News

  ecenta establishes ecenta management consulting AG

ecenta AG and Dr. Christoph Wargitsch are setting up the consulting subsidiary "ecenta management consulting AG". Based on 10 years working for companies like A.T. Kearney as a consultant and Audi, Volkswagen and T-Systems as a member of the leadership team, Wargitsch has a long-term, global experience in mastering complex challenges in marketing & sales, customer relationship management as well as IT strategy and IT management. His industry experience is mainly in automotive, manufacturing, IT Services and telecommunication.

ecenta management consulting AG seamlessly extends the existing service offering portfolio of ecenta AG. Target group are executives and project managers in service firms and industrial enterprises who are facing challenging tasks and want to rely on consulting that is dominated by long-year implemenation experience combined with fresh views and innovative power. Customers find an attractive package of consulting and implementation consisting of ecenta management consulting AG's strategy work, concepts and process design combined with ecenta AG's SAP implementation power.

  CRM Marketing at MDEC in Malaysia

An international expert team of ecenta consultants was tasked to implement SAP CRM Marketing at MDEC (Multimedia Development Corporation Sdn Bhd, Kuala Lumpur / Malaysia).

During the project, SAP standard functionality was adapted and enhanced to the particular customer needs. The solution allows the central planning and analysis of all of MDEC's marketing activities.

Due to the creation of specific target groups and with the help of individual emails, the customers can be addressed in a more specific fashion during a campaign. Campaign feedback can be gathered and plan/actual values can be compared easily. A calendar shows the time sequence of marketing campaigns, which can be displayed according to topic areas.

  Flexible and efficient Help-Desk processes for Telco Industry with SAP CRM 5.0

Being one of the world's leading Telco companies quick and cost efficient customer service is an important factor for customer satisfaction and loyalty thus providing significant business advantages in today's business environment. Currently a team of ecenta consultants is responsible for the technical design and implementation of a restructured and more efficient service process based on SAP CRM 5.0.

The main objective in this project is to make the process more flexible and adapting quicker to changing business needs. This includes handling and forwarding service tickets within the organization as well as in third-party scenarios. To guarantee this level of flexibility, business rules, such as the assignment of a service ticket to the right group within the service organization, have to be quickly changeable without adjustments in source code and with short lead times.

The new scenario runs on SAP CRM 5.0 in parallel to the existing scenario for a certain transition period. The implementation is mainly based on IC WebClient which has been customized and adapted to the customer needs. Hereby existing functionality such as the use of Internet Customer Self-Service (ICSS) for registering service tickets besides multiple interfaces to SAP and non-SAP systems has to be retained and proven to handle both service processes at the same time. A flexible way of assigning the service tickets to the right group within the service organization is implemented with use of rule-based order routing. This standard functionality allows to automatically determine the right group based on service ticket attributes like e.g. products or severity.

The project currently started the testing phase and is looking forward to a successful go-live in November 2007. The total implementation time for the new service process by then will be 5 months including the technical blueprinting.

  Fulfill every possible need for Hierarchies with MDM

SAP NetWeaver MDM is a powerful tool when it comes to building hierarchies and taxonomies. Moving forward from the Customer Master Data Consolidation to the Centralization scenario at a globally active telecommunications company an additional demand besides customer master data was brought up; a customer hierarchy needed to be built in MDM and also distributed to five integrated consuming systems. Each Hierarchy level represented a legal entity and needed to be handled separately.

With its long-term expertise ecenta was able to fulfill all customer requirements, especially the different needs of the consuming systems since each system had a different expectation of the received hierarchy information.

  Benefit of upgrading your existing MDM solution to latest versions

After running with the MDM Java API enabled matching algorithm for one year, the customer - a globally operating company in the telecoms sector - decided to upgrade their Vendor repository to MDM 5.5 SP05, in order to be consistent with the Customer repository. This move also allowed them to leverage the powerful matching mode provided via the MDM Data Manager since SP04 offered more flexibility and control for the power user to define system-specific matching rules and normalization rules, which could then be used as building blocks for matching strategy variants.

The ecenta team provided expertise in the upgrade process including configuration of import and syndication processes with MDM Import Server and Syndication Server, and also migrated the logic encapsulated in the Java matching algorithm to new matching strategies through interactive consultation with the end users.

  Deploying CRM Service globally

Early 2007, a leading provider of optical instruments turned to ecenta to align and deploy a new service strategy globally. Acting in concert across multiple locations around the world, ecenta consultants analysed and documented the service requirements in a mere 12 weeks. The consequent service process optimizations and system deployments enabled unparalleled efficiencies and record customer satisfaction levels. The solution included deploying support teams using the SAP CRM 5.0 Interaction Center for the customer-facing agents. Key elements of these processes included designing and implementing an innovative IBase concept, contract & warranty management, and integration with legacy field service applications. For the management, the solution included detailed BI reports.

In a further step, the IC WebClient was enhanced in order to leverage the new Installed Base concept and provide the user with intuitive, fast access to relevant information while creating Customer Service Requests. The resulting reduction in inconsistent and inaccurate service tickets had a direct impact on the data quality available for reporting. The result: the stage was set for reports providing new insight into product quality, service processes and related costs.

  Design and implementation of a BI logistics solution for a global corporation

For a globally-active corporation ecenta designed and implemented a BI Logistic solution which assists users in the various Market and Business Units within the organization in their planning and forecasting activities.

The solution has an extensive scope that spans through the various ERP modules (SD, MM, PS, and FI). It uses standard data sources in the BW Logistics Cockpit and generic data sources, enabling the delivery of management graphs and operational reports, comprising of Inbound and Outbound Delivery Precision, Sales Order Handling lead time, Material BOM and Inventory Management.

  ecenta supports upgrade from SAP BW 3.5 to SAP BI 7.0

In close cooperation with specialists from ecenta, a leading candy manufacturer upgraded its BW system landscape (consisting of Sandbox-, Development-, Quality Assurance- and Production-System) from SAP BW 3.5 to SAP BI 7.0.

The project covered the upgrade of all BW 3.5 ABAP-Stacks and the additional installation of BI 7.0 Java-Stacks including new BI7 Web-Reporting functionality, Adobe Document Services and SAP Enterprise Portal. Within only six weeks all systems were upgraded without negative impact on existing BW Applications including Month-End-Closing starting immediately after the technical upgrade was finished.

  HR processes made easy with HCM Processes and Forms

There is a growing trend for companies to move towards the adoption of global shared services center to standardize and centralize HR processes. SAP supports the central execution of HR activities whilst encouraging greater process ownership by involving managers and employees where required within the processes.

Business packages for Employee Self-Service, Manager Self-Service and HR Administrator have been delivered by SAP for this purpose. The new business packages include portal iViews developed using WebDynpro Java. These iViews make use of consistent navigational approaches to give users a uniform and intuitive way to access information, and reduce development time through component re-use.

Form-based processes (HCM Processes and Forms) are enabled through portal content delivered with these business packages. A typical process starts with a manager initiating a process (like transfer, salary revisions). While editing the form, he can attach supporting documents and save intermediate drafts before sending off his final confirmed form. A HR administrator checks form content and validates supporting documents for further processing. Upon completion of the entire process, the form and its supporting attachments can be automatically appended to the employee's Digital Personnel File (DPF). SAP provides standard Adobe Interactive Forms for some of the more common and basic processes. Standard forms supported by the HCM processes and forms provide value-helps from the SAP PA and PT modules.

ecenta - together with other services companies - provided a prototype for a global corporation, hereby delivering input from the technical stream into the process design for customer's key global HR processes, and designing and developing Adobe Interactive Forms to be used to support their processes.

  Process optimization in the Public Sector with SAP CRM 5.2

Within the scope of a prototype for a European immigration office ecenta - as a partner of the SAP Center of Excellence - is developing the core process on the basis of SAP CRM 5.2 within the new UI Framework and with SAP Business Workflow.

The process runs from submitting the application form, through checking and validating it, up to the approval and notification. It runs through multiple stages, which are handled by different employees within different departments of the business.

Additionally the core process will be extended and optimized with the integration of multiple 3rd party tools, i.e. address validation, duplicate check, Outlook integration, external document management or Adobe Print Forms.

The entire prototype including multiple demo scenarios shall be completed in just 10 weeks.

  Getting all the best from MDM at once

A globally leading cement and concrete producing company used a tremendously grown catalog of material master data. This catalog grew in six years by natural company growth but especially by buying more global companies and integrating their material master data into the system landscape.

ecenta's scope was to migrate the existing catalog to a new modeled MDM data model that reflected the current processes. A huge taxonomy hierarchy was built with more than 4,000 attributes. Data from 30 different countries and 7 different languages was migrated. This data needed to be distributed back to 25 different JDE clients that represent each local country plant. The remaining five were European countries that brought their material master data from R/3 systems into the corporation's landscape after the company fusions. This data was analyzed by ecenta consultants, mapped, transformed and finally migrated to fit the old JDE system definition of the material master data. The challenge for ecenta was to fulfill the consolidation and migration not in an isolated first phase but in parallel to the ongoing harmonization and centralization phases. A complex three-level approval workflow for newly-created or updated materials was created via CAF (GP) and WebDynpro Forms in the SAP Enterprise Portal.

The go-live for the whole project was a successful big bang approach. At the very same day the consolidated, cleansed data was distributed to all connected systems but also newly-created and updated data came into the MDM catalog via the Enterprise Portal.

  Full controlled approval workflows with customized user interfaces

The former tedious way of manually entering master data in the Customer Request Scenario of one of the major globally operating telecoms companies is modernized by a team of ecenta consultants to a more innovative and user-centric business process using the SAP NetWeaver technologies such as CAF and EP.

ecenta builds a new Data Entry System which is a composite application that harmonizes various different systems and components such as MDM, EP and ERP (R/3) systems. The system runs on the SAP Enterprise Portal that provides a unified means of access to the application, services, and data that the users require to complete their daily work in an optimal way. CAF-GP allows ecenta's developers to model the complex business process with great ease and speed, leveraging portal capabilities such as UWL, i.e. portal contents. The integration of the MDM matching strategy on the portal using the MDM Java API, is also one of the prominent enhancements of the approved workflow for the company.

  Analytical Self-Service Applications for the Sales Department using
  SAP NetWeaver 2004s

At the end of the year 2006 the German branch of a leading candy producer implemented SAP NetWeaver 2004s. While the heterogeneous source system landscape was dominated by SAP R/3, a single SAP solution promised to be superior. As in particular the data integration in Cognos Datawarehouse appeared inaccurate, SAP BW was chosen as sole analytical platform.

In the course of the replacement already existing Cognos reports were rebuilt and enhanced. As the Sales Organization strived to enable data access even to less skilled personnel, the development focus laid on simplicity and intuitive usability. Using the new web capabilities of SAP NetWeaver 2004s BI, ecenta consultants delivered an easy-to-use web-based standard reporting solution.

Standard reports cover about 75% of the inquiries. The remaining 25% are being served with completely flexible variants, addressing special personnel of the Sales Department.

  Enhancing SAP CRM On-Demand Analytics for more customer satisfaction

SAP Customer Relationship Management On-Demand is an easy-to-use, web-based solution for sales, marketing, and service. It combines the benefits of SAP CRM with the quick rollout, the improved user experience, and the low cost of ownership of a hosted solution. As it is based on SAP NetWeaver 2004s it integrates BI analytics to enable executives to monitor and respond rapidly to key performance indicators and consequently to get a more comprehensive view of the entire business.

However, the standard BI reporting is not sufficient for all CRM On-Demand customers. Therefore a team of ecenta consultants on behalf of SAP Managed Services enhanced the CRM On-Demand service analytics for a leading energy supplier in Europe. The main objective of the project was to analyze the gap between the customer requirements and the standard functionality, close it with a custom BI architecture, and a highly-extensible performance calculation logic. Based on these modifications, ecenta specialists delivered a set of BI reports that enable the customer to accurately monitor the process of service ticket and interaction handling, the life cycle of service tickets, and the completeness of the customer master data.

Comparing the standard reporting functionality with the newly developed solution the customer is now able to access all relevant information to constantly improve its service process and therefore to create more customer satisfaction.

  Creating Groundbreaking CRM Solutions

As part of a strategy to migrate existing legacy systems onto an SAP platform, one of America's major manufacturers for underground construction equipment is currently implementing SAP CRM for their quotation and order management. Along with these core processes a number of existing JSP applications are moved onto the SAP platform as well using BSP technology. A team of ecenta consultants is designing and implementing the CRM solution for this project. After successfully completing the design in the blueprint phase, the realization is currently on its way.

For order management a web-based application using SAP eCommerce for CRM will give dealers access to create orders for parts and track the status of these orders. Since these orders sometimes can contain several hundred items an upload functionality via FTP will be created. Also registration of equipment and the creation of warranty claims for registered equipment are integrated as self-service applications for the dealers.

The quotation management scenario is used as a collaborative scenario: Dealers can create quotes for their end customers, having full access to the product information including variant configuration and variant pricing, yet with the ability to add the own, dealer-specific pricing information. Once all the relevant information is captured and the quotation is accepted by the end customer, the dealer can convert the quote into an order. Resulting from the order equipment will be sent to the dealer, allowing him to do some finishing work before selling it to the end customer.

One major objective for this implementation is to use out-of-the-box functionality as much as possible, allowing an easy transition into support mode after go-live and keeping the total cost of ownership low.

  SAP CRM and Composite Applications in Malaysia

MDEC (Multimedia Development Corporation Sdn Bhd / Malaysia), founded and fully-owned by the Government of Malaysia, has the goal to accompany local and foreign-owned multimedia companies during their growth process in Malaysia for many years. Many of the internal business processes are now being supported by SAP CRM.

In the first step, the service, claim, and request management process was supported after an implementation period of only a few months. In this course, the CRM Service Ticket scenario and the IC WebClient were deployed. All requests from current customers and from prospects are entered into the system and can be forwarded to the responsible internal organizations that are taking care of ticket resolution.

The next step was to support the core process of MDEC with CRM Sales: Locating companies / prospects (leads), issueing the MSC status (Multimedia Super Corridor), and providing the company with information on a continuous basis.

The particular challenge in this project was the integration of Interactive Adobe Forms, with which data is collected for further processing in the CRM system. This integration is supported by SAP with the help of the Composite Application Framework. The team set up a scenario which allows MDEC to upload content from 40-page Adobe Forms (e.g. a Business Plan, a Financial Plan etc.) into CRM within few seconds. After the upload, these data are processed by MDEC personnel in the Enterprise Portal.

  Web Reporting: Towards a single point of entry

A globally acting corporation trains its employees to get familiar with the SAP NetWeaver Enterprise Portal 7.0 installation in order to provide a single point of entry. ecenta maintains and develops web-enabled Business Intelligence reports that are included into the BI portal environment.

Having several thousand users that connect and log into the portal 24/7 is one of the challenging situations to cope with. Providing them with information that is specific to the user's context is another daunting task that needs close collaboration with the individual departments. The customized development of SAP Web Templates is becoming more sophisticated as the customer familiarizes more and more with the subject matter. All departments participate in order to make the EP installation usable for their employees: Finance, Human Resources, Product Management, Sales & Marketing, Service Management, Sourcing, and Supply.

One of the future milestones will be the migration from SAP BW 3.5 which is purely implemented in ABAP to the Java based SAP BI 7.0, whereas the first steps have already been successfully tackled. ecenta has proven to be the right partner to perform the remaining steps by prototyping up-to-date BI web content and by highlighting the benefits that will arise by this kind of progress.

  Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) for SAP

ecenta established the first CTI Solution within the SAP network. Integrated into the CRM IC WebClient the solution will support call centers all around the globe. Currently two possible technical approaches are under investigation, one based on Genesys technology and the other one on the new SAP BCM solution.

A first go-live is planned for call centers located in Spain, in the United States and in Germany in November 2007. A second worldwide go-live will follow in the beginning of 2008.

  Milk products enriched with "SAP CRM" vitamins

A team of ecenta consultants from different places of the world is leading a CRM implementation of CRM 5.0 in one of the largest dairy companies in Europe. The company has grown during the past five years to become one of the largest groups in Scandinavia; expanding business to the UK and 19 other export markets in Europe.

With the wish to offer the best attention to their customers the Swedish unit has started one of the most ambitious projects: implement a call center for customer service which will be rolled out to the other countries. The solution will cover the IC WebClient, the Help-Desk Scenario, CTI (Avaya), and master data integration with an ERP backend.

The project is expected to go live by the end of the year 2007.

  SAP BW-CRM AFL (Asset Finance and Leasing) goes global

ecenta consultants successfully implement, optimize, and enhance the SAP NetWeaver 2004s Business Intelligence in a globally active leasing corporation. Data Extraction, Modeling and Reporting are being enhanced in order to fit the client global reporting requirement for AFL (Asset Finance and Leasing) and FI solutions.

The client is one of the major financial players, which provide Financial and Leasing Services for Automobile, Credit Card, and Insurance; the client operations span across Europe, America, Australia, and Asia.

The challenge is to synchronize CRM data and R/3 FI in order to provide accurate and meaningful reporting such as customer current portfolio, potential new business, overdue accounts, total customer engagement, and sales analysis. The management and detail reporting is important to reflect and to manage the client current business and potential clients.

  Flexible BI solution for automotive leasing services

ecenta consultants developed local reporting solution using SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence for the leasing operation division of a top world automotive company in China. By integrating information from their CRM and R/3 FICO systems, the BI solution provides reports of contract analytics, financial securities analytics, overdue payment reports, as well as bad debt analysis in compliance of People's Bank of China (PBOC).

The solution was put into productive use quickly after the development was completed and received very positive feedback from the users. After the solution s launch, the efforts required for the leasing contract analysis was cut by as much as 30%.

  Core shell reference model to propose role-based reporting with SAP BI

ecenta AG has supported a global Telecommunications company to improve their SAP BI solution for CRM Service processes in preparing a redesign of performance measurement for the customer support section. The project was set up due to the demand for standardization and at the same time individualization of performance reporting in the company.

As recipient-oriented - i.e. individualized - information supply can avoid information overload and support the decision-making process, a role- and decision-based approach was focused. A core shell model was applied to attain the goal of the study to elaborate a multidimensional data model to structure Key Performance Indicators and characteristics for customer support. The model also satisfies the demand for standardization due to the way information is structured. It was suitable to propose a restructuring of reports, i.e. a necessary redesign due to organizational changes and due to gaps between the existing SAP BW reporting and the information demand elaborated.

  No more traffic jam thanks to SAP CRM!

Since November 2006, ecenta participates in a call-center implementation for the anti-congestion program of a major European city. The IC WebClient in the CRM release 5.0 is used to manage the tax decisions for an automated process. The go-live is planned for August 2007.

After the go live, specialists of ecenta are supporting the implementation partner in application management, whenever more complex problems occur.

  Intelligence within CRM On-Demand solutions

On behalf of SAP America, ecenta consultants have successfully implemented and supported SAP NetWeaver 2004s Reporting enhancements and optimization for clients of SAP CRM On-Demand solutions. In this project the client is one of the major IT Companies, providing support services for PeopleSoft, J.D. Edwards and Siebel Products.

As CRM On-Demand requires prompt response and resolution time, ecenta consultants have successfully implemented SAP BI reporting solutions for Value Added Services, Enhancement and Change Request, which fulfill not only client requirements but exceeded client expectation, thus this translates to more control of their core business and increased efficiency and sales.

  Development of global Tele-Solution for SAP still ongoing

A team from ecenta AG is developing a global application for SAP TeleManagement including TeleMarketing, TeleCoverage, and TeleSales. The project already started end of 2005 and the go-live of the first phase of the solution was in 2006. Today the application based on SAP CRM IC WebClient is used in several countries in Asia, Europe, and America and others will follow in the near future.

The team is concurrently supporting the live solution and implementing new enhancements. For this purpose, the team is spread over 3 locations: Walldorf, Newtown Square, and Singapore. Feedback from Call Centers all over the world provide new requirements to achieve the highest possible usability for Call Center Agents and TeleSales Representatives.

Next Steps for ecenta will be to define and implement a solution for Manager Support, Reporting and integration of the existing CTI solution.

High Complex Data Integration for CATS, PS, HR, FI

ecenta consultants design and develop a BI analytics solution to integrate workforce management, CATS, PS, HR, and finance data. The solution enables the customer to check and control project costs, time efforts and their ratio. Furthermore, it is a tool that supports the customer's decision-making for ongoing business and future projects.

  Enabling Business with SAP Business Intelligence

ecenta develops a reporting application for a leading global pharmaceutical company in the US. The goal is to allow the management to assess the performance of various aspects of the customer service process in the organization. These activities range from call center and RMA to in-house repair. A multitude of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) have been developed in close cooperation with the customer.

These KPIs measure the efficiency and quality for different facets of the customer service process. The wide-ranging measures of the KPIs necessitate that data can be extracted from both SAP ERP and SAP CRM systems.

The two main challenges are to design a flexible solution that is able to grow with the needs of the client, and to provide acceptable loading times while integrating a large amount of data from two different systems.

  Customer Consolidation out-of-the-box with SAP MDM or: Consolidation
  of master data is the first key to improving business processes

Customer consolidation is the fundamental procedure in Customer Data Integral Scenario at any large enterprise. With MDM 5.5, a large telecommunications company has taken advantage of the various compositions of MDM tools provided by SAP to achieve this in a short period of time. Through this out-of-the-box tool provided by SAP, effective Customer Consolidation is achieved. The results: Efficiency and Productive consolidation. Time is saved as no customization is required for such consolidation, i.e. with MDM there is truly one single view of truth.

Up to date, three systems have been integrated successfully with MDM which includes one non-SAP system. Through, the deployment of SAP MDM tool, the telecoms company managed to consolidate customers from two SAP ERP systems in three months. Effective use of the interactive matching that was proposed by ecenta, a possible removal of 13% of duplicates and 50% of the customer data from the non-SAP system was successfully identified. In order to effectively deploy this, ecenta has managed to engage end-users in several workshops and training sessions to help them familiarize with this new SAP MDM function.

This flexibility and out-of-the-box feature - through its wide-range of file type acceptance provided by SAP MDM - makes it easy for more systems to be integrated in the future.

  Quote Research Service to find the Quotes needed to support Sales cycles

ecenta consultants develop the Quote Service for knowledge management services to provide sales-relevant quotes for a global IT corporation. Sales fields use the online Quote Finder to easily access what the press, analyst, and customer have to say about the company and their main competitors based on industry, solution, and application.

The solution helps to position the company (and its offerings) positively within a market context, enhance customer awareness, explain the value the company adds to them, and empower the sales field to boost sales and increase the company's market share.

  Another success story for SAP CoD

A leading provider of IT products and services from Australia is a major customer of SAP CRM On-Demand (CoD). With their intensive use of the CoD system, the reporting requirements are beyond what the standard package offers. As a result, the SAP CoD BW Value-Added Services team, which was lead by BI consultants from ecenta, has met the customer's reporting requirements by delivering a series of new reporting functions by both enhancements and new development.

  CRM Service and Interaction Center implementation for High-Tech
  Storage Solutions Manufacturer

This high-tech company is based in the Silicon Valley, California. They are part of the ramp-up program for CRM 5.2 and they are scheduled to go-live mid-2008. The underlying goal of the project is to replace their current Vantive (Peoplesoft) Implementation which is nearing end of life with a standalone SAP CRM Implementation. This is a global big-bang implementation with the simultaneous replacement of Vantive in call centers in the US, Europe and Asia.

Key highlights of this project is a custom-built Logistics functionality with local ATP Checks, Interfaces to several 3rd-party and existing legacy systems (including Oracle ERP) and real-time integration with an existing Online Web Application which is used by the end customer to raise new service requests and maintain installed bases (using Web Services). Several changes to the user interface using the new tools delivered by SAP CRM 5.2 are also in scope. This is the biggest IT initiative undertaken by this company since it's inception.

  Knowledge Management Services: Performance Measurement of Sales Support

Real-time access to relevant information has always been critical to business success.

In close cooperation with the company ecenta consultants developed and implemented a BI solution based on SAP NetWeaver BI technology that effectively gives decision makers access to all relevant information from the field.

The system architecture delivered by ecenta leads to a better scale of Knowledge Management Services, improves the use of communication channels, and improves the response times. Powerful performance improvement is the main goal of the solution. Although the solution is highly integrated and specialized, the team of ecenta consultants managed to implement a system that is easy to maintain and easy to enhance.

  SAP CRM as a step toward global master data management

When a world leading high-tech company is realigning and consolidating their whole SAP landscape a lot of pitfalls are to be considered and many questions need to be answered. For the SAP CRM 5.0 system a consultant of ecenta America was involved in order to support program management and safeguard the current CRM implementation projects.

One main objective of the realignment project is to consolidate the way master data is entered into the system. Along with a strategy to make all SAP functionality available through SAP NetWeaver Portal a global approval process and the harmonization of master data entry are introduced increase the data quality of the master data. This is particularly important with regard to the SAP NetWeaver Master Data Management implementation already on the roadmap in the near future.

Making SAP CRM the system of record for customers is one major step in this consolidation process considering that for the first time all global business units will follow the same process and use the same tool to feed their customers into the SAP landscape. The knowledge and experience of ecenta helped the company to enforce their business rules and yet staying close to SAP standard functionality, to ensure a low TCO and an easy transition to SAP NetWeaver MDM, once this implementation starts.

  Fast and accurate reporting for a leading telecommunications company

A team of consultants from ecenta, in cooperation with SAP Indonesia, has developed a CRM-focused BI solution for a large telecommunications company.

The main objective of the solution was to build an extensible Business Warehouse Architecture based on the SAP standard content for CRM to improve the quality and timeliness of the reports for the customer and management. The solution went live in January 2007. In time, it has become a critical business-enabling tool for both outward facing and internal business units.

  SAP CRM Helpdesk very successful even "off-the-shelf"

More and more companies are trying to follow the "off-the-shelf" approach when implementing a SAP solution, where desired processes are covered mainly by configuration with little or no development. A major high-tech company invested in prototyping such a solution based on the SAP CRM Service Ticket scenario, lead by a consultant of ecenta America.

The aim of the prototype was to investigate the capabilities of a SAP CRM Helpdesk solution and to see how much it qualifies for replacing numerous existing in-house service applications. As part of standardization process for the handling of service requests the objective was to identify which applications can be replaced with small implementation projects.

Together with ecenta a first replacement project was started and is planned to go live at the end of Q1/2007.

  ecenta analyzes and optimizes the global data loading process in
  SAP Business Warehouse

With the steady growth of applications and data volume in the global SAP Business Warehouse of a internationally operating telecommunications company it gets more and more difficult to complete Business SLAs regarding the availability of business reports for end users. Data flows and data loading processes in large SAP BI installations are developed from the point of view of a single BI application without taking the global data loading situation into account.

Within the scope of a global review project ecenta analyzed the data flows in the customer's Enterprise Data Warehouse from a global point of view to find performance bottlenecks that are caused by redundancies, hidden dependencies and design errors and to provide solutions for resolving these bottlenecks. ecenta furthermore elaborated possibilities to increase data loading performance by using synergies between the different BI Applications and delivered recommendations to the BI development teams to avoid performance bottlenecks when creating data flows and data loading processes.

  Reach New Service Level with CRM 5.0

A team of ecenta APA consultants, together with consultants from SAP Malaysia Consulting, has successfully delivered a CRM upgrade from 2.0C to 5.0

The client is a major stated-owned oil and gas company in Malaysia. Over the years, the client has grown to become a fully-integrated oil and gas company with business interests in various countries and is now ranked among FORTUNE Global 500's largest corporations in the world.

With the aim to deliver the best helpdesk experiences to the customers, this project included upgrading existing CRM 2.0C to CRM 5.0 and close integration between CRM and R/3 4.6B system. On January 2007, the project successfully went live with SAP CRM 5.0. The project team has rolled out CRM Interaction Center with the following functionalities:

• ability to record all sort of complaints and enquiries
• ability to closely monitor transactions created with Service Level Agreement (SLA)
• automated escalation
• integration to R/3 46B sales order via ITS
• ability to allow vendor and field engineers to update jobs status via self-services

Currently, there are 50 active users within the new system. Additional 50 field engineers would be accessing the system in the remote area soon. In the next few months, more components of SAP CRM are planned for future roll out, such as CTI integration with Nortel, Internet Sales, Marketing & Campaign Management and Analytical CRM.

  Truly global customer support service based on SAP CRM

With the assistance of ecenta SAP America is currently implementing a customer support service process based on SAP CRM at one of the leading IT companies of the US. Specialists of ecenta are involved at the customer's site during the full life cycle of the project. This includes the initial design phase, the implementation of CRM, deployment, go-live support and the ongoing design of further improvements and functionality for the next project phases.

SAP CRM is replacing the variety of the existing regional applications for the global customer support of the client. The different regional solutions are consolidated into one global customer support application based on the IC WebClient. The project delivers an enhanced common set of differentiated support experience capabilities across all customer support touch points. This is achieved by the standardization of the client's internal business processes and as well as the integration of selected internal applications.

In late summer of 2006 CRM was deployed successfully. Since then, consecutively support sites in Europe, Asia and Latin America are switching to SAP CRM. North America and Japanese support sites are scheduled to join this year. Overall, several thousands of support agents will work on the same SAP CRM instance to support customers all around the world 24/7.

A constant flow of feedback from the agents working with IC WebClient allows a very rewarding conclusion: IC WebClient significantly eases the support agents' everyday work!

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