World Leader in Production and Distribution of Consumer Products

Pain
The company uses many external resources for outsourcing services. The procurement and management of those projects was being done through a module within SAP that was designed for use with products rather than services. However, the company tried to fit this business process within an existing module. There was no clear label to identify the service associated with the receipt, requiring managers to manually match up receipts to services received. When multiple suppliers sent receipts through purchasing at one time, the process became even more challenging, time consuming and ineffective. On top of that, the system for processing purchase orders varied among purchasing managers, resulting in inconsistencies.

Vision
Working with Microsofts Managers and SAP Alliance Team, MPS Partners worked with the Global Business Systems group to craft a vision of a simple but flexible self-service experience backed by a powerful integration solution based on Microsoft and partner products.

Value
Naresh Koka of MPS Partners worked directly with the internal team to design a solution that maximized the client’s existing SAP architecture and implementing tools utilizing Excel and Outlook that were designed and integrated to specifically address their challenges has resulted in:

• >Reduced time to complete tasks: supporting the client’s commitment to operate efficiently. In the case of the goods receipts reconciliation, what took one hour with the former system now takes five minutes.
• Reduced human error: supporting the client’s constant strive to be the best they can be. In the case of the Daily Cash Report, the ability to collect information automatically from locations around the world, reconcile and identify any discrepancies minimizes any lost opportunities with cash investments by getting to market quickly.
• Reduced the time to complete tasks: by automating the data collection process and reminding the responsible parties of the monthly recurring task.

Solution
MPS Partners maximized the client’s existing tools—in this case Microsoft Outlook—and created an Office Business Application to automatically approve goods receipts. Since the goods movement data sent by suppliers are in different formats, the modules within Excel were designed to automatically extract/parse, route for approval and post a goods movement in SAP without the need for manually intervention. In the past, the approver would have had to open the Outlook item, open the attachment, copy and paste the information into SAP.