Section 7.5. How have companies put SAP s ESA Adoption Program to work?

7.5. How have companies put SAP's ESA Adoption Program to work?

Although ESA is a relatively new addition to the SAP lineup, customers are already reporting success with it. In this section, we will look at three such companies: Manchette Publicité, Wacker Chemie AG, and LHI Leasing.

7.5.1. ESA in action: Manchette Publicité

Manchette Publicité is the advertising arm of the Philippe Amaury media group, the owner of several major newspapers and sporting magazines including Le Parisien, Aujourd'hui en France, and L'Equipe. Manchette designs and sells advertising space in these and other publications, and has been doing so on the Web at its pioneering client self-service portal, Manchettepub.com, since 1999. While the portal has proven to be an effective and efficient vehicleby 2003, 30 percent of its customers regularly used the portal and bookings had increased 70 percent in a single yearManchette hopes to realize even greater efficiencies by automating the entire process of selling advertising space via a one-stop destination powered by enterprise services.

Manchettepub.com was originally built with the SAP Classified Advertising Management application from the SAP for Media solution portfolio. Customers could create their own ads and enter them into Manchette's system automatically, but the portal lacked interoperability with the functionality embedded in the company's other portals for different publications and for invoicing and payment processes. Manchette's management wanted to fold all of these abilities into a single portal accessible by every customer. After discussions with SAP Consulting, Manchette decided to adopt ESA as the path for doing just that. Each process used in its various portalsfrom inquiry to ad entry to paymentwould be encapsulated using enterprise services as a separate piece of functionality reusable at a granular level.

Accordingly, Manchette decided to overhaul and redesign Manchettepub.com as a self-service, workflow-routed destination site composed entirely of enterprise services. If business conditions changed or a better user interface (UI) surfaced, the site and its services could easily be redeployed as needed, with the added bonus that Manchette's SAP and non-SAP applications could now coexist in the same portal.

With SAP Consulting's participation, Manchette's IT team held a series of workshops during which they analyzed the company's needs and priorities and created a roadmap for the construction of an enterprise services-enabled companion site to Manchettepub.com, named leParisienpro.com (after one of the company's flagship papers, Le Parisien). Upon its completion, Manchettepub.com would then be rebuilt using enterprise services and SAP NetWeaver, with Manchette's SAP for Media applications comprising the business logic layer for both. The construction of leParisienpro.com took three months, and Manchettepub.com is already under reconstruction.

The new portal allows clients to complete artwork and copy templates and check submission deadlines while transaction details are automatically routed to Manchette's accounts payable system for invoicing. Both sets of features have significantly reduced the amount of manual work performed by Manchette staff, a savings that translates to a 50 percent reduction in the cost of selling advertising space. Forty percent of the company's customers now use the portal, a figure expected to rise to 60 percent over the next two years.

Furthermore, Manchette has already reused the enterprise services comprising leParisienpro.com to create a separate portal for public sector clients legally obligated to place financial notices in the local press. This new site, Avispublics.com, was built rapidly, with minimal development effort and cost, by reusing components in leParisienpro.com. Two-thirds of Manchette's 70 public sector customers were expected to use Avispublics.com by the end of 2005.

This site will be just the first of Manchette's many markets and lines of business to be automated. The company intends to expand from a business-to-business model into the business-to-consumer market with a portal for readers wishing to place their own classified ads from home. The company is even considering becoming an application service provider by marketing its enterprise services platform to other advertising agencies in France. Potential customers will then have the power to reconfigure the platform flexibly, to meet their own unique business needs.

7.5.2. ESA in action: Wacker Chemie AG

Manchette is not the only SAP customer to have had early success in adopting ESA. Wacker Chemie AG is a global chemical manufacturer headquartered in Munich, Germany. Its portfolio of subsidiaries is focused on semiconductor technology, silicone chemistry, polymers, fine chemicals, and polysilicon. As a 2.5-billion-euro-a-year business with 14,700 employees and 20 production sites in Europe, Asia, and the Americas, Wacker has begun looking to enterprise services as the means to integrate its specialized and far-flung operations flexibly.

Wacker's challenges stem from the combination of a strong ERP implementation and a complicated manufacturing environment with highly specialized equipment and the systems that run them. Wacker is using SAP NetWeaver as the platform to integrate its SAP R/3 system and production systems accessed via the Microsoft BizTalk platform within a unified, customized portal interface using enterprise services. Figure 7-6 illustrates this configuration.

Figure 7-6. ESA at Wacker Chemie AG handling maintenance tasks

One example of the company's integration efforts is in the area of maintenance. Wacker tracks the lifespan and scheduled replacement of its manufacturing equipment components in two different places: in its production-level systems and within its SAP R/3 implementation. The former tracks a component's lifespani.e., how long it's been in useand the latter contains a set of parameters and instructions that automatically order a replacement part once a threshold is crossed and that part nears the end of its natural life. The trick for Wacker has been mapping these systems together. Using SAP NetWeaver, Wacker has created a pair of services to map and manage the measurement metrics abstracted from the production environment's applications onto the parameters specified in the SAP R/3 implementation, all within the portal.

As a follow-up along similar lines, Wacker is investigating a solution to the common problem of tank management, included in the new architecture shown in Figure 7-7. A major task in the chemical industry is the storage of liquid chemicals in tanks. Monitoring the status of tankshow full or empty they areis the responsibility of Wacker's SAP R/3 system, but the data calculated via process orders and stored in SAP R/3 is often at odds with the reality of tank levels, for any number of reasons. A difference of two or three liters may be acceptable, but at a higher difference, a warning is required. In Wacker's proposed solution, a set of enterprise services monitoring real-world tank levels will be integrated over BizTalk and within another SAP NetWeaver portal with the SAP R/3 data, resulting in an interface that illustrates the difference between the real and "official" amounts in each tank, along with how that difference has changed over time.

Figure 7-7. ESA at Wacker Chemie AG providing tank-monitoring capabilities

7.5.3. ESA in action: LHI Leasing

Bringing innovative new products to market as quickly as possible is a key to success in every industry these days, and that certainly applies to writing leases for retail real estate.

Just ask LHI Leasing, a Munich-based leader in the field, which manages some 1,600 virtual corporations whose combined assets total 16 billion euros. LHI's retail department store customers demand an increasing variety and complexity of financial products, such as structured financing. As LHI moves into the middle market, it needs to quickly update and change standardized contracts and combine them with other products.

Naturally, speed and flexibility in product offerings demand speed and flexibility in IT. However, LHI found recently that its monolithic ERP system just wasn't up to the job. So, LHI turned to SAP for help in adopting ESA and laying the groundwork for a new IT landscape. The goal: long-term flexibility while providing current users with tangible short-term benefits. With help from SAP's consulting organization, LHI worked up the first version of its ESA adoption roadmap in a matter of weeks.

First, a series of workshops were conducted to lay out the concepts and language of ESA for the sake of LHI's business and IT managers. These workshops also served to help the SAP consulting team gain a solid understanding of LHI's business practices. They quickly identified reporting, employee and manager self-service, and knowledge management as business processes that were particularly well suited to early use of ESA and that would be able to produce quick wins for LHI. The SAP consultants also drilled down on specific business scenarios in order to craft a high-level design for LHI's overall enterprise services architecture.

The result was a roadmap sketching out activities over the short and long terms. This roadmap provided a list of potential risks, a management summary, and a three- to five-year timeline for major milestones. The timeline laid out the schedule on which LHI was to implement ESA with the latest mySAP ERP solution, create portals for employee and manager self-service, harness external services such as a FileNet system that generated personalized customer reports, and integrate ad hoc workflow systems for creating new products. Later stages of the roadmap covered the discovery and design of customized enterprise services.

Key to LHI's new enterprise services architecture, of course, will be SAP NetWeaver, which the company is deploying across its intranet and extranet. At first, this platform will make it possible for LHI employees to search and integrate information across applications via a web-based portal and to correspond with each other in new ways. Eventually, LHI will enable its customers to gain direct access to a broad range of information, too, and even update selected pieces of that data on their own. Eventually, the company will be able to whip up new leasing contracts on a modular basis, combining components extracted from old contracts. At the same time, LHI will be able to maintain records of each lease in a form that's easily accessible for yearly financial and regulatory reporting purposes.

The next step will be to work with SAP Consulting in analyzing still more business processes within LHI and identify additional candidates for delivery in enterprise services form. As it implements the roadmap, LHI stands to save considerable expense. With its IT infrastructure resembling a set of reusable services, as opposed to a collection of self-contained applications, LHI will be able to quickly create, try out, and refine new leasing and asset management products to meet every change in business conditions. In short, LHI is on its way to becoming a sort of department store itself, offering just the right product for every customer.