Land Rover South Africa (LRSA) went live last week (first week of January) with a major information technology project involving a move to an integrated SAP R/3 software solution designed to deliver major business benefits, including allowing business volume growth.
"Installation and customisation of R/3 Materials Management, Production Planning and Sales & Distribution modules were complex as no industry standard model for the automotive CKD/CBU (complete knock down/completely built up) environment existed," said David Randall, leader of the consulting team on the project.
The contract called for integration with a front-end system that provides dealers with a pipeline view of the information flow. This will enable dealers to, for instance, find out the availability of a specific model.
On top of all of this is also a requirement for a high level of integration with BMW South Africa`s SAP R/3 systems. The local BMW plant manufactures Land Rover Defenders on behalf of LRSA.
Randall is a senior SAP consultant with Csiper Consulting/Ernst & Young joint-venture company E&Y CSI, and leads a team of specialists in the fields of enterprise resource planning (ERP) and package-enabled re-engineering (PER).
"A combination of factors won the contract for E&Y CSI," says Randall. "LRSA liked our approach and methodology as well as the fact that E&Y will use its global network to expand the knowledge input to the project. E&Y`s "Global State" approach to servicing its clients was seen as a major benefit to BMW/Land Rover for further roll-outs of SAP R/3 solutions throughout their global operations.
"The implementation was fairly aggressive in terms of what they wanted delivered in the time frame, particularly as automotive is not an easy area to work in," says Randall. "Overall it went very well given the constraints and the complexity, which relate not only to the integration with BMW`s system, but also to those of Land Rover in the UK."
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