build a full-size QA system until they were ready to test.

“That was a big success story for us,” Lavin says.

“Without Gold Client Solutions, we would have had to build two test environments, invest in a full-size copy of the production system and more than double our storage requirements, which would have been very costly.”

Mercedes-Benz has found other uses for Gold Client Solutions as well, such as assisting in efforts to reduce the number of transports between DEV and QA. With Gold Client Solutions, they are able to keep data current in DEV which allows for effective unit testing within DEV. This reduced the need to transport all changes to QA just for unit testing and decreases the number of transports overall.

The tool saves time for developers and functional users by letting them preserve custom testing data out of QA prior to a refresh. Those groups are now able to store custom tables before refreshes, and then restore them afterward. Before, the Basis team had to rebuild those custom tables manually.

“Word has gotten out that we can save data for them,” Lavin says. “It’s saving a lot of people a lot of time.”

Gold Client Solutions further reduce the workload on the Basis team with a feature called Data Snap. Functional users can define their own selection criteria, perform the data extract from the Production system and load QA or DEV– all on their own.

The business benefits Gold Client Solutions has helped Mercedes-Benz in several areas. Through its ability to pull master data, such as pricing, separately from the individual transactional data, Gold Client has significantly cut the time to deliver the data required by some groups. In fact, these groups can pull master data in less than an hour using the Gold Client Solutions Data Snap feature.

Faster problem resolution is realised as the developers can now copy the erroneous transactional data from the production system to the DEV or QA environment. The application fix can now be tested on exactly the same data that caused the error in Production. If needed, this transactional data can also be quickly reloaded in DEV or QA as the fix is further refined and tested.

Gold Client Solutions has improved the efficiency and overall time of QA refreshes.

“We’ve been able to reduce our time from three days to two days on refreshes, and the number of resources working on QA refreshes from four down to two,” Lavin says. “We save six to seven man-days’ worth of time on each refresh – four times a year – which adds up to 25 days a year.”

“Having the ability to get a more stable QA environment was very valuable to us,” Lavin adds. “We would definitely recommend Gold Client Solutions to anyone struggling with similar challenges.”

This case study is sponsored by Hayes Technology Group.

www.insidesap.com.au 51

Australand STUDY CASE

‘Boring’ data migration: just what the property developer ordered When property group Australand switched ERP systems, data migration specialist BackOffice Associates® delivered a Boring Go Live® data migration as promised.

AT A GLANCE Industry: Property Business Objectives: • Replace ageing and loosely integrated legacy systems • Migrate from Timberline ERP system to SAP® • Carry out custom integration of SAP RE-FX (real estate management) with CRM • Identify issues, and where possible, improve data quality during the migration process Solution: BackOffice Associates® Data Migration Solution Business Outcomes • Boring Go Live® data migration achieved in a timely manner • BackOffice Associates’ repeatable approach enables multiple dry runs before system go-live • Graphical view of migrated data highlights formatting issues early in the migration process Thrusting skywards in the heart of Melbourne is 357 Collins Street, a commercial building in the throes of refurbishment.

The project is being carried out by publicly listed Australand, one of Australia’s leading diversified property groups.

The 357 Collins Street project, which will see the 24-level building refurbished to an A-grade office with lower floor retail space, is routine work for Australand’s commercial and industrial division, one of three divisions of the company.

Not so routine for the property developer was a major refurbishment of its IT systems, which involved switching from an existing ERP platform to SAP. At the heart of that undertaking was a complex data conversion effort lasting 14 months.

The effectiveness of the chosen data migration solution, and expert consulting services provided by BackOffice Associates, contributed towards the successful data migration, and in turn, the implementation of the overall SAP system at Australand.

BackOffice Associates has a proven track record of delivering Boring Go Live data migrations. Australand business solutions manager, Anand Murthy, rates the company’s SAP implementation as one of the most highly successful projects he’s been involved with.

52 Inside SAP magazine

In addition to Melbourne, Australand has operations in Sydney, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide. Along with its commercial and industrial division, the 600-employee business has residential and investment divisions, the latter with 70 properties worth $A2.2 billion at the end of 2011.

It’s a complex business involving numerous trading entities, says Murthy, which requires a robust system that can support and grow with the business.

“It’s the nature of the construction industry that you have a number of joint venture partners and have to set up a different trading entity for each.”

The challenge As Australand’s business grew, its existing IT systems became increasingly fragmented and unstable, so the decision was made to move to SAP. “We wanted to focus our IT efforts more on improving business processes and realising associated business benefits, rather than just keep the systems running,” Murthy says.

Migration to the new platform would have been relatively straightforward – as straightforward as ERP projects can be – but this one had complications.

“When we first started on this project, we realised it wasn’t going to be straightforward because there were multiple sources of data – it wasn’t a straight conversion from our existing Timberline ERP system to SAP,” Murthy says.

“There was scope to also include our CRM system and Cognos reporting system, which contained a lot of additional data that had to be migrated.”

Ben Samuel, Australand’s design and data migration lead, could see greater potential for problems from the perspective of actually migrating the data to the new SAP system, rather than the implementation of the new SAP system itself.

“The scope of a migration project is measured by how many legacy systems you need to tap into,” Samuel says.

“The more sources you have to pull data from the more complex it becomes, and we had more than 20 legacy sources.”

In those circumstances, the demands on the data conversion team are greater than on the ERP consultants.

Maximising the chance of a smooth migration calls for finding practitioners skilled at both migration as well as system configuration and implementation.

As it turned out for Australand, an effective team was brought together and the process went as smoothly as they

“Having the right data in the right format is as critical as having the right system in place, and this was one of the most effective implementations I’ve been a part of.”

Anand Murthy, business solutions manager, Australand

could have hoped for.

Alongside Samuel, BackOffice Associates assigned one of its senior consultants to take charge of the data migration project, working with a handful of other Australand staff.

The solution The project’s scope was within the usual range undertaken

by BackOffice Associates, but one element of the job, integration of SAP RE-FX with SAP CRM, was unique.

“Australand uses SAP CRM to drive its residential sales, and it was essential that SAP RE-FX and CRM work together. But that had never been done before, so we were blazing a new trail.”

The quality of data the BackOffice experts had to work with was “mixed”. The most challenging were Timberline’s core records of as many as 600 Australand projects, only about half of which were current.

That data had to be extracted, then validated and cleaned, redundant records culled, and what remained, reformatted for usage in SAP. For Samuel, a 10-year SAP veteran, the key to a successful migration is in getting the business rules right. He says BackOffice Associates’ strength was its familiarity with SAP. “It was crucial that the BackOffice consultants understood

SAP because if they felt a business rule was not making sense, they could challenge it and say, ‘are you sure about that, because we have done it differently on other projects’.”

In addition to its SAP expertise, Samuel credits BackOffice Associates’ data reconstruction abilities, and focus on ensuring the project met its milestones, for its success.

“The skills of BackOffice Associates’ consulting experts helped ensure that our go-live was smooth and without many migration issues.”

Murthy says BackOffice Associates’ data migration platform was also key to project success, making it simple to do multiple data conversion dry runs.

“The beauty of BackOffice Associates’ migration platform is that you enter all your business rules and transformation rules once and then you can keep repeating the transformations – you don’t have to go back and revisit the business rules. That allowed us to do five rounds of data conversion testing with very little effort,” he says.

“Having the right data in the right format is as critical as having the right system in place, and this was one of the most effective ERP implementations I’ve been a part of.”

The final go-live was ‘boring’ – in other words, just as BackOffice Associates promised.

This case study is sponsored by BackOffice Associates.

www.insidesap.com.au 53

Focus on the Finish Line

Focus. The key component to tangible results.

ASG Group focuses on helping organisations achieve better business outcomes. With a comprehensive local range of SAP and Business Objects services, we cut through complexity to deliver measurable performance improvement. At ASG unrivalled SAP experience and industry knowledge combines with a practical problem solving approach and flexible engagement style geared to delivering results – day one.

ASG SAP Solutions. The finish line just got closer.

www.asggroupsolutions.com.au/sapsolutions E info@asggroup.com.au T +61 2 9026 8512

• Strategic Planning • Implementation • Upgrades • Optimisation & Integration • Application Managed Services

Kimberly-Clark CASE STUDY

Unifying ERP across nine Asian countries

SAP modules implemented

Kimberly-Clark needed to implement a complex enterprise resource planning (ERP) roll-out across nine Asian countries. Beyond uniting the ERP platforms and expanding business capabilities, broader objectives included replacing legacy systems and integrating ERP across the region to increase efficiency, promoting the adoption of common processes, and establishing KimberlyClark as an early adopter of best business practices and technology for competitive advantage.

Kimberly-Clark markets innovative health and hygiene products through three consumer products divisions (Adult & Feminine Care, Baby & Child Care and Family Care), a Professional Division and a Health Care Division. Major brands include Kleenex®, Wondersoft®, Viva®, Huggies®, Snugglers®, Kotex®, Scott™, Kleenguard™ and Tecnol™.

The challenge Kimberly-Clark’s South and Northern Asian divisions, which included operations in China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam, used a variety of legacy ERP systems which added layers of complexity to doing business in the region. The need was to unify the systems, but the great challenge was to be able to do it efficiently and successfully within the context of nine very different business environments, while minimising business disruption.

The project was viewed as an essential component to support the Kimberly-Clark Global Business Plan and was managed out of Australia. Lodestone Management Consultants was engaged to work on the project.

The business objectives Critical was to bring the necessary knowledge and expertise to the project so that it could be delivered on time and on budget, resulting in the broader business objectives being met, which were: yy Replace legacy systems and integrate ERP across the region

Finance and Controlling, Sales and Distribution, Materials Management, Production Planning, Plant Maintenance, Project Systems, Advanced Planner and Optimizer, and Business Warehouse.

to enable efficiency and synchronisation. yy Promote the adoption of common processes across Asia. yy Establish Kimberly-Clark as an early adopter of best business practices and technology for competitive advantage. yy Establish Kimberly-Clark as a preferred supplier via customer collaboration and superior customer service. yy Provide a business platform to drive aggressive top- and bottom-line growth. yy Improve trade promotion efficiency and effectiveness. yy Enable new distribution channel development. yy Drive supply chain efficiencies. yy Provide real-time information for timely, fact-based decision support.

The solution Lodestone provided consultants in many of the nine markets, as well as managing consultants based in Australia. Under the project management of Kimberly-Clark executives, the Lodestone consultants worked in a team-lead function providing the skilled resources that could mitigate the risk associated with a large and complex project.

The consultants in most of the markets were local.

Consequently, they had first-hand knowledge and experience with local conditions such as complex regulatory requirements. They clearly understood the impact that these conditions could have on the implementation of an international project, and were able to integrate all local requirements into the overall project.

ThThe Asia-Pacific SAP roll-out project was delivered according to the objectives, and within the allocated time frame and budget.

The benefits Since its successful go-live in late 2007, the project has delivered: yy Improved ability to effectively manage promotion spending yy Driven supply chain efficiencies yy Improved customer service levels yy Enhanced quality and visibility of business information, and yy Promoted best practices in Kimberly-Clark businesses across Asia.

This case study is sponsored by Lodestone Management Consultants.

www.insidesap.com.au 55

CASE STUDY

VALE AUstralia

controls

Extracting value from information assets Mining giant Vale is delivering an ambitious growth strategy in tough conditions. Controls Consulting unlocked their investment in SAP BW to provide a trusted decisionsupport system.

Vale is the second largest mining company in the world.

Headquartered in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Vale employs more than 134,000 people and operates in 38 countries worldwide.

Vale is the world’s largest producer of iron ore with record 2nd quarter 2012 output of 80.5Mt. In 2011, Vale posted outstanding financial results of operating revenue of US$60 billion and adjusted EBITDA of US$36 billion.

In Australia, Vale is committed to delivering on ambitious growth plans to be the second largest coal exporter in the world.

The challenge Global economic uncertainty, recent falls in commodity prices and increasing cost pressures make for challenging conditions in the mining industry.

“To support the growth agenda of the coal business, we needed to enable data-driven decision-making. Managing cost, capital spend and operational performance relies on accurate and timely information,” says Marcelo Poly, Coal Business IT Manager.

To this end, SAP’s Business Information Warehouse solution (SAP BW) was implemented at Vale Australia. However, following SAP BW go-live in October 2011, Vale Australia faced significant challenges with its new corporate reporting solution.

Deficiencies in report design and overly complex reporting tools created barriers to usage. Business end users found reports difficult to access and complex to use. Information was not readily available and significant effort was required to extract it.

Many reporting processes remained an exercise in manual data administration.

The situation resulted in poor adoption of SAP BW by the business. In spite of the substantial investment, the organisation still relied heavily on spreadsheets for reporting and decisionsupport. This created issues around data accuracy and integrity.

The solution Vale Australia embarked on a Business Intelligence (BI) Transformation Programme. “Given the strategic importance of information, there was an imperative to turn the situation around. Visibility of financial KPIs and operational metrics is paramount. You can’t manage what you can’t see,” Poly says.

Vale chose local BI specialists, Controls Consulting, to deliver the transformation. The credentials of Controls Consulting as specialists in SAP BI technology, with extensive mining industry experience, were decisive in the selection process.

The remit was to transform SAP BW into a trusted information platform. The programme objectives were to ensure the solution provided accurate data, user-friendly reporting tools

56 Inside SAP magazine

and fast query response times.

Vale required an information solution robust enough to ensure data integrity but flexible enough to meet the demands of a growing organisation and changing information requirements.

Taking a business-led and user-centric approach to the transformation, Controls Consulting, in partnership with Vale, implemented a number of process, data and technology improvements to the BI solution: yy Single point of access to information via a Reports Portal. yy Business metrics framework to ensure common definitions of KPIs across the organisation. yy Presentation layer redesign to simplify report interfaces and improve usability. yy Push reporting to post results to inboxes via automated email reports. yy Dashboards and scorecards to provide clear visibility of company performance. yy Self-service reporting capability to empower users to build their own (‘BYO’) query. yy User engagement through a ‘Power-User’ approach to champion the technology with the business.

The business results The BI Transformation Programme at Vale helped unlock the benefits of SAP BW without additional software licences or hardware costs. Leveraging the existing investment, Controls Consulting was able to: • Increase the number of BW users • Increase the BW report usage • Reduce effort required for manual data administration • Reduce the reliance on spreadsheets, and • Improve the timeliness and accuracy of information.

“The dashboards, web reports, portal and push reporting have improved the accessibility of information. A growing number of BW users and increasing report usage is evidence of the ongoing success of the programme. But this is just the beginning. We have a vision for embedding BI in the organisation, enabling a datadriven culture of decision-making at Vale,” says Poly.

In challenging times for the mining industry, SAP BW now provides Vale Australia with a trusted information platform to grow its business.

This case study is sponsored by Controls Consulting.

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From BI Strategy to Execution

om egy to

PwC Avantis combines the best of both worlds– the strategic planning and direction from the team at PwC, combined with the technical delivery of Avantis, the leading SAP BusinessObjects partner in Australia for over a decade. This winning combination means we can deliver BI and analytics, from strategy to execution.

Business Intelligence Strategy Our BI Strategy services are designed to give you a roadmap that you can follow to deliver actionable, analytic applications across your entire organisation. Our services for BI Strategy include an initial design or refresh of your enterprise BI strategies and roadmaps. We will work with your organisation to define the business needs that are driving BI effort and investment, providing ‘current state’ assessments and ‘future state’ recommendations and roadmaps.

Business Intelligence Implementation Our BI Implementation services have been designed to implement strategic BI solutions, without breaking the bank. As a long-standing SAP BusinessObjects partner, we have helped organisations of all sizes make the most of their investment in SAP BusinessObjects.

We offer expert technical training and consulting for SAP BusinessObjects and SAP HANA, with a focus on real-world solutions. We believe that BI projects should be delivered in days, not weeks or months and our exclusive RABID methodology (RApid Business Intelligence Delivery) will help deliver real value to your organisation for less time and money.

So whether you are looking for a comprehensive BI strategy for your organisation, help with a new or existing SAP BusinessObjects implementation, or an innovative solution to your “big data” problems, PwC Avantis has the skills, experience and expertise to deliver a solution for you.

Our expert SAP BusinessObjects Services: • BI Strategy • ETL & Data Warehousing • Data Quality • Health Checks • Server Install & Configuration • Rapid Deployment Solutions • BI 4.0 Migration Services • BI 4.0 Training Services • BI Mobile Development • Report Development • Universe Development • Custom application development • Dashboard Development • SAP HANA Development • Hadoop Hive Integration • Sharepoint Integration

SAP Certified Training Partner Contact us for your BI 4.0 Training Catalogue Visit us online at www.avantis.com.au or call our head office on (02) 8404 4133 © Copyright 2012 PricewaterhouseCoopers. All rights reserved. “PwC” refers to PricewaterhouseCoopers, a partnership formed in Australia, which is a member firm of PricewaterhouseCoopers International Limited, each member firm of which is a separate legal entity.

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The independent magazine for SAP professionals

SAP service provider profiles Looking for a partner to assist with your next SAP project? In the following pages, service providers in the areas of software and solutions, consulting, application support, hosting, testing and quality management, and change management outline their capabilities.

60

Hayes Technology Group

62

Lodestone Management Consultants

63

Wipro Technologies

64 ASG Group Limited 65 Systems and People 66

SUSE

67 Esker 68 BackOffice Associates 69 Manhattan Associates 71 ReadSoft 72 Revelation Software Concepts 73 CSC 74 PwC Avantis Information Systems 76 Retarus 77 Harms Consulting 78 Interpro 79 Windsor Business Solutions 80 Compuware Corporation 81 Everjoy Consulting 82 Redback Consulting 83 TIK Consulting 84

Acuity Search

er ue

www.insidesap.com.au 59

COMPANY PROFILES

Hayes Technology Group, Inc. Founded in 1998, Hayes Technology Group specialises in SAP ® data management solutions. Businesses around the world choose Gold Client ® Solutions, our selective data copy products and services, to maximise the value of their investments in SAP. Gold Client Solutions reduces enterprise storage requirements, improves the quality and availability of test data, restores development integrity, and helps ensure data security.

Regardless of size or industry, all companies running SAP face challenges with data implications on the SAP landscape. Our industry-leading product, Gold Client Solutions, encapsulates Hayes’ core methodology to managing SAP data by maximising control and flexibility. The innovative approach of Gold Client Solutions dramatically reduces the amount of time and effort required to provide quality data by eliminating the need to copy the entire production database to nonproduction environments.

Data innovation Hayes Technology Group sets itself apart with its extensive data knowledge, proven experience and unmatched expertise in SAP landscape management.

Founded in 1998, Hayes Technology Group was established with the mission to provide top-tier technical consulting services to businesses using SAP. While consulting with some of the largest SAP environments in the United States, it became painfully apparent that there was a need for alternative system refresh solutions as SAP projects matured. In 2000, Hayes Technology Group developed and released Gold Client Solutions, a faster method and software solution for delivering better, smaller SAP data across the non-productive landscape.

Since expanding well beyond its foundation to reduce and copy select ERP data, Gold Client Solutions encompass data transformation, synchronisation and copying select data subsets on the most demanding SAP software solutions of ERP, HR, CRM, SRM, GTS and BW.

Data management, simplified Businesses must ensure that accurate data is available for development, testing, analysis, and training, while still protecting sensitive data. However, creating and updating non-production systems with good, reliable data is one of the most difficult challenges to overcome in an SAP environment. As the size of clients grow, the functionality of the SAP-delivered client copy process becomes increasingly inefficient, technically impractical, and expensive.

60 Inside SAP magazine

Gold Client Solutions relieves the costly drain of resources, storage and time that is required to manage, support and secure data across SAP environments. Our unique data management software allows teams to quickly select and copy subsets of only relevant data from production or non-production sources to nonproduction targets, with options to simultaneously scramble sensitive data and keep data subsets in sync across systems.

Gold Client Solutions can be leveraged in a number of ways with the benefits realised continually, resonating in change management, testing and landscape optimisation throughout the data life cycle.

Business value y y Reduce infrastructure and data maintenance costs y y Increase efficiency in development, testing, and training y y Mitigate security and privacy risk y y Diminish business disruptions Core benefits y y Reduce time and effort to provide data that matches current production data y y Maintain relevant, secure and accurate data for development, testing and training y y Eliminate production database copies used to furnish quality data in non-production environments y y Efficiently create and maintain smaller, fully functional environments containing relevant, accurate business data y y Decrease the data footprint of non-production systems y y Shorten production support, development and test cycles yy Protect data and manage compliance and regulatory risk y y Keep data in sync across the supported SAP landscape

COMPANY PROFILES

yy Migrate select business data assets to new environments Key features yy Create smaller, fully functional clients composed of reduced master and transactional data yy Flexible selection methods allow any criteria to identify data for replication yy Data is replicated with all relevant data, exactly as it exists in the source yy Protect sensitive data at export with extensive, extendable transformation rules yy Automated export-import of secure flat file transfer process yy Simultaneously copy relevant data on multiple SAP applications yy Selectively delete unwanted data in non-production systems yy Compare, synchronise SAP repository objects between environments yy No additional system, console or hardware is required yy Available for SAP ERP, BW, HR, CRM, SRM, GTS, industry-specific solutions, supporting all modules and custom tables Expert implementation and training by Hayes Certified Software Engineers is typically completed in only five days. The efficient process helps businesses quickly meet their goals and SAP project timelines. Additionally, annual maintenance program provides 24x7 access to our unparalleled global support.

Data migrations Hayes Technology Group also offers proven data expertise services for data transfers required for mergers, acquisitions and divestitures. One of the more dynamic, complex and valuable applications of Gold Client Solutions is when a company is divesting a business entity from an SAP environment. In today’s world, it is common for large corporations to divest or ‘spin-off’ specific business units. Due to the integrated nature of SAP, separating business data into two separate and differentiated SAP systems can present a complex problem.

Gold Client Solutions conquers this tremendous challenge by allowing the creation of scenarios identifying data by company code, sales organisation, purchase organisation, plant, warehouse, and so on. Only master and transactional data identified as belonging to the divested business unit is surgically targeted and exported. The exported data

can be used in establishing a new SAP system and client allowing the divested entity to operate separately from the parent organisation.

Through hands-on experience and successes, Hayes’ Business Data Transfers service offers a strategic process and best practices to accomplish this highly difficult challenge that is very manageable and achievable, for even the most complex SAP environment.

A proven solution Our customers have realised dramatic success with Gold Client Solutions. Here is a quick look at just a few: y y Mercedes-Benz USA saves 25 man-days annually on refreshes, and avoided the doubling of their storage, a full-size production copy and building two additional test environments. y y Northrop Grumman surgically exported limited nonclassified data from a classified environment to build and test a new protected system. y y Mentor Graphics reduced system landscape refreshes by 50 per cent, meets US-EU Safe Harbour privacy policies, and troubleshoots urgent production issues without disrupting business.

SAP Certified integration Gold Client Solutions has achieved SAP Certification as powered by SAP NetWeaver ®. The SAP Integration and Certification Center (SAP ICC) has certified that Gold Client Solutions integrates with SAP NetWeaver ® Application Server and SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse based on the ABAP™ programming language add-on. In addition, Gold Client Solutions has achieved ‘SAP Solution Manager Ready’ status.

Gold Client Solutions are available for use with SAP Enterprise Resource Planning (SAP ERP), SAP Business Information Warehouse (SAP BW), SAP Customer Relationship Management (SAP CRM), SAP Global Trade Services (SAP GTS), SAP Supplier Relationship Management (SAP SRM) and human resources (SAP HR) applications.

Hayes Technology Group, Inc. is a global corporation headquartered in the United States with a customer base of over 225 systems around the world. We are an Independent Software Vendor (ISV) in the SAP ecosystem and provide data solutions for companies, of all sizes and industries, which use SAP products.

E: info@hayestechnology.com W: www.hayestechnology.com

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COMPANY PROFILES

Lodestone Management Consultants Lodestone is a global management consultancy, committed to designing and delivering solutions that enable companies to thrive in today’s complex business environment. We help our clients to define the measurable business benefits that we will achieve together, using our teams of client-focused consultants, who combine a passion for excellence with strong process and SAP skills and deep experience of transformational change in their industry.

Originally established in Switzerland in 2005, Lodestone now has offices in 17 countries and over 1000 consultants globally, and counts some of the largest financial services and pharmaceutical companies in the world among its clients.

Lodestone Australia With offices in Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra, Lodestone works with both medium to large corporations and a number of Federal Government agencies to design, develop and implement solutions delivering measurable business benefits.

With a background in management consulting and program management, we offer advice to international corporations on devising innovative business operating models, on optimising processes and on implementing new technologies leveraging SAP.

Our people Our people are experienced and innovative with a proven track record of success. At Lodestone we have a passion for excellence; all our consultants strive to deliver beyond the expectations of our clients. By acting as their trusted adviser, we aim to establish long-term relationships with our clients.

Dedicated to continuously earn this trust from our clients, we deliver the highest possible quality in what we do.

One of the main reasons our clients choose Lodestone is because they know we will provide high-quality, hardworking teams of consultants bringing the right experience to the table.

merchant file import, vendor reimbursement, expense posting, dispute management and notification, alert and escalation procedures.

Certified in March 2012 by the SAP Integration and Certification Center, the EMS will be deployed to the customer base via Solution Manager, including all future patches and enhancements.

EMS features yy Web-based claim management and authorisation using the latest SAP technology Web Dynpro yy Easy-to-use expense allocation with expense code and cost object defaults yy Use of customisable expense codes to simplify G/L Account assignment yy Allocation to any SAP Cost Object, e.g. Cost Centre, Internal Order, WBS Element yy SAP standard inter-company posting function yy Use of Authorisation Groups to notify one or many authorisers for approval processing yy Alerts for unallocated items with multiple escalation levels yy Standard SAP screen customising to show only relevant fields specific to your business yy BW integration for multi-level reporting

Delivering unique solutions: the Lodestone Expense Management Solution The Lodestone Expense Management Solution (EMS) is an SAP certified add-on that streamlines a company’s expense claim process by cutting cost and overhead spent on manual processing and General Ledger reconciliation. Corporate charge card processing can be a costly and time-consuming exercise, often frustrating both the accounts personnel and the cardholders alike. The Lodestone EMS operates within your SAP environment and is designed to alleviate the pains of your monthly expense account processing.

The EMS is highly configurable and can be implemented and aligned to your existing accounting and expense business processes as well as your customised SAP ERP system. It gives you the ability to define your own levels of automation around

62 Inside SAP magazine

To find out how Lodestone can help your organisation, contact us today.

T: 02 8571 8300 E: info@lodestonemc.com W: www.lodestonemc.com

COMPANY PROFILES

Wipro Technologies With over $6 billion (financial year 2010-11) in revenues, 904 global clients, 135,000 employees and a growing global presence, Wipro (NYSE: WIT) is amongst the fastest growing global IT solutions companies in the world. In addition to our comprehensive capabilities across domains and technologies, the primary growth drivers for Wipro have been its commitment to its stakeholders in the areas of technology leadership, service delivery quality and process innovations.

Wipro is a leading provider of IT services, outsourced R&D, infrastructure outsourcing, business process services and business consulting for customers across Americas, Europe, Asia, Australia and the Middle East.

Why Wipro? yy Delivering technology-driven business solutions for the past 25 years

customers in the region and growing. These customers are being served by a team of 3000+ IT professionals based out of the region from the local delivery centres in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide. The Asia-Pacific region contributes to 9 per cent of our overall revenues and has been the fastest growing geography for Wipro.

This growth is a result of our sharp focus on industry sectors like BFSI, ENU, Telecom, Retail and Services backed with a strong track record of successful execution and the ability to deliver integrated solutions across various technologies, skill sets and domains. As a part of the graduate recruitment program in collaboration with Australian Computer Society (ACS) Foundation, the local hire is at 30 per cent and strongly growing.

W: www.wipro.com

yy 74 development centres, 900+ clients (with over 150 Fortune 500 customers), 135,000 employees in 54 countries, 70+ nationalities yy The world’s largest independent R&D services provider and the world’s largest offshore third party testing services provider yy One of the world’s top offshore Indian BPO service providers and the largest offshore technology infrastructure management services provider yy The world’s first PCMM and CMMi Level 5 company, and the first company outside the USA to receive the IEEE Software Process Award

Innovation at work yy A dedicated ‘Innovation Council’ that funds over 50 projects every year in areas of product, process and services innovation yy 50+ Centres of Excellence (CoEs) to develop domainspecific frameworks and solutions yy Plug-and-play technology IPs and patents to cut timeto-market for customers by over 20-25 per cent yy Factory Model and other collaborative delivery models for 20-30 per cent reduction in cycle-time from demand to delivery yy Platform BPO for quicker solutions deployment, scalability and transaction-based cost management For more information, please visit www.wipro.com.

About Wipro ANZ Wipro ANZ has been one of the key emerging markets for the organisation for over a decade now. We have strategic and long-term engagements with over 20+ major

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COMPANY PROFILES

ASG Group Limited ASG is a leading IT business solutions provider in Australia – customer focused and responsive. We match our highly skilled resources with proven solutions, partnering closely with our clients to help them achieve their goals. While our clients’ needs continually change and evolve, our focus remains constant – to continuously adapt and provide the best outcomes for our clients.

About ASG ASG Group Limited (ASX: ASZ) is an award-winning and wholly Australian-owned IT business solutions provider.

Established in 1996, the company’s goal is to provide innovative, high-quality and cost-effective services to its clients.

ASG has built up a wealth of knowledge in the IT services industry covering consulting, professional and managed services, hosted and cloud services. These services are used to deliver solutions across a wide range of technologies including Business Intelligence, Core Business Applications, Middleware and Technical and Hardware infrastructure. Committed to delivering tangible business outcomes for our customers, ASG’s approach is one of inherent flexibility. This, coupled with a ‘can do’ attitude, consistently delivers real results.

The ASG services portfolio is end-to-end, covering everything from strategy and business process design to performance and service level management, customer management, supply chain, enterprise solutions, knowledge management, governance structuring, IT architecture, information security, organisational change and business continuity.

ASG is proudly Australian with a national reach through offices in all major capital cities and over 800 dedicated staff. We pride ourselves on the size and reach of our local footprint and its ability to deliver robust, flexible, customer decision-driven outcomes in the Australian market.

ASG: A leading SAP solutions provider and Gold SAP Partner With SAP experience spanning more than 15 years and 100+ senior consultants, ASG currently delivers some of the leading SAP projects and services for high profile customers in Australia.

ASG is a SAP Gold Partner, a certified partner of the Run SAP methodology and holds accreditations in ERP, BusinessObjects, SAP Hosting, Maintenance and Support. These SAP partnerships provide ASG with a complete end-to-end solution offering.

We understand our clients’ needs change and evolve, that’s why our approach is one of inherent flexibility. ASG is more than IT services – our focus is business understanding, enabling your technology investment to match your business strategy.

With strong infrastructure capabilities, ASG delivers the benefits of various hosting and data centre services, giving you access to the cloud while keeping your data secure within Australia.

ASG: Delivering best technology usage for your business ASG’s proven approach and industry expertise invigorate leading SAP solutions to help you manage your business end-to-end from financials (including public sector agencies, trusts and funds management), human resources, payroll, corporate services, inventory, manufacturing, logistics, product development, customer service, sales and marketing.

Importantly, an ASG SAP solution can also aid organisations’ regulatory, treasury and environmental compliance, as well as providing vital business insights through a robust BI platform.

Our toolkit includes industry best practices which can be adopted as an ‘out of the box’ solution or be used as a baseline to kick-start specific customisation requirements. These toolkits are extended into the BI and mobility domain, giving you access to on-demand information wherever you are.

ASG: Value proposition yy ASG’s value model is simple – we use our expertise, knowledge, industry based experience and partnership with SAP to provide clients a low-cost, low-risk path to business optimisation with measurable outcomes. yy ASG’s expertise gives clients a strategic approach to information technology, combining the world’s foremost business software with a proven methodology to deliver faster, stronger, more efficient operations. yy ASG’s industry knowledge means our solutions build efficiency, flexibility and visibility into all aspects of your operations, while delivering reduced costs and reduced risk with an increased return on investment. yy ASG’s industry experience means we have probably already experienced many of your challenges in previous implementations and have identified the quickest path to business optimisation. Also, with a significant number of completed implementations, we are aware of potential pitfalls and can help clients avoid them before the implementation commences. yy SAP Best Practices, combined with ASG’s expertise and industry knowledge, accelerate the streamlining of your business model, making for an easier set-up and implementation. yy ASG clients are industry leaders, giving you access to solution referencability and peer benchmarks.

T: +61 2 9026 8512 E: info@asggroup.com.au W: www.asggroupsolutions.com.au/sapsolutions

Systems and People the SAP people specialists Since 1995, Systems and People have worked exclusively in SAP and the SAP resource industry.

Our team is comprised of experienced SAP, HR and Contractor Management professionals who collectively have over forty years of industry experience.

This is our competitive advantage – we have an in-depth understanding of SAP technologies; along with the industry knowledge, skill requirements and cultural competencies required to support successful SAP implementations.

Our extensive experience in the SAP industry means we have developed a vast network of the right SAP people to support our clients.

We continuously build on our knowledge of the latest SAP technologies by being active in the SAP and SAUG community, so we have the best possible understanding of our clients’ evolving SAP requirements.

We invest in education and technology innovation to deliver exceptional services to our clients and candidates.

With Melbourne and Sydney offices, Systems and People are able to service clients and candidates on a National level.

Our unique SAP service offering encompasses @ SAP Recruitment (permanent and contract) @ SAP Consulting @ SAP Contractor Management How we have helped our clients @ 1 day to 1 year SAP contract resources in core ECC areas and niche skill sets such as BI/BO, CRM, PI, Workflow and WebDynpro @ Building internal permanent SAP support teams @ On-hiring overseas SAP specialists via 457 sponsorship @ Contractor management of directly engaged SAP contractors and entire temporary workforces @ Sourcing junior SAP permanent staff with the right attitude to develop @ Supplying part-time and ad-hoc SAP support staff to smooth demand peaks @ Providing SAP leadership resources for key implementation projects @ Providing SAP documentation and training skills to ensure user system adoption @ Supplying SAP ABAP and Basis resources to back-fill for client projects

Unlock the true value of your SAP investment with the right SAP people Build your internal SAP expertise with experienced contract and permanent SAP resources Reduce your administration overhead with a streamlined contractor management and payroll solution

Systems and People Pty Ltd t 1300 897 820 f 1300 897 920 admin@systemsandpeople.com.au www.systemsandpeople.com.au

recruitment

consulting

contractor management

melbourne • sydney

SUSE

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. 速

The #1 Linux platform for SAP applications.

For more information, please call +61 2 8281 3400 or email us at Hamish.Miles@suse.com

Established in 1992, SUSE is the original provider of the enterprise Linux distribution and the most interoperable platform for mission-critical computing.

With a portfolio centred around SUSE Linux Enterprise, we power thousands of organisations around the world across physical, virtual and cloud environments.

SUSE grew more than threefold after it was acquired by Novell in 2004. Now operating as an independent business unit of The Attachmate Group, SUSE continues its unwavering focus on the benefits of open source and the needs of its commercial partners and customers.

More than 13,000 businesses worldwide rely on SUSE Linux Enterprise Sever. Enterprise Linux Servers from SUSE are some of the most versatile, reliable and best supported software infrastructure solutions available to deliver mission-critical IT services efficiently and cost effectively.

Designed for mixed IT environments and exclusively recommended by Microsoft, SAP and VMware, Enterprise Linux Servers helps you save time and money, increase resource utilisation and reduce risk.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP applications The only operating system optimised for all SAP software solutions: yy Faster installation to accelerate time to results. yy Maximised support to lower cost of operation and ongoing maintenance. yy Built in business continuity to protect critical business operations.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications is the only operating system optimised for all mission-critical SAP software solutions, including appliances. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications is recommended by SAP as a preferred Linux platform.

SUSE Linux Server for SAP Applications is based on the newest SUSE Linux Enterprise technology, a highly reliable, scalable, secure and optimised server operating system that is built to power physical, virtual and cloud applications. It is validated and certified

by SAP and is therefore uniquely positioned to support SAP software solutions, including appliances.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server Priority Support for SAP applications Deploy SAP on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and then get the enterprise support you need. This exclusive offering enables SAP customers to receive priority support from both SUSE and SAP. T: +61 2 8281 3400 E: hamish.miles@suse.com W: www.suse.com

COMPANY PROFILES

Esker Esker is the leader in document process automation cloud solutions for SAP. Esker solutions include end-to-end order to cash and procure to pay solutions and services.

Cloud solutions and on-premise software solutions include: yy yy yy yy yy yy yy

Sales order processing Accounts payable automation Accounts receivable and e-voicing E-procurement Enterprise faxing Enterprise mail services, and Customer Invoice Portal.

In Australia and New Zealand, over 1800 companies rely on Esker.

100+ SAP customers, and 100+ Esker on Demand customers, including BHP Billiton, OZ Minerals, Newcrest Mining, Orica, Visy, James Hardie, Bunnings, Tourism New Zealand, Sony, Sharp, Samsung and many local subsidiaries of global multinationals run their business on Esker.

Esker customers achieve significant operational efficiencies, cost savings and ROI while gaining visibility

and control within order to cash and procure to pay business processes ranging from sales order management and accounts receivable to purchasing and accounts payable.

Founded in 1985, Esker operates globally with more than 80,000 customers and millions of licensed users worldwide.

Since 1997, Esker ANZ has offices in Sydney, Melbourne and Auckland.

T: (AU) +61 2 8596 5100; (NZ) + 64 9 306 8872 E: info@esker.com.au; info@esker.co.nz W: www.esker.com.au; www.esker.co.nz

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COMPANY PROFILES

BackOffice Associates BackOffice Associates® is a worldwide leader in data migration and data governance solutions, with a concentration on enhancing data quality since 1996. Our range of products and services address the needs of business and IT users seeking to unlock the value of their data assets. Whether monitoring ongoing information quality, or executing the most complex migration and governance initiatives, BackOffice Associates is the clear choice for customers requiring ‘Business-Ready Data Every Day™’.

BackOffice Associates ensures success through a unique combination of technology, methodology and consultant expertise. These three pillars provide the foundation for solving data migration, data quality and data governance issues for customers across all industries, company sizes and project complexities. Sixteen years of experience spanning all data objects and process models, coupled with an ability to analyse both master and operational data, uniquely equips BackOffice Associates to deliver Business-Ready Data™ that eliminates business-process interruptions.

BackOffice Associates is a global corporation headquartered in Massachusetts with additional offices in the US, and local offices in Europe, Asia, India, Australia and Mexico. Company information is available at www.boaweb.com.

Data migration Only BackOffice can bring a powerful combination of methodology, technology and consultant expertise to deliver proven success in data migration. We leverage our experience in several hundred migration projects with customers in local and global rollouts of their ERP solutions. We can employ our library of over 10,000 rich data quality analysis, reporting, connectivity and transformation elements that help to keep data migration efforts low and make the process easily repeatable. During the migration, we analyse your data to assure that only the legacy data required to run your business is moved while at the same time improving data quality to eliminate any potential business process interruptions that could be caused by data issues.

Data quality Maintaining a high level of data quality in the postmigration ERP environment calls for sophisticated data strategies and best practices for post-migration support.

Companies implementing data quality strategies can face significant obstacles including insufficient budgets, unrealistic timeframes and extraordinary demands from the business. Businesses need to lower costs, achieve global

68 Inside SAP magazine

visibility, take control of global data standards and enjoy real-time reporting on trusted data sources for their critical business operations and decisions. BackOffice offers a full range of solutions for identification and remediation of data quality issues which address the various challenges in a data quality project as well.

Data governance BackOffice Associates Data Governance solutions help your Centre Of Excellence track metrics on data quality and empower your data stewards to accurately maintain your mission critical data. BackOffice delivers a proven best practice methodology and services with ‘out of box’ content for actionable quality control reports and end-toend solutions designed for your industry. Unlike solutions that focus on individual data objects, BackOffice can deliver a complete governance solution, providing a robust, integrated, best practices implementation.

Data audit The goal of a BackOffice Data Audit™ is to gain an immediate understanding of your data quality, scope and complexity. It will mitigate project and business risk and project delays related to data, by providing fact-based and measurable results quickly. A rapid analysis of your data in relation to your target system and current business processes, will allow you to understand the true scope and challenges driven by real-time analysis.

T: 02 9959 9645 E: info@boaweb.com W: www.boaweb.com

COMPANY PROFILES

Manhattan Associates Pty Ltd The Manhattan Difference: Supply Chain People Thinking Differently about Supply Chain Manhattan Associates continues to deliver on its 22-year heritage of providing global supply chain excellence to more than 1200 customers worldwide that consider supply chain optimisation core to their strategic market leadership.

Manhattan’s platform-based supply chain software solution portfolios are designed to deliver both business agility and total cost of ownership advantages to customers.

Manhattan SCOPE®: Supply Chain Optimisation, Planning through Execution, leverages our Supply Chain Process Platform (SCPP) to unify the full breadth of the supply chain. Manhattan SCOPE enables high degrees of operational insight, performance, agility and optimisation at a tightly-managed and overall lower total cost of ownership. The platform-based architecture also enables combining elements of different solution suites into X-Suite solutions to address specific supply chain challenges.

Manhattan SCALE™: Supply Chain Architected for Logistics Execution, leverages the Microsoft ® .NET platform to unify logistics execution functions. With a familiar, easy-to-use interface that’s ‘scaled to fit, ready to run’, Manhattan SCALE is designed to help companies maximise their supply chain execution speed-to-value by

reducing IT complexity and deployment costs. Nimble and flexible, SCALE leverages global inventory visibility and streamlines processes to drive profitability and enhance overall performance.

Manhattan MORE®: Manhattan’s Optimised Roadmap to Excellence is our comprehensive methodology for delivering customer value through supply-chain-centred people, principles, products, protocols and processes.

We build long-term customer relationships through our Customer Excellence Lifecycle, which leverages our software, expertise and enriched services in a hightouch cycle of engagement, deployment and adoption for continuous supply chain advancement.

Leading companies use Manhattan solutions, including nine of the top 11 retail supply chains, nearly half of the top 100 motor carriers, seven of the 12 largest 3PLs, nine of Fortune’s 25 most admired companies. For more information, please visit www.manh.com.

T: +61 2 9454 5400 E: anzinfo@manh.com W: www.manh.com

Allow us to introduce ourselves We’ve provided you with SAP consulting and technical services since 2001. That’s a long time in IT years.

All we do is SAP We help you manage your SAP applications more efficiently and at a lower cost. But we would say that, wouldn’t we?

We stay ahead of the pack Anyone can promise you SAP support, but can they deliver? We can. Plaut is the largest Australian organisation certified in Run SAP Methodology.

And it shows.

We’re a certified Australian SAP Partner Our on-shore specialist information management, business, CPAs and HR experts focus on your business outcomes. We’re here to help, here.

Go on, ask our happy clients Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation, Air Services Australia, the Department of Immigration and Citizenship, BHP Billiton, BlueScope Steel, Johnson & Johnson, The GPT Group, Tomago Aluminium and Murray Goulburn. Impressed?

We deliver results with SAP.

+61 (0) 2 9492 5600 www.plaut.com.au

70 Inside SAP magazine

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COMPANY PROFILES

ReadSoft ReadSoft is a global leader in Accounts Payable and Document Process Automation, specialising in automating all document and request-driven processes for medium to large enterprises and Shared Service Centres (SSC).

ReadSoft solutions simplify and automate any transactional or business process, from receipt through to capture, approval, post and archive. This includes, for instance, tasks associated with receiving and paying invoices, receiving or creating purchase orders, master data creation and maintenance, financial posting corrections, and many other request and document-driven processes managed by a centralised department or SSC.

Areas

Purchase to Pay Requisition Order Confirmation Delivery Note Incoming Invoice Payment Approval

Order to Cash Customer Order Remittance Advice

ReadSoft solutions consolidate visibility and control of data input and approval workflows enabling users and administrators to monitor processes, navigate to relevant transactions, and easily take on new processes with minimal training efforts. This makes it ideal for a Shared Services environment where additional business processes can easily be created and deployed.

A detailed audit trail provides visibility of the entire process, from inception through to finalisation, to enable strict business process governance and control.

ReadSoft’s solutions have been selected by an impressive range of multinationals seeking to improve control, efficiency and effectiveness and offer an attractive, measurable return on investment (ROI). With more than 7,500 customers, including Caltex, Rio Tinto, Intel, Apple, Siemens, Porsche, Kellogg’s and Orica, amongst others, ReadSoft is the solution of choice.

T: +61 2 9929 0676 W: www.readsoft.com.au

Master Data Vendor Cost Centre Profit Centre GL Account Asset

Finance

Financial Posting

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Revelation Software Concepts Revelation Software Concepts (RSC) specialises in simplifying change control for SAP solutions. Since RSC was founded in 1997, some of the world’s largest companies have come to rely upon its mature change control solutions.

Its deep expertise and responsive support have made RSC the leading change control specialist for SAP solution-based infrastructures around the globe. RSC’s change control software Rev-Trac automates and enforces a complete range of SAP change control activities and processes. RSC’s change intelligence software Salt monitors change activity and helps users know the state of change across all SAP systems at all times. Rev-Trac and Salt are both certified as powered by the SAP NetWeaver ® technology platform.

Rev-Trac SAP change control software Rev-Trac is a powerful, highly configurable, change control software for change request and transport management in SAP solutions. Quickly and simply implemented, Rev-Trac is especially suited to managing extensive SAP landscapes including those with N and N+1 configuration and those containing multiple SAP solutions utilising multiple technology stacks.

Implementing Rev-Trac provides unprecedented control over each and every change introduced into SAP systems. Its extensive automation and in-built safety features simplify SAP project delivery and safeguard production system stability turning everyday SAP project teams into heroes. For more information on Rev-Trac and available add-ons, visit www.xrsc.com.

Salt SAP change intelligence software Salt change intelligence software for SAP solutions gives instant visibility into an organisation’s custom ABAP code and objects providing up to the minute views into any system. Comparing object versions, monitoring work in progress, and even quickly finding specific pieces of code are just a few examples of Salt’s powerful functionality. By monitoring change activity and then providing specific data to appropriate stakeholders, users can interpret the Salt data and act quickly to either make improvements or avoid disaster.

An online Salt test drive system is available, giving 24x7 access to the system for users to fully explore the various Salt intelligence and analysis applications at one’s leisure. Find out more at www.saltapps.com.

T: +61 3 9955 9700 E: sales@xrsc.com W: www.xrsc.com

CSC We offer a broad range of services, from technology and business consulting to systems integration and outsourcing.

Our approach We respect that our customers are unique and your concept of value will change over time. New conditions will prevail, new priorities emerge and new technologies will become mainstream and affordable. Sustaining value, once it is created, is key.

To achieve this, CSC delivers a custom approach specifically designed with your business in mind. We build flexibility into our solutions that spans not just processes and software, but all elements of our service – from commercial models to risk analysis, knowledge management to security.

We are proven industry leaders For over 50 years, some of the world’s largest organisations have trusted us to get the job done. In Australia, we are a tier one SAP services provider in Natural Resources, Defence, Government, and Financial Services.

We deliver what we promise, no excuses We know that organisations rely on our solutions for their business success. Clients know that, whatever happens, we will do everything possible to deliver the agreed SAP solution at the agreed time so we are supporting the business outcome and objectives.

Striking the right balance

We have outstanding SAP credentials In over 70 countries worldwide, CSC’s staff deliver innovative business solutions to help clients realise their ambitions on a daily basis. Here in Australia, more than 200 staff are dedicated to delivering consulting and expertise in SAP implementations and integration, upgrades and application management services. With access to the global SAP practice via a common CSC SAP Global Portal Community, staff leverage world-leading capability in SAP Financials, BI/Analytics, Mobility and specialist architecture design and build for SAP Netweaver. yy For the last five years, Gartner has recognised CSC as a ‘leader and visionary’ in SAP Application Management Support (AMS) services and SAP finance sector-specific solutions. yy For over 25 years, CSC has been a SAP Platinum Partner and certified globally with SAP as a Hosting Partner, Applications Management Services Partner and Global Services Partner. yy Repeatedly awarded the SAP Sapphire Award for Excellence.

yy Domain expertise in Government, Mining, Utilities, Financial Services, Manufacturing, Insurance, Health and other sectors.

0912-06

yy Global SAP Hosting Certification, Global SAP Application Management Certification, Global SAP Services Partner Certification, Multiple SAP All-in-One Certifications, Certified SAP Cloud Services Partner.

yy We leverage our SAP-certified ITIL processes, Gartnerrecognised leading incident management capability, catalyst methodology, and global SAP certifications for hosting, services and technology to ensure rapid stabilisation and business outcomes.

Does your business’ SAP platform provide the best possible balance of functionality, flexibility and cost-effectiveness? Is it an essential element of your growth strategy – or is it limiting your agility and ability to compete? At CSC we are committed to delivering expert support and consulting and maximising value from your existing SAP investments.

Share your challenges with us and we will use our strengths in SAP to ensure you get the balance right.

W: www.csc.com/au/sap

Find out more at CSC.COM/AU/SAP

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COMPANY PROFILES

PwC Avantis Information Systems PwC Avantis combines the best of both worlds – the strategic planning and direction from the team at PwC, combined with the technical delivery of Avantis, the leading SAP BusinessObjects partner in Australia for over a decade. This winning combination means we can deliver BI and analytics, from strategy to execution.

BI Strategy

Big data problems, real-world solutions

Our BI Strategy services are designed to give you a roadmap that you can follow to deliver actionable, analytic BI applications across your entire organisation. Our services for BI Strategy include an initial design or refresh of your enterprise BI strategies and roadmaps. We will work with your organisation to define the business needs that are driving BI effort and investment, providing ‘current state’ assessments and ‘future state’ recommendations and roadmaps.

We offer independent advice on BI solutions tailored to your needs and existing environments, with a strategy that is business led and technology enabled.

We also realise that for some classic SAP partners, their experience with different data sources begins and ends with SAP and SAP BW. At PwC Avantis, we believe that SAP is ‘just another data source’ and that the real value of Business Intelligence comes when you bring ALL of an organisation’s disparate data sources together.

Traditionally this would be done in a data mart or data warehouse, which can increase the cost and time to deliver a BI solution. We have pioneered the use of Hadoop Hive, SAP HANA and data discovery tools like SAP Visual Intelligence to deliver innovative ‘big data’ solutions that deliver a consolidated view of your organisation’s data.

BI Implementation

SAP Certified training

Our BI Implementation services have been designed to implement strategic BI solutions, without breaking the bank. As a long-standing SAP BusinessObjects partner, we have helped organisations of all sizes make the most of their investment in SAP BusinessObjects.

We offer expert technical training and consulting for SAP BusinessObjects and SAP HANA, with a focus on real-world solutions. We believe that BI projects should be delivered in days, not weeks or months and our exclusive RABID methodology (RApid Business Intelligence Delivery) will help deliver real value to your organisation for less time and money.

If you are just getting started with SAP BusinessObjects, we offer a complete range of services, including ‘Quick Start’ packages which can deploy servers, train your staff and start developing reports in under a week. We also work with organisations to mentor and train their own staff, educating them not only on the development tools, but also the best practices for implementing SAP BusinessObjects.

Our consultants bring hard-earned expertise to every project and are happy to share their knowledge with your team.

As an existing SAP BusinessObjects customer, we can help you migrate to the latest version of SAP BusinessObjects with minimal impact to your users and day to day operations. Our Rapid Deployment Solutions (RDS) for migration and upgrades are fixed price, with no additional or hidden costs. As part of the migration, we’ll help you update your administration skills with public, on-site or one-on-one training, as well as train users with custom courseware developed using your environment and reports.

As one of only two SAP Certified Training Partners in Australia for SAP BusinessObjects, we offer all of the SAP authorised courses, as well as building our own custom courses for new and emerging technologies, and courses based on your own data and environment.

We have trained over 6000 students and in addition to providing training to our own customers, we also teach public training courses on behalf of SAP themselves.

Our certified trainers spent the majority of their time implementing SAP BusinessObjects and developing reports, dashboards and mobile solutions – they bring this realworld expertise to every course they teach.

So whether you are looking for a comprehensive BI strategy for your organisation, help with a new or existing SAP BusinessObjects implementation, or an innovative solution to your ‘big data’ problems, PwC Avantis has the skills, experience and expertise to deliver a solution for you.

T: 02 8404 4133 W: www.avantis.com.au

74 Inside SAP magazine

ACUS5

Delivery focus Acuity Search comprises Alex Gomez, Sam Vargas (Directors) and Shane Morgan (SAP Recruitment Partner). All three of us have experience recruiting SAP professionals dating back to 2000/2001. This depth of SAP recruitment experience is second to none in the Australian market. As SAP is the only focus of our business, this allows us to keep up to date with market trends and identify candidates in niche areas ahead of hiring curves. This can be invaluable to clients who need new and emerging SAP skills for project work with immediate effect. We understand the tight timeframes that are associated with hiring programmes and the adverse effect of not attracting the right resource to a project at the right stage of proceedings.

We have the capacity to provide both contract and permanent resources covering the entire SAP spectrum, ranging from senior SAP leadership and management right through to SAP graduates. We can provide ad-hoc resources at short notice or build entire project teams from the ground up.

ROI

Our competitive advantage

Due to our transparent view of the SAP market we are able to consult on what the value of a particular SAP resource may be at any one time. Rates/salaries tend to fluctuate greatly in the SAP market based on demand and shortage of skills.

We have a clean database of over 9000 seasoned SAP & BI professionals and Linkedin networks that enable us to reach out to over 30 million people globally.

Because we are considered experts in our field many of the candidates that we deal with are happy for us to consult on what their current value is at any particular time. This allows us to ensure that rates/ salaries are not inflated due to over confidence. It is also our aim to purely deal with the very best proven SAP consultants working on the best projects in Australia. These are consultants who have the focus, drive, articulation and professionalism to ensure that projects do not drift and that re-work is kept at zero.

If the SAP consultant you require exists, we are confident we will find them. We save time and effort by doing confidential background checks up front for candidates that we have not engaged with previously.

This ensures that only quality, reliable resources are presented to our clients.

We are passionate about our field and take real accountability for the work that is entrusted to us by our clients. We will provide you with an ethical, upfront approach to your recruitment and we will always strive to achieve positive outcomes for all parties involved in the recruitment process.

To speak with an SAP recruitment expert today, please call www.acuitysearch.com.au

ACUS5055_Acuity_AD_v2.indd 1

02 8011 4220

12/09/12 2:18 PM

COMPANY PROFILES

Retarus Retarus is a leading provider of professional messaging solutions and has been developing and offering services for electronic corporate communication since 1992.

The company’s portfolio focuses on large and mediumsized corporations. Over 3500 international customers in various sectors (including Adidas, Allianz, Bayer, Continental, Honda and Panasonic) use Retarus messaging services with absolute confidence every day to transact mission critical business documents.

From development, consulting, and operations through to service and support, Retarus’ focus is always on maximising security, reliability and availability, and providing the greatest possible flexibility and efficiency.

More than 250 staff employed at the global headquarters in Munich and subsidiaries in Australia, Austria, Canada, France, Italy, Singapore, Spain, Switzerland, UAE, United Kingdom and USA make Retarus’ core service values – customer focus, innovation, quality and transparency – their mission.

Numerous partnerships and the cooperation with renowned high-tech companies such as IBM/Lotus, Microsoft and SAP empower Retarus to offer progressive and optimised business solutions.

Retarus product highlights Retarus Communications Services for SAP: Electronic document delivery via fax, email, SMS and EDI directly from SAP systems. Perfect integration between business partners providing seamless data exchange across the entire supply chain as well as the automation of business processes. Highest information quality in your customer supplier network, SAP certified (‘Unicode-ready’ and Certified for NetWeaver). Market leader, over 1,000 SAP systems connected worldwide.

Retarus Managed Email Services: Email for SAP including disclaimers and digital signature.

Retarus Mail-to-fax/Fax-to-email: Optimised workflows, digital forwarding of documents. Highly efficient spam and virus protection, internet security, encryption, archiving and compliance features tailored to your needs.

T: +61 2 9959 1931 E: info@au.retarus.com W: www.retarus.au

Simplify Your Processes – Send Communications Directly From SAP! No Hardware, No Software...Pure Genius!

Adapt your messaging to meet any business process quickly and reliably!

In today‘s fiercely competitive markets, speed and agility are the essence of market leadership. If you have implemented SAP ® solutions, you already know how to succeed.

Now the question is how do you improve efficiency when communicating with your clients and prospects? With Retarus‘ SAP Certified Integration, which supports Fax, Email, SMS and EDI, you will never have to worry again. We are the only SAP Certified Managed Messaging Provider built to meet the needs of today‘s demanding enterprises. Our solution requires no hardware or software and delivers unlimited scalability. We even provide universal language support so you can communicate globally, regardless of which SAP module you have implemented. Contact us today to speak with one of our messaging experts and take advantage of our free 30 day no-risk trial!

Visit us at the SAUG 40th Plenary and Annual General Meeting in Sydney 2012 or at: www.retarus.au/sap

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10.09.2012 13:55:11

COMPANY PROFILES

Harms Consulting Our primary objective is to create value through long-term client partnerships and functioning as our clients’ trusted advisor.

Harms Consulting is a dynamic, innovative and experienced SAP Partner specialising in SAP business software. We are acknowledged throughout the Australian SAP community as the premier SAP Real Estate Management specialist.

Though we are passionate about developing groundbreaking solutions to meet the business needs of our SAP Real Estate Management clients, this is only one of a number of arrows in the Harms Consulting quiver.

Harms Consulting’s foundations are firmly grounded in development expertise and system integration; over time solution experts joined our development specialists as well as project managers. Today we are a full-service consulting firm, offering all aspects of services for the full SAP software life cycle, from planning to building and running the application.

The Harms team of managers and consultants deliver innovative solutions to meet client needs. We understand it requires a mix of deep technical knowledge, best-practice business optimisation skills, a clear business strategy, as well as time and resources to maximise clients’ investment in SAP. That’s why we begin each engagement by first understanding the business benefits our clients would like to achieve; our quality frameworks make sure deliverables are measured against specified business outcomes.

We have grown significantly in recent times and this is directly attributable to our ability to attract and retain the best people from Australia and internationally. This stems from the emphasis we place on human talent development, which has earned Harms a staff retention rate greater than 200% of the industry average.

Our achievements are driven by our company culture and values; those we find the most rewarding are our robust customer references, our high staff retention rate and our track record of groundbreaking solutions and successful projects.

Global Success Story: SAP Real Estate Management Harms Consulting is Australia’s premier SAP Real Estate Management solution provider, implementing Australia’s first SAP Flexible Real Estate solution enabling Luxottica Retail to cost-effectively manage multiple rental sites and fit-outs.

Our consulting team has gained a great deal of experience as a result of working on national and international SAP Real Estate Management projects, developing strong skills within the SAP Flexible Real Estate solution, as well as embracing the NetWeaver technology.

We employ industry best practices in the property solution space to drive efficiencies and business benefits, creating transparency to critical business processes such as Portfolio Management, Lease Management, Asset Valuation and Depreciation, Space and Move Management and Facilities Management.

Harms Consulting serves a number of Real Estate markets which include Corporate and Commercial Real Estate, Facilities Management, Retail, REIT (Real Estate Investment Trust), Banking, Property Development, Mining, Oil & Gas, Industrial, Transport and Government/Public Sectors.

SAP Application Management Services At Harms we understand all organisations face challenges of change, increasing technological complexity and pressure as a result of regulatory demands. Meeting these pressures with internal staff alone is not always possible or cost-effective.

Our SAP Application Management Services utilise the latest tools and methodologies from SAP to maximise the value of our clients’ investment in SAP business software by reducing total cost of ownership and improving the innovation cycle. Our certified consultants have a depth of skills to support your system through well-managed and established procedures delivered on and off-site.

The flexibility of our model enables us to package services and infrastructure to directly support the needs of our clients.

SAP Consulting Harms provides on-demand consulting service to clients seeking a relationship with an SAP Partner and requiring access to SAP Subject Matter Experts without requiring longterm contractual obligations.

Our SAP Consulting Business Unit aligns itself closely with SAP in adopting and promoting new technologies.

Mobility technologies Harms Consulting has been active in the development space for more than 15 years and has the hands-on experience to maximise emerging mobile technologies.

Mobility is not just another technology but a strategic investment in any organisation’s future. Embracing the new but definitely here to stay mobile technologies can achieve compelling business benefits.

Our Mobility services include: overview workshops, strategy definition, policy development, device selection, service level definition, installation of SUP and Afaria software, creation of mobile BusinessObjects, application design, development of applications with HTML5, development of native and hybrid iOS applications and future-proofing.

Harms Consulting is an SAP Partner, a Value Added Reseller of SAP business software and an SAP PartnerEdge partner.

T: 02 9221 2000 E: info@harmsconsulting.com W: www.harmsconsulting.com

www.insidesap.com.au 77

Interpro Australia Pty Ltd Since the early 1990s, Interpro has been successfully placing IT professionals in Australia.

Our success is due in part to our experienced account managers understanding our clients’ business needs, industry sectors and technology platforms. Our expert divisions enable us to deliver a responsive, cost-effective and personalised service.

INTERPRO IT’S THE PEOPLE WE KNOW Our clients benefit from leveraging our network of over 25,000 SAP professionals. Our market knowledge has been built over the last 20 years, allowing us to strategically resource their SAP projects and on-going support requirements.

Our national network provides access to the top SAP employers, providing our candidates with challenging projects and careers.

Contact your local SAP specialist at Interpro to find out more about the company, and how we can support you to achieve your goals.

Visit or scan the links below to view our latest contract and permanent vacancies

APPLY

yy Our recruitment database that holds over 25,000 pre-qualified SAP professionals yy Market knowledge – we have a team deployed in every major city in Australia yy Exclusivity model for candidates and clients yy Ability to deploy complete SAP project teams quickly yy Our extensive SAP global network

Candidate testimonial

www.interpro.com.au

“Interpro has restored my faith in recruitment agencies.

Their approach in securing me one of the best and most suitable positions I have ever had was handled professionally and efficiently. I have worked for the same company as a contractor for over a year and that contract has recently been converted to a permanent position.

Interpro is well respected by this company for placing the correct candidate in the many positions that have been filled by them. Interpro will be my first choice of agencies.”

http://tinyurl.com/95q3g7n

Mark Arbuckle – Contractor

Office Locations & Contact Details ENQUIRE

For the last 15 years, our SAP Recruitment Practice has been delivering the highest calibre SAP candidates, providing the opportunity for our candidates to work on the most significant SAP projects in Australia.

Our unique SAP Recruitment service offering allows candidates and clients to leverage from the following:

sap@interpro.com.au

Contact Girlie Brotonel and her team to find out more.

SYDNEY

02 9283 3555

MELBOURNE 03 9600 0059 BRISBANE

07 3220 3693

CANBERRA

02 6169 4150

PERTH

02 9283 3555

Scan with your smart phone to contact us

T: 02 9283 3555 E: sap@interpro.com.au W: www.interpro.com.au LinkedIn: au.linkedin.com/in/girlie

COMPANY PROFILES

Windsor Business Solutions Do you deliver your product, in full, on time, to specification and safely?

Windsor Business Solutions (WBS) is Australia’s most practical and innovative Integrated Enterprise Asset Management specialist. Operating nationally, they focus on SAP EAM and provide sensible and sustainable end-to-end solutions for business. Based on industry best practices, effective business processes and many years of experience, solutions from WBS are actually accepted and used by Operations, Maintenance, Supply and Finance people. Our BEAM© audit process finds the business issues so that WBS can fix them.

Our business is building reliable businesses We work with you to improve value and the triple bottom line by improving productivity and safety through the superior management of physical assets, as WBS couples deep SAP skills with long industry experience. With many physical assets requiring substantial investment, our intelligent approach considers all aspects of the life of the asset and will align with your business plan.

Asset Management is more than just software or equipment maintenance. We work with you to establish processes and systems which allow management throughout the acquisition, installation, operation, maintenance, refurbishment and disposal of any physical asset and reporting at all stages. Getting your product to market requires a cohesive and integrated planning

effort across all business functions where KPIs are designed to ensure corporate success and are based on the business process and strategic plans. Get rid of the silos!

WBS: The SAP EAM experts Linear Asset Management (LAM), Project and Portfolio Management (PPM), Multi Resources Scheduling (MRS), SAP Project Systems (PS), SAP Plant Maintenance (PM) – WBS are the experts. We are also skilled in FICO, MM and other modules and our Solution Architects ensure the delivery of a well-integrated solution. We were also invited by SAP to participate in the development of the SAP Mining Best Practices industry solution that was recently released.

You have a much greater chance of a successful design in SAP EAM projects when the SAP functional consultants come from an engineering or trade background. Ours typically have extensive experience in Maintenance Management and Reliability Engineering. They design sensible solutions based on ‘tried and true’ industry best practices that work and meet your needs.

Play it safe and engage WBS, a SAP Partner whose EAM consultants are maintenance professionals as well as SAP Certified Solution Consultants.

T: 1300 927 716 E: partnersolutions@wbss.com.au W: www.wbss.com.au

Is downtime costing you?

Optimise Your Uptime with the trusted team at WBS. Improve Productivity Improve Safety Improve Profit Improve Sustainability

SAP

Strategy

Asset Management

Achieving Productivity and Safety through the Superior Management of Physical Assets. www.wbss.com.au

Compuware Corporation Now I can really see how my SAP transactions perform FROM THE VIEWPOINT OF MY USERS

SAP runs your business processes, but are they running at their best? There’s only one way to tell: See application performance from your users’ point of view.

Compuware brings unprecedented views of SAP performance with the industry’s only solution that starts with the end user. We follow every SAP transaction and user worldwide, in real time. Using a single, unified dashboard, you gain the full visibility needed to deliver the nonstop SAP performance and availability your users expect – and business demands.

www.compuware.com/sap

Compuware Corporation is the technology performance company which provides software, experts and best practices to enable an organisation’s most important technologies to perform at their peak by delivering best-inclass on-premise software, software as a service (SaaS) and professional technical services.

As an example, Compuware delivers a strategy designed to help organisations reduce the total cost of ownership of SAP deployments by improving application reliability and performance.

Compuware also helps to proactively reduce risk and streamline upgrades, new deployments and ‘go live’ processes for SAP customers when they deploy new technology or refresh their existing SAP business solutions.

Compuware’s unique, automated offerings for SAP solutions enable businesses to maximise the value of their SAP solutions, especially in regard to upgrade implementations, to service pack maintenance and to delivering high quality, end-user experiences.

The Compuware APM (Application Performance Management) platform is the industry’s leading solution for optimising the performance, availability and quality of web, non-web, mobile, streaming and cloud applications.

Driven by end-user experience, Compuware’s APM solution provides visibility into the actual performance being delivered to SAP users, as well as the supporting infrastructure, so all parties responsible can prioritise and isolate problems and resolve issues quickly.

One of its key benefits is that it is the only solution on the market that can deliver real-user transaction-response times for all SAP transactions, for all users, all the time, without the need to instrument the application or deploy an agent on the application infrastructure.

Compuware’s APM solution is flexible and works in parallel with any existing monitoring deployment for SAP to provide 24x7 performance and availability coverage. It also has deep-dive analysis capabilities into specific areas of application components to further analyse performance problems. The end result is that business and IT operations are enabled to ensure optimal performance, availability and usage of SAP solutions.

Today, CIOs want to maximise the investments they have made in their strategic SAP solution deployments by reducing the time and cost associated with going live. Compuware continues to work with SAP to help our joint customers reduce total cost of ownership and improve the reliability and performance of SAP solution implementations.

T: 1800 675 720 E: marketing.ap@compuware.com W: www.compuware.com/sap

COMPANY PROFILES

Everjoy Consulting Everjoy Consulting is the leading SAP recruitment company servicing Australia and New Zealand with an extensive track record in the delivery of recruitment solutions to high-profile customers in all industries.

Everjoy Consulting is one of the truly consultative recruitment agencies, providing tailored recruitment solutions to suit the individual needs of our customers and candidates.

With over 15 years experience in resource management and functional consulting within our recruitment team, we truly know what it is to run an SAP project. We understand the importance of high-quality delivery within tight time constraints. Everjoy has aided consulting organisations in the delivery of end-to-end implementations, upgrades and business process re-engineering (BPR).

Through the extensive industry experience of our consultants and demonstrated track record in delivering superior results to our clients, Everjoy Consulting currently offers a range of services above and beyond the traditional recruitment solution.

Our unique Contractor Retention Program Unique to the SAP recruitment industry, Everjoy Consulting has an established Contractor Retention Program (CRP) which is specifically designed to provide you with the comfort and security of business continuity while allowing you to utilise the contractor engagement model with comfort. Everjoy Consulting actively works to mitigate the risks associated with the retention of key resources in your project team.

Resource planning and scheduling Everjoy consultants work with you to plan your annual headcount against your growth and organisational development strategies. We assist you in highlighting peaks, troughs, cyclical or skill set difficulties with the ultimate goal of reducing the stress and costs associated with recruitment.

Best practice consulting Your Everjoy consultant works with you to provide business process review and optimisation to ensure that your processes comply with industry best practice, allowing you to attract and retain the best resources available.

Employee performance management We don’t disappear after a candidate starts with your organisation! As an independent party to the employment relationship between a company and its employee, Everjoy consultants conduct regular reviews with each candidate placed in your company. The value to our customers in this independent and objective performance snapshot is demonstrated by the ability to mitigate risks before they arise and further ensure continuity in your growing team.

Whether you are looking for the best people, or the best job, contact Everjoy Consulting today.

T: 02 9394 8500 W: www.everjoy.com.au

Is your recruitment process lost at sea?

Recruitment for Contractors or Permanent SAP resources can be a very complicated and rocky. With so many modules, processes and specialisation requirements, the SAP environment is constantly changing.

Sail out of the storm; discover why so many SAP Vendors and End Users have partnered with Everjoy Consulting over the past 8 years. We source the best for their business, right across Australia. Greenfield, Upgrade, Template-Rollout, Integration, Production Support or BAU, we understand the process and your requirements. +61 2 9394 8500

linkedin.com/company/everjoy-consulting

twitter.com/everjoy_consult

facebook.com/EverjoyConsulting

www.everjoy.com.au

COMPANY PROFILES

Redback Consulting Redback Consulting is an IT consulting organisation whose primary focus is the provision of implementation, support and value-added services for Enterprise Resource Planning solutions for the public and private sectors, focusing on SAP and SAP-related solutions.

Our service offering includes Human Resources (SAP HCM and SuccessFactors), Financials, Procurement (SAP SRM and Ariba), CRM/Grants and associated enabling technologies.

We have a strong solution design capability with a dedicated solution lab and team dedicated to the provision of bespoke design services for ERP. With offices in Australia, Singapore and India, we are ready to meet any challenge.

Reducing total cost of ownership With the reduction in capital budgets, organisations are increasingly looking at ways to utilise their operational expenditure for ERP solutions and services.

As well as being an SAP Services Partner, Redback has attained additional certifications and capability within managed service and cloud including:

With our hosting infrastructure partners, we are able to offer facilities up to T4 security certification, scaled to your business needs.

We have an expanding set of SAP and SuccessFactors accelerator templates, which, when combined with our services capabilities, can deliver our customers quality ERP functionality in HCM, Financials, Procurement, CRM and Grants, without the management, infrastructure and maintenance overhead, thus reducing your total cost of ownership.

For more information on our service offerings, or to talk to us about how we can assist you to achieve your business goals and make your strategy reality, contact us today.

T: +61 2 6198 3243 E: info@redbackconsulting.com.au W: www.redbackconsulting.com.au

yy SAP Certified in Application Management Services yy SAP Certified in Hosting Services yy SuccessFactors Sales Partner

Delivering services and solutions to meet business critical needs now and in the future

Find out more at www.redbackconsulting.com.au or email info@redbackconsulting.com.au

Real Innovation

Real Commitment

www.redbackconsulting.com.au

COMPANY PROFILES

TIK Consulting TIK was founded in Melbourne in 2005 by three directors that have over 35 years’ experience in delivering all facets of the SAP HR/Payroll modules. During this time, they realised that when implementing an SAP HR/Payroll solution, there are many processes which are often repeated and generally reinvented for each implementation. Also, once implemented, businesses were often left to fend for themselves in managing the support of their SAP HR/Payroll installation. With this in mind, TIK was formed and the Nexus Suite was born.

The Nexus Suite provides configurable solutions for SAP HCM implementations and business as usual requirements that would otherwise only be accomplished through programming.

The individual modules of the Nexus Suite cater for specific SAP business purposes such as data conversion, the import and export of information, payroll and statistical reporting and reconciliation, master data replication and duplication, payroll verification and SAP support pack analysis. The highly integrated and flexible nature of the Nexus Suite ensures that the specific needs of an organisation can be met through using individual modules or in any desired combination.

Customer success Since the Nexus Suite was released onto the market, it has made a profound difference to numerous customers using the SAP HCM system. The impact that the Nexus Suite has had on each customer varies based on the customer’s needs with the various modules of the Nexus Suite slashing the required resources and mitigating project risk.

The DuluxGroup was able to successfully and seamlessly transition from multiple SAP legacy systems onto a unified ECC6.0 platform through the use of the Nexus Suite. Rather than having multiple large project teams within each of the technical areas, the whole data conversion process, inbound and outbound interfaces, reporting and payroll verification phases were able to be carried out by part-time resources.

Previously, the Toyota Motor Corporation Australia maintained two disparate SAP systems for FI/CO and HCM activities, with the HCM mini-masters and HCM Organisational Data being synchronised between the two environments via SAP ALE. The Data Replication and Payroll Verification Modules were used to unify the multiple SAP systems as well as replicating all of the underlying configuration through into the one environment. The Data Replication Module replicated all of the required HCM configuration and data into the unified SAP environment and the Payroll Verification Module (SAP to SAP) ensured that any and all payroll calculation anomalies between the two systems were quickly identified, analysed and resolved. Prior to TIK commencing work, a SAP consulting firm quoted 180 days of consulting to perform these activities using traditional methods, however, using TIK and the Nexus Suite, the entire HCM configuration and master data was transferred to the unified system in six days.

TIK is a company committed to ensuring that any organisation using the Nexus Suite will achieve substantial cost and time savings; with this in mind, TIK provides unsurpassed support and guidance to its Australian and International customers.

Streamline your SAP Implementation & Support At TIK Consulting, we pride ourselves on providing high quality SAP products, which are specifically designed to save time and money for customers who are implementing, upgrading, or already running an SAP system.

The Nexus Suite slashes build timelines, eliminates costly maintenance overheads and provides a central management console for all data conversion, information import/export, payroll verification, reporting and reconciliation activities - all within SAP, without programming or the need for further manipulation outside of SAP. Find out more at www.tikconsulting.com.au or email us at sales@tikconsulting.com.au

COMPANY PROFILES

Acuity Search The SAP recruitment experts.

Acuity Search was formed in 2008 by Alex Gomez and Sam Vargas and is one of Australia’s leading specialist SAP recruitment firms. We specialise in providing proven contract and permanent SAP resources for both project and support focused work across Australasia.

Over 80 per cent of our candidates come through referrals or mapping and headhunting techniques. These are by far the most effective ways of sourcing proven SAP resources in a candidate driven market.

All Acuity Search employees have accrued 10 years+ of exclusive SAP domain recruitment experience and have developed large candidate networks that span Australasia.

It is a fact that most of the larger recruitment agencies do not specialise and rely almost exclusively on internet advertising to generate candidates.

Our research tells us that this proves to have a very small reach into the SAP marketplace; it is also a strategy which often misses the strongest people in that market,

the people who are not actively looking for work but are open to new opportunities once approached.

Many of the best SAP consultants rely heavily on their relationships with specialist recruiters like Acuity Search to ensure that they have work pipelined before they have completed their current assignments.

Acuity Search takes advantage of this by mapping the landscapes of clients that we are not engaged with. This enables us to ‘cherry pick’ particular SAP skills. We also develop strong relationships with candidates that we have identified as being open to new contract and permanent career opportunities.

To speak with an SAP recruitment expert today, please call Alex Gomez or Sam Vargas.

T: 02 8011 4220 W: www.acuitysearch.com.au

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Please visit www.insidesap.com.au and follow the links for international subscriptions for more information.

directory SAP SERVICE Provider directory Channel Partner – SAP Business All-in-One Company

Contact

Web

Acclimation Pty Ltd

1300 852 990

www.acclimation.com.au

08 9420 5420

www.asggroup.com.au

Ciber Pty Ltd

02 8920 0887

www.ciber.com.au

Clarity Consulting Group Australia Pty Ltd

03 9868 3500

www.claritygroup.com.au

Computer Networks Pty Limited

02 9878 0277

www.computernetworksit.com.au

CSC Australia Pty Ltd

02 9034 3000

www.csc.com/au

ASG Group Limited

Evolution Systems Pty Limited

02 9304 4400

www.evolutionsystems.com.au

Extend Technologies Pty Ltd

02 8908 4200

www.extendtechnologies.com.au

FourPL Pty Ltd

02 9922 2636

www.fourpl.com.au

Fujitsu Australia Ltd

02 9776 4555

www.au.fujitsu.com

02 9221 2000

www.harmsconsulting.com

Harms Consulting Pty Ltd IBM Australia Limited

132 426

www.ibm.com.au

IZAZI Solutions Pty Ltd

02 9929 7880

www.izazi.com

Oxygen Business Solutions Australia

1800 002 354

www.oxygenforbusiness.com

Perisoft Global Services Pty Ltd

02 9894 4111

www.perisoft.com.au

Soltius New Zealand Limited

64 4472 1897

www.soltius.co.nz

Stream

02 9114 6075

www.streamcs.com

02 8281 3400

www.suse.com

Tango Group Limited

64 9377 6033

www.tangogroup.co.nz

Turnkey Consulting Pty Ltd

02 9091 8011

www.turnkeyconsulting.com.au

1300 927 716

www.wbss.com.au

08 8238 6500

www.advance.on.net

08 9420 5420

www.asggroup.com.au

Ciber Pty Ltd

02 8920 0887

www.ciber.com.au

CitiXsys Australia Pty Ltd

02 9006 1616

www.citixsys.com

Clarity Consulting Group Australia Pty Ltd

03 9868 3500

www.claritygroup.com.au

02 9034 3000

www.csc.com/au

Enabling NZ Ltd

64 3473 9160

www.enabling.co.nz

Enabling Pty Ltd

02 9925 0383

www.enabling.net

Evolution Future Solutions Pty Ltd

1300 884 635

www.evolution-fs.com.au

Inecom Pty Ltd

03 9847 7300

www.inecom.com.au

Key Business Solutions Pty Ltd

02 9648 3323

www.keybusinesssolutions.com.au

Leverage Technologies Pty Limited

02 9332 3855

www.leveragetech.com.au/

SUSE

Windsor Business Solutions

Channel Partner – SAP BusinessOne Advance Business Consulting ASG Group Limited

CSC Australia Pty Ltd

Disclaimer: The information contained herein is provided as a service. While all care has been taken to ensure accuracy at time of publication, Inside SAP and Flapjack Media Pty Ltd make no representation or guarantee as to the correctness of the information provided in this directory, and bear no liability for any losses or other consequences arising from its use. Readers are advised to undertake their own verification of the information contained herein. The information and/or services provided may change at any time without notice.

www.insidesap.com.au 85

directory MicroChannel Services Pty Ltd

02 9089 9999

www.microchannel.com.au

Oxygen Business Solutions Australia

1800 002 354

www.oxygenforbusiness.com

Realtech Limited

64 9308 0900

www.realtech.co.nz

Soltius New Zealand Limited

64 4472 1897

www.soltius.co.nz

SUSE

02 8281 3400

www.suse.com

08 9420 5420

www.asggroup.com.au

02 9959 2260

www.bpse.com.au

02 9394 8500

www.everjoy.com.au

Magical Learning Pty Ltd

0417 234 927

www.magicallearning.com

Progress Pacific Pty Ltd

02 9460 1158

www.progresspacific.com

02 8404 4133

www.avantis.com.au

Education ASG Group Limited Baton Simulations

www.batonsimulations.com

BPSE Consulting Pty Ltd Everjoy Consulting

PwC Avantis Information Systems Pty Ltd Ripple Solutions Pty Ltd

08 9323 7720

Hosting Partners ASG Group Limited

08 9420 5420

www.asggroup.com.au

Computer Networks Pty Limited

02 9878 0277

www.computernetworksit.com.au

CSC Australia Pty Ltd

02 9034 3000

www.csc.com/au

Datacom Business Services Pty Ltd

03 9541 7500

03 9541 7500

Linfox Australia Pty Ltd

03 8340 1000

www.linfox.com.au

Macquarie Telecom Pty Ltd

02 9201 0000

www.macquarietelecom.com

02 6198 3243

www.redbackconsulting.com.au

1300 368 387

www.telstra.com

Redback Consulting Telstra Corporation Limited

Independent Software Vendors with Certified Integration ASG Group Limited

08 9420 5420

www.asggroup.com.au

Australia Post

03 9204 8285

auspost.com.au

CitiXsys Australia Pty Ltd

02 9006 1616

www.citixsys.com

ComActivity Pty Ltd

02 9479 7949

www.comactivity.com.au

02 8596 5100

www.esker.com.au

02 9394 8500

www.everjoy.com.au

Excel4apps Pty Ltd

02 8968 9303

www.excel4apps.com

Gesix Solutions Pty Ltd

07 3870 1322

www.gesix.com

Esker Australia Everjoy Consulting

www.hayestechnology.com

Hayes Technology Group Innogence Limited IQX Business Solutions iSolutions Holdings Pty Ltd Lodestone Management Consultants Pty Ltd

86 Inside SAP magazine

02 8908 4100

www.innogence.com

02 9432 7813

www.iqxbusiness.com

02 9966 9096

www.isipl.com

02 8571 8300

www.lodestonemc.com

directory Manhattan Associates Pty Ltd

02 9454 5400

www.manh.com.au

MESSAGEmanager Solutions Pty Ltd

02 8448 8800

www.mmanager.com

Noveco Systems Pty Ltd

03 9598 5519

www.noveco.com.au

O4 Corporation Pty Ltd

02 9386 1777

www.o4corporation.com

Oniqua Enterprise Analytics

07 3859 9513

www.oniqua.com

Operations and Maintenance Consulting Services Pty Ltd

03 9315 0330

www.reliabilityassurance.com

Pocket Programs

02 8061 6006

www.pocketprograms.com

Prospecta Software Australia Pty Ltd

02 9025 3955

www.prospectasoftware.com

03 9955 9700

www.xrsc.com

Sensis Pty Ltd

03 8653 5000

www.sensis.com.au

Sisu Limited

64 4802 4081

www.sisusoftware.com

Sky Technologies Pty Ltd

03 9558 6088

www.skytechnologies.com

SpinifexIT Pty Ltd

03 9561 5850

www.spinifexit.com

08 9420 5420

www.asggroup.com.au

02 9959 9645

www.boaweb.com

02 9034 3000

www.csc.com/au

02 9394 8500

www.everjoy.com.au

02 9432 7813

www.iqxbusiness.com

02 8571 8300

www.lodestonemc.com

1800 602 920

www.retarus.au

1300 927 716

www.wbss.com.au

02 9394 8100

www.wipro.com

02 8011 4220

www.acuitysearch.com.au

03 9095 8661

www.brick-consulting.com

02 9394 8500

www.everjoy.com.au

02 9283 3555

www.interpro.com.au

Perafel

02 8860 5900

www.perafel.com

Speller International

03 9348 0092

www.spellerinternational.com.au

1300 897 820

www.systemsandpeople.com.au

08 9420 5420

www.asggroup.com.au

02 9492 5600

www.plaut.com.au

Revelation Software Concepts Pty Ltd

Integration Services ASG Group Limited BackOffice Associates, LLC CSC Australia Pty Ltd Everjoy Consulting IQX Business Solutions Lodestone Management Consultants Pty Ltd Retarus Windsor Business Solutions Wipro Technologies

Recruitment Acuity Search Brick Consulting Group Pty Ltd Everjoy Consulting Interpro

Systems and People

RunSAP Implementation Partner ASG Group Limited Plaut IT (Australia) Pty Ltd

www.insidesap.com.au 87

directory SAP BusinessObjects Partner Acclimation Pty Ltd

1300 852 990

www.acclimation.com.au

08 9420 5420

www.asggroup.com.au

02 8404 4133

www.avantis.com.au

02 8916 0800

www.bitech.com.au

Ciber Pty Ltd

02 8920 0887

www.ciber.com.au

Clarity Consulting Group Australia Pty Ltd

03 9868 3500

www.claritygroup.com.au

CSC Australia Pty Ltd

02 9034 3000

www.csc.com/au

CSG Solutions Pty Ltd

08 8922 9000

www.csg.com.au

Extend Technologies Pty Ltd

02 8908 4200

www.extendtechnologies.com.au

Fujitsu Australia Ltd

02 9776 4555

www.au.fujitsu.com

02 9221 2000

www.harmsconsulting.com

Icon Integration Pty Ltd

02 9929 9463

www.iconintegration.com.au

Inhouse Limited

64 4499 6818

www.inhouseltd.co.nz

Innogence Limited

02 8908 4100

www.innogence.com

Oxygen Business Solutions Australia

1800 002 354

www.oxygenforbusiness.com

PCW Solutions Pty Ltd

02 9875 5598

www.pcwsolutions.com.au

Perisoft Global Services Pty Ltd

02 9894 4111

www.perisoft.com.au

Praxa Limited

02 8870 7000

www.praxa.com.au

Soltius New Zealand Limited

64 4472 1897

www.soltius.co.nz

Stream

02 9114 6075

www.streamcs.com

02 8281 3400

www.suse.com

Tango Group Limited

64 9377 6033

www.tangogroup.co.nz

Turnkey Consulting Pty Ltd

02 9091 8011

www.turnkeyconsulting.com.au

ASG Group Limited PwC Avantis Information Systems Pty Ltd Bitech Group Pty Ltd

Harms Consulting Pty Ltd

SUSE

Utopia Inc

www.utopiainc.com 1300 927 716

www.wbss.com.au

BizExpress Pty Ltd

02 9372 5100

www.bizexpress.com.au

Windsor Business Solutions

SAP BusinessObjects – OEM Partners Bravura Solutions Ltd

02 9018 7800

www.bravurasolutions.com

BusinessCraft Pty Ltd

02 4965 5555

www.businesscraft.com

CorProfit Systems Pty Ltd

02 9440 9500

www.corprofit.com

02 9034 3000

www.csc.com/au

Definiti Pty Ltd

02 9017 3200

www.definiti.com.au

Jobpac International Systems Pty Ltd

02 9492 4100

www.jobpac.com.au

Lynx Financial Systems Pty Ltd

02 9479 8304

www.lynx-fs.com.au

Neller Pty Ltd

08 8139 1800

www.neller.com.au

Omnix Pty Ltd

07 3367 2704

www.omnix.com.au

Oniqua Enterprise Analytics

07 3859 9513

www.oniqua.com

Profiling Online Pty Ltd

02 9969 8198

www.profilingonline.com

Supercorp Technology Pty Ltd

07 3850 1200

www.supercorp.com.au

SUSE

02 8281 3400

www.suse.com

CSC Australia Pty Ltd

88 Inside SAP magazine

directory SAP Partner – Software BMC Software Australia Pty Ltd

03 9657 4455

asiapacific_support@bmc.com

Ascential Software

02 9900 5688

www.ascentialsoftware.com

AXS-One Pty Ltd

131 525

www.ausgrid.com.au

BMC Software (New Zealand) Limited

64 9307 4360

asiapacific_support@bmc.com

Brokat Australasia Pty Ltd

02 8272 7300

www.brokat.com

Excel4apps Pty Ltd

02 8968 9303

www.excel4apps.com

Genesys Labs Australasia Pty Ltd

02 9463 8500

www.genesyslab.com/international/ asia_pacific/australia

Accenture (AU)

03 9838 7000

www.accenture.com/au-en/

Services Partner Accenture (NZ)

64 4471 1555

www.accenture.com

Acclimation Pty Ltd

1300 852 990

www.acclimation.com.au

Agility International Pty Ltd

02 0929 92680

www.agility.com.au

ALG Australia Pty Ltd

03 9001 1566

www.algsoftware.com.au

Altis Consulting Pty Ltd

02 9211 1522

altis.com.au/

Analytics 8 Pty Ltd

03 9621 1002

au.analytics8.com/

08 9420 5420

www.asggroup.com.au

Assurity Consulting Limited

64 9354 4901

www.assurity.co.nz

Astral Consulting Services Pty Limited

03 9690 7222

www.astral.com.au

Axient Pty Ltd

02 8338 3444

www.axient.com.au

02 9959 9645

www.boaweb.com

BCS Technology Australia

02 8667 3024

www.bcstechnology.com.au

BearingPoint New Zealand Limited

64 9355 9000

www.kpmg.co.nz

BearingPoint Pty Ltd

03 8665 9500

www.bearingpoint.com.au

BI Group Australia Pty Ltd

03 9018 2666

www.bigroup.com.au

Bitech Group Pty Ltd

02 8916 0800

www.bitech.com.au

BluLeader Pty Ltd

02 9037 4345

www.bluleader.com.au

BPSE Consulting Pty Ltd

02 9959 2260

www.bpse.com.au

ASG Group Limited

BackOffice Associates, LLC

Ciber Limited (NZ)

64 9968 2935

www.ciber.com/nz/

Ciber Pty Ltd (AU)

02 8920 0887

www.ciber.com.au

Clarity Consulting Group Australia Pty Ltd

03 9868 3500

www.claritygroup.com.au

Computer Networks Pty Limited

02 9878 0277

www.computernetworksit.com.au

07 3503 9284

www.controls.net.au

03 9415 9611

www.cosol.com.au

02 9034 3000

www.csc.com/au

Controls Consulting

controls

COSOL Australia Pty Ltd CSC Australia Pty Ltd DAS Consulting Australia Pty Ltd

0419 732 433

www.dasc.co

Deloitte (AU)

02 9409 7000

www.dc.com

Deloitte (NZ)

64 9303 1225

www.dc.com

Discovery Consulting Group Pty Ltd

1300 664 903

www.discoveryconsulting.com.au

eB2Bcom Pty Ltd

03 9851 8600

www.eb2bcom.com

EPI-USE Australia Pty Ltd

02 8904 9344

www.epiuse.com.au

Extend Technologies Pty Ltd

02 8908 4200

www.extendtechnologies.com.au

02 9221 2000

www.harmsconsulting.com

Harms Consulting Pty Ltd

www.insidesap.com.au 89

directory HCL AXON Solutions Pty Ltd

02 9929 9900

www.hcl-axon.com

HCL New Zealand Limited

64 4471 6440

www.hcl-axon.com

Hexaware Technologies Limited

02 9089 8959

hexaware.com

IBM New Zealand Ltd

64 9358 8777

www.ibm.com

Iesupport Pty Ltd

02 8920 9560

www.iesupport.com.au

Incotrade Australia Pty Ltd trading as Leonardo Consulting

07 3831 5511

www.leonardo.com.au

IncQ Consulting Pty Ltd

0414 228 559

www.incqconsulting.com

Infosys Technologies Limited

03 9860 2000

www.infosys.com

Innogence Limited

02 8908 4100

www.innogence.com

02 9432 7813

www.iqxbusiness.com

IZAZI Solutions Pty Ltd

02 9929 7880

www.izazi.com

KALTech Group

03 9878 8922

www.kaltech.com.au

LiTMUS Group Pty Ltd

1300 366 929

www.litmusgroup.com

02 8571 8300

www.lodestonemc.com

IQX Business Solutions

Lodestone Management Consultants Pty Ltd Mphasis Australia Pty Ltd

0431 285 692

www.mphasis.com

NXG Business Solutions Pty Ltd

03 9645 7400

www.nxg.com.au

Oakton Services Limited

03 9617 0200

www.oakton.com.au

Oxygen Business Solutions Australia

02 9805 7400

www.oxygenforbusiness.com

Oxygen Business Solutions (NZ)

64 9583 1600

www.oxygenforbusiness.com

Pendragon Consultants Pty Ltd

07 3303 0212

www.pendragon.com.au

Perisoft Global Services Pty Ltd

02 9894 4111

www.perisoft.com.au

02 9492 5600

www.plaut.com.au

Presence of IT Pty Ltd

1300 665 503

www.presenceofit.com.au

Prospecta Software Australia Pty Ltd

02 9025 3955

www.prospectasoftware.com

Realtech Limited

64 9308 0900

www.realtech.co.nz

02 6198 3243

www.redbackconsulting.com.au

0414 629 233

www.rs-ap.com

1800 602 920

www.retarus.au

Revolution IT Pty Ltd

03 9600 2566

www.revn-it.com

Plaut IT (Australia) Pty Ltd

Redback Consulting Retail Solutions Asia Pacific Pty Ltd Retarus

Silfen Pty Ltd

02 9113 0727

www.silfen.com.au

Sinapse Pty Ltd

03 8412 4444

www.sinapse.com.au

Southern Cross Computing Pty Ltd

02 6290 2800

www.scc.com.au

SRA Information Technology Pty Ltd

08 8995 0000

www.sra.com.au

Stellar Consulting Group Limited

64 9363 2822

www.stellarconsulting.co.nz

StepChange Pty Ltd

08 6210 1527

www.stepchange.com.au

StoneBridge Systems Pty Ltd

1300 854 116

www.stonebridgesystems.com.au

Stream

02 9114 6075

www.streamcs.com

02 8281 3400

www.suse.com

TAMS Solutions Pty Ltd

02 9455 0397

www.tams-sp.com

Tata Consultancy Services Limited

03 9828 0600

www.tcs.com

Vesta Partners Pty Ltd

03 8676 0672

www.vestapartners.com

1300 927 716

www.wbss.com.au

02 9394 8100

www.wipro.com

03 9229 3805

www.zenithsolutions.com.au

SUSE

Windsor Business Solutions Wipro Technologies Zenith Solutions (Aust) Pty Ltd

90 Inside SAP magazine

directory Zer01 Pty Ltd

0415 723 537

www.zer01group.com

08 9420 5420

www.asggroup.com.au

02 8875 5000

www.compuware.com.au

02 9034 3000

www.csc.com/au

02 8596 5100

www.esker.com.au

61 2 9394 8500

www.everjoy.com.au

02 9432 7813

www.iqxbusiness.com

02 9454 5400

www.manh.com.au

03 9598 5519

www.noveco.com.au

02 9929 0676

www.readsoft.com.au

03 9955 9700

www.xrsc.com

03 9558 6088

www.skytechnologies.com

02 8281 3400

www.suse.com

03 9229 3891

www.tikconsulting.com.au

1300 927 716

www.wbss.com.au

02 9394 8100

www.wipro.com

02 6198 3243

www.redbackconsulting.com.au

08 9420 5420

www.asggroup.com.au

02 8875 5000

www.compuware.com.au

02 9034 3000

www.csc.com/au

02 9394 8500

www.everjoy.com.au

02 9432 7813

www.iqxbusiness.com

02 9454 5400

www.manh.com.au

1800 602 920

www.retarus.au

02 8281 3400

www.suse.com

02 9394 8100

www.wipro.com

Software Solutions ASG Group Limited Compuware Corporation CSC Australia Pty Ltd Esker Australia Everjoy Consulting IQX Business Solutions Manhattan Associates Pty Ltd Noveco Systems Pty Ltd ReadSoft Pty Ltd Revelation Software Concepts Pty Ltd Sky Technologies Pty Ltd SUSE TIK Consulting Windsor Business Solutions Wipro

SuccessFactors Partner Redback Consulting

Technology ASG Group Limited Compuware Corporation CSC Australia Pty Ltd Everjoy Consulting IQX Business Solutions Manhattan Associates Pty Ltd Retarus SUSE Wipro Technologies

www.insidesap.com.au 91