Following a year-long innovation and optimisation project, Britehouse Holdings Specialist SAP division, Britehouse SSD, has enabled PPC subsidiary, Portland Holdings, in Zimbabwe, to surmount the processing and system problems created by years of hyperinflation and to boost business performance through previously inaccessible SAP All-in-One functionality.
“Several factors had combined to leave us with dirty data and limited functionality after our initial implementation of SAP All-in-One in 2007,” says Portland Holdings financial director, Iain Sheasby. “The first implementation hadn't been ideally aligned with our business needs as a manufacturing organisation. Specifically, we were set up for product pricing instead of process costing, making automated profitability analysis impossible.
“Then, as our users became familiar with the solution, they developed more advanced requirements. But the system hadn't been set up to enable things like workflow, e-business, or automatic payment runs for vendors.
“The last straw, however, was hyperinflation - which forced us to adjust currencies in the solution nine times in a period of 18 months. We updated the solution again when the Zimbabwean economy was dollarised in 2009, but the complex and cluttered legacy data made the entire system unwieldy. Certain modules of SAP All-in-One simply couldn't operate.
“Ordinary fixes weren't feasible. We decided to start again, with new data in a better-aligned solution and the old data kept for record purposes on a separate server. While we were at it, we wanted to access the additional functionality we'd been doing without since implementation.”
Portland Holdings chose to go with Britehouse on the project because of its track record as a business partner to PPC in South Africa and, as a consequence, its understanding of the cement manufacturing industry.
Britehouse assigned to the project an overall team of 13 specialists in areas such as finance, sales and distribution, materials management, plant maintenance, production planning, and solution management. Using RunSAP methodology, the team moved 21 000 spares and 20 000 assets to the new system and cleaned up 2 500 customer and 600 vendor data masters, as well as 16 000 open plant maintenance orders. Some of the existing master data had to be realigned, as did the trial balance logic.
Britehouse also implemented activity-based and shipment costing, optimised Portland Holdings' credit management processes, and aligned its system with PPC's central master data depository - to facilitate reporting.
Britehouse's project plan enabled a cut-over at the end of September to coincide with Portland Holdings' year-end, enabling the company to start its new financial year with clean data and a clean balance sheet.
“Our primary focus was on stabilising the system to provide Portland Holdings with a functioning business as usual environment,” says Britehouse project manager, Corne Pieterse. “Then we focused on innovation, to enable Portland to extract more functionality and, therefore, more value from their system.
“Unlike a new implementation, the challenge in-system innovation is not simply identifying the insufficiencies and ineffectiveness of the existing system, but also finding a better way of doing things that doesn't over-extend the organisation's current business processes.
“Because RunSAP's documented and automated scoping, development, configuration and testing methodologies take the guesswork out of innovation, we were able to ensure that what we recommended and then executed for Portland was relevant and appropriate in terms of enabling the organisation to significantly improve performance.”
Sheasby says that Britehouse's technical specialists are in a league of their own. “Perhaps more importantly, their project management capabilities are exceptional, enabling the technical specialists to focus on what they have to do. Also, whenever a resource was needed, it appeared and remained dedicated to our project for as long as needed.
“All of which has ensured that we now have a stable system that is tightly aligned to our business processes and industry norms. It's also much more user-friendly and enables the company to run on a business focus rather than merely on function.”
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