Section 8.4. ESA in action: Kimberly-Clark


8.4. ESA in action: Kimberly-Clark

Kimberly-Clark is one of the world's largest manufacturers of health and hygiene consumer products. Every day, 1.3 billion people use one of the products from its personal care, consumer tissue, and B2B lines of business, which include brands such as Kleenex, Scott tissue, and Huggies diapers. With 60,000 employees working in more than 100 manufacturing plants worldwide, nearly half of Kimberly-Clark's $15 billion in annual revenues stem from sales in 150 countries besides the United States.

Kimberly-Clark's management was quick to recognize the inherent flexibility and other advantages of ESA, but because of the company's size and global scope, it has chosen to follow a cautious roadmap toward strategic adoption of enterprise services. Instead of rushing down a piecemeal, project-driven path, the company and its IT architects have chosen to first develop the skill sets, business process maps, governance structures, and repositories necessary for wholesale and wholehearted adoption.

The central event of Kimberly-Clark's timetable is the arrival of the Enterprise Services Repository from SAP. Only with the Enterprise Services Repository, the company feels, will enterprise services achieve the degree of flexibility and reusability that justifies the level of investment necessary to convert its business processes into service-enabled composite applications.

But it hasn't been idle. Kimberly-Clark has already mapped thousands of business processes in simple PDF form for eventual translation into ARIS or other application modeling tools. There is already a standardized modeling methodology and governance structure. The next step is to begin designing governance procedures for an enterprise services environment in which a central authority would manage the services shared by multiple applications. Kimberly-Clark also has the advantage of an unusually close bond between the business and IT sides of its operations; it's taken relatively little time for both sides to discuss the advantages of evolving toward ESA and the necessary steps along the way.

Kimberly-Clark intends to make the jump to using the SAP Solution Manager to model its business processes within the IT toolset. The timing will depend on finding an appropriate business driver or a project large enough to drive the transition. The company is also organizing its IT department to create both a shared services group fluent in using SAP NetWeaver Developer Studio and Web Dynpro capabilities, and to teach its business analysts the skills necessary to think of functionality in terms of combinable, reusable services.

Along the same timeline, the enterprise architecture team and IT will embark on convincing the rest of Kimberly-Clark that enterprise services are a business solution, not a technology solution. Kimberly-Clark's plans for upgrading business solutions such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Supply Chain Management (SCM) will offer opportunities to begin testing and experimenting with the creation of enterprise services and composite applications.

But the one thing that won't happen is sudden, systemwide, dramatic change. Even after Kimberly-Clark adopts ESA with the arrival of the Enterprise Services Repository, the company expects the cost of moving its employees en masse to new applications and interfaces to remain too expensive to justify the effort. Why? Because adapting change in business processes requires extensive efforts concerning retraining and rolling out the capabilities to the business clients. There will always be advantages to moving slowly.




Enterprise SOA. Designing IT for Business Innovation
Enterprise SOA: Designing IT for Business Innovation
ISBN: 0596102380
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 265

flylib.com © 2008-2017.
If you may any questions please contact us: flylib@qtcs.net