Global Manufacturer of Microphones, Wireless Systems and Premium Earphones and Headphones

Pain
One significant gap that SAP has is that its user interface makes it difficult (and very expensive) for an average end user to enter engineering change requests (ECR) and new part requests (NPR). Additionally, deploying SAP throughout the entire engineering and manufacturing organizations would be a very costly and time consuming initiative. The Company decided that it would have its team of engineers (over six hundred globally) enter these complex requests into SharePoint rather than directly into SAP.

Vision
The goal was to have a more efficient, quicker interface in place by the end of 2011.  By using SharePoint, MPS Partners would be able to reduce the number of screens required to enter and ECR from seventeen in SAP to three. This efficiency ensured that engineering data, bills of material and product spec sheets were always up to date. Additionally, The Company had been experimenting with SAP Portal for many years. This engagement helped show the power of SharePoint and how to best utilize it to interact with SAP.

Value
Prior to this project, the company struggled to deploy even a simple Intranet with SharePoint. The company had used several internal resources along with a handful of partners with limited success. With this significant success, the company is now targeting the deployment of several additional composites through SharePoint. The CIO has stated again that she now sees that SharePoint is the easiest way to foster collaboration within the organization and with SAP.

Solution
By using a friendly interface within SharePoint, the time required to enter a request was dramatically reduced and the amount of errors was minimized. MPS Partners built the SharePoint interface along with the all of the interfaces back to SAP in a period of ten weeks, thus hitting a goal of delivering this system by the end of 2011.

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