The brewery biggie eliminated the requirement of trained SAP manpower by
creating a personalized front-end, across its 50 odd billing stations, most of
which are situated in remote
areas. Being the country's biggest brewery firm, United Spirits had the nique
challenge of consolidating the billing status reports across its 50 odd billing
stations situated all around India, some of them in remote locations. Adding to
the company's problems was the fact that most of these billing stations were
attached to bottling plants that were operating as franchisee companies. Having
implemented enterprise wide SAP in 2003, the company needed to make life simpler
for the person manning the computers at each billing station. Project Delta was
undertaken to fulfill this need.
The objective of the project was to simplify the business processes in SAP.
Transaction efficiency needed to be enhanced multifold and the information had
to be tabulated in real time at a central location. Using these inputs and SAP
BAPI, Web services are called in to complete all the five processes in 'One Go'.
Since the SAP interaction is done through an SAP connector using SAP BAPI, the
solution is insulated from SAP upgrades, resulting in Delta being used
extensively for Material Creation, Customer Creation, and Backflush. Hence,
every instance in SAP that ideally took three stages and 8 screens, can be
accomplished in a single step through a single screen through Delta.
The single screen is essentially an extended version of a typical Excel Sheet
where data like No. of cases/units ordered, processed, return orders, warehouse
capacity etc are updated real time as soon as an order is received, till it is
processed, billed and delivered. Delta has also ensured that the excise laws,
regulations etc that are unique for each state are consolidated within the
billing system, thereby ensuring that the taxes, fees and other related charges
are levied correctly. The company has also reduced the number of SAP trained
professions manning these stations.
T K SUBRAMANIAN, VP-Information Systems |