News archive
22. December 2006
Migrating non-SAP reporting solutions to SAP NetWeaver 7.0 Business Intelligence technology
As part of a consolidation project reports from non-SAP reporting applications should be migrated to SAP BI 7.0. The aim was that after the consolidation only one business reporting application had to be maintained which enables the customer to focus development resources on that platform.
An ecenta consulting team was responsible for migrating non-SAP-Reports to SAP BI 7.0 without changing the look and feel of these reports. This was achieved by using new java-based SAP BI 7.0 reporting technology, BI-Accelerator (access reports within seconds) and Adobe Document Services (enable end user to save queries as pre-formatted Adobe-PDF files).
In addition to that the consulting team replaced plain HTML-Pages that have been used as table of contents to access all kinds of web-based reports by SAP Enterprise Portal (EP) which now serves as the single point of entry for business reports. This covered customizing the SAP Portal to reflect the customer's corporate identity, setting up a role-based authorization model to control user access and creating portal iViews to present business reports in SAP EP in a professional way.
10. December 2006
Shaping Installed Base Management for the Telco Industry
A team of three ecenta consultants was responsible for a major restructuring project of a global Installed Base Management solution in the telecommunication industry.
The solution is aimed at optimizing the currently existing service process handled in SAP CRM 5.0. The Installed Base Management component enables tracking and analysing the customers' installed products. Together with contract management functionalities, this solution provides fast and accurate service through the Interaction Center Agents, decreases service costs and lead times and therefore ultimately increase efficiency.
The responsibility of ecenta within this project was to reflect the entire customer's product range in the Installed Base Management component. In doing so, a flexible service level agreement and product-specific contract assignment is possible on every product level which enables a more accurate service cost allocation.
In a further step, the IC WebClient was enhanced in order to take the new Installed Base into account when creating Customer Service Requests. Ecenta thereby contributed to reducing the amount of erroneous service tickets causing delayed service responses and wrong cost allocations. Consultants from ecenta designed, realized and supported this solution within 5 months as the new restructured IBase went live in December 2006.
1. December 2006
Ongoing IC WebClient enhancements for the Help Desk scenario for High Tech Medical Equipment Manufacturer
This high tech company based in California use SAP CRM Interaction Center WebClient as a help desk for their customers. Being an early adopter of the IC WebClient from the CRM 4.0 days, they recently upgraded to CRM 5.0. Post upgrade they ran into some performance issues related to some key processes executing in the IC WebClient which resulted in end user dissatisfaction with the tool. With the help of ecenta America consultants, most of the performance issues were resolved and enhancements made to the system to improve the end user experience. Further usability enhancements are still being made especially for the "Service Dispatcher" user role. The Service Dispatcher is a unique blend of a help desk agent and a resource planner. To accommodate the information requirements of this role, ecenta America is making enhancements to bring in some of the capability of the Resource Planning Application (RPA) into the IC WebClient. The end result will be a highly usable Ticketing and Dispatching IC WebClient Application tailor made to this unique user role.
22. November 2006
End user statistical reporting in SAP Business Information Warehouse
ecenta has implemented a SAP NetWeaver BI solution for the purpose of obtaining useful information about the users in the BI system and the ability to analyze different important metrics for a Fortune 500 company.
The implementation involves extracting, transforming, and loading large amounts of information from and within the BI systems. During the implementation process, ecenta consultants had to employ ingenious workarounds in order to meet the loading and reporting requirements.
With the successful go-live of the solution in November 2006, the company now has easy access to information such as: System usage at end-user level, training activities and their effect on the system utilization, top users, user habits that would facilitate "Super User" appointment, and regional use of the system.
10. November 2006
The world's biggest Adobe Interactive Forms
In Malaysia domestic as well as foreign firms try to acquire the company status "Multimedia Super Corridor" which is correlated with a set of incentives and benefits from the Malaysian Government backed by the ten Bill of Guarantees. Applying for the MSC status at the government-owned institution responsible implies a complex business process including Marketing, Sales, and Service activities supported by SAP. For the interaction with the organization's potential customers a central tool is Adobe's Interactive Form.
Adobe Interactive Forms allow the user to maintain its data online and offline and provide hereby a unified design for digital as well as paper-format. The user data can be entered in various ways, e.g. by text fields, drop-down lists, etc.
Therefore ecenta implements several Adobe Interactive Forms. A special challenge is hereby the creation of dynamic Forms with more than 800 entry fields and 15 pages, plus versioning capabilities. ecenta consultants employ dynamic Adobe Forms which ease the user-interaction providing them the opportunity to customize the form dynamically at runtime e.g. by dynamic tables, which allows to add or delete rows or to hide and display sub-forms.
Rendering and storing of such huge forms is indeed a demanding task in technical and performance areas. Together with the consultants investigation, the Adobe Plan sizing challenge is tackled by resolving the whole data managing process.
The implementation of a versioning allows the tracing of all data changes during the whole application process. The binding of the Adobe Interactive Forms to the SAP CRM system enables the central storage of the collected information, which can be used for Business Intelligence related processes.
30. September 2006
Ongoing CRM Service Roadmap for High Tech Medical Equipment Manufacturer
This high tech company based in California is currently live on CRM 5.0 integrated to R/3 4.6C. CRM 5.0 is used to create help desk service tickets using the IC WebClient which are integrated through a custom middleware enhancement into R/3 Customer Service. This custom process is sub-optimal and is the source of application errors and usability issues. With the help of ecenta America consultants the company is currently doing a proof of concept to use CRM Service instead of R/3 Customer Service and thereby realize true value of their investment in SAP CRM Software. As part of the prototype all major processes contained in R/3 are being modeled in CRM as well a strategy to migrate data from R/3 into CRM is being formulated.
5. October 2006
Building your complex customized data relations with MDM 5.5
SAP NetWeaver MDM draws the attention from the public sector. ecenta was involved in the proof of concept of the MDM tool. The scope was to summarize all legal indexed entities of children under the age of 18 in a central catalogue. Evolving in separate satellite systems from the different counties the government planned to consolidate all children data, eliminate duplicates, and build a complex relationship between children, parents, organizations and service providers.
ecenta provided the service to analyze the magnificent number of Entity Relationship Diagrams and build the results in a complex MDM Data Model. More than two million test records were loaded into the system to show that MDM could handle such an amount of records. The future total number was planned to reach almost 20 million records.
1. September 2006
Value Added Services for SAP CRM On-Demand Solutions
ecenta develops in close cooperation with SAP America an extended functionality for the SAP CRM On-Demand for Service software. The solution is a custom-tailored reporting tool for one of the world leaders in aeronautical supply which is used not only for reporting purposes but also regarding special needs in CRM as parameterized customer indexes.
31. July 2006
Leasing Down Under
Two consultants of ecenta APA, in cooperation with SAP Australia, played major roles in the Proof of Concept for an SAP Asset Finance and leasing (AFL) Solution. The customer is one of the biggest global players in the Leasing Business with subsidiaries in more than 20 countries. All finance, purchasing and - for the first time - full service leasing processes are handled with the new system. To this purpose, the SAP CRM 2006s Leasing system is integrated with an ECC in the areas FI and CO as well as with SRM 5.0 and BW 7.0.
Eight Business Scenarios representing 85 % of the business were the main focus in the Proof of Concept. In detail the consultants of ecenta APA created the complete Proof of Concept documents containing SAP Leasing Solutions for all processes covered by these eight scenarios. They presented the outcome of the Proof of Concept in a two-hour presentation to the board members.
4. July 2006
Improve speed and reliability of your processes
ecenta has together with SAP performed a Proof of Concept for a Swiss pharmaceutical products company. SAP NetWeaver MDM had to compete against several other MDM tool vendors to show that it fulfils best the customer's requirements.
The goal was to improve the speed and reliability of the processes by applying electronic workflow management and web browser technologies to the product data request from submission to approval and delivery of product master data information. This was meant primarily for the Finance Reporting and Product Supply.
12. June 2006
SAP CRM in the driver's seat
PT Astra International, a leading Indonesian manufacturer, assembler and distributor of automobiles, motorcycles and automotive components, with ecenta Asia Pacific successfully implements a customer support service process in SAP CRM 2004 with Service Industry Add-on. Based on the IC WebClient, this automotive customer support solution supports over 240,000 automobile owners as a Call Centre for membership support, automotive information and a 24-hour Emergency Roadside Assistance.
ecenta Asia Pacific provided the expertise for the solution design and implementation of CRM. SAP CRM 2004 replaces a non-SAP CRM system and is integrated with an existing SAP R/3 into a single SAP landscape for easy master data synchronization, and also to reduce costs of supporting different systems. Marketing through outbound calls in IC WebClient call list is also planned for subsequent project releases.
28. April 2006
IC WebClient @ SAP Telemanagement
SAP CRM, Interaction Center WebClient, CRM Service, CRM Marketing
On behalf of SAP Germany, ecenta AG consultants have, already in 2005, developed prototypes for SAP Telemarketing and Telesales, based on the Interaction Center WebClient. The challenge was the deployment of the user interface and the implementation of Business Requirements in the existing CRM System.
With the combination of Telemarketing, Telesales and Telecoverage to Telemanagement the development of a new user interface, based on the existing prototypes, started, which will be used worldwide in SAP Call Center and supports the user in all areas concerning Telemanagement - from accepting a call to contact approval.
In close cooperation with SAP IT the ecenta AG consultants are also involved in finding solutions for CTI and Reporting.
2. April 2006
Leasing goes mobile
SAP CRM, SAP R/3, Asset Finance und Leasing (AFL), PDA
Two developers of ecenta Asia Pacific, in cooperation with SAP AG, developed a further important step in the life cycle of the SAP leasing Solution: The world-wide first integration of a SAP leasing solution to an inhouse PDA solution. Since April, sales employees of the Financial Services branch of a large Munich truck manufacturer can replicate Credit Quotations and Leasing Contracts from their PDA into the SAP leasing system. The communication takes place via XML in both directions including error handling and transactional security.
18. March 2006
"Shaping the future with SAP CRM" for a leading pharmaceutical distributor in the US
SAP CRM, Strategy
On behalf of SAP America ecenta America Inc. is advising a leading company of pharmaceutical distribution in the US in order to help them develop their SAP CRM strategy.
By analyzing the current business requirements, examining the existing IT landscape and considering the roadmap for other projects, the aim is to come up with a strategy on how to implement a number of SAP CRM scenarios in a way that the different phases can be used as building blocks for subsequent phases. Challenges to be considered are the high order volume and pharma-specific requirements like contract pricing.
Part of this project is also to train the customer on the functional and technical capabilities of SAP CRM to create a foundation for future decisions related to CRM projects. By a number of workshops the customer expectations could be successfully mapped to features and functions of SAP CRM.
28. February 2006
Leasing passes Elk Test
SAP CRM, SAP R/3, Asset Finance and Leasing (AFL)
Five consultants of ecenta AG and ecenta APA, in cooperation with SAP Sweden and SAP Norway, are currently implementing another solution for Asset, Finance and Leasing (AFL). This time the customer is the Financial Services branch of a big Swedish truck and construction equipment manufacturer in Frankfurt. All financing - as well as insurance services and maintenance service contracts - are handled with the new system. To this purpose, the SAP CRM 4.0 AFL and CRM Service system is integrated with an SAP R/3 4.7B in the areas FI and CO. The Interaction Center WinClient is used in order to guarantee a compact and simple view on all contracts.
The topics migration, custom development, and SAP CRM leasing processes are the main focus of the integration as well as SAP R/3 FI consulting. The ecenta consultants developed the concept and the implementation of the SAP R/3 LAE contract refinancing component Doppelstock, the automatic generation of quotations and insurance contracts per XML interface, global allocation customer number handling covering the full contract lifecycle and extensive further customer enhancements in the CRM leasing contract.
15. February 2006
New User-Management-System at Sales Advisory Service
Sales Advisory Service, SAP CRM, Interaction Center WebClient, User Management
With the productive start of the IC WebClient@SAS (Sales Advisory Service of SAP AG), the kick-off for the second phase of the project began. In this phase of the project, the User Management System and changes to further simplify the life of the local agents, were successfully implemented and rolled out.
The agents' feedback was very positive and with the new User Management System the incoming inquiries can be routed to the responsible persons even more precisely. Since the Call Center has been live for almost one year now and most business requirements have been realized, the next big milestone is the implementation of a CTI solution to ease the everyday work even more.
31. January 2006
Excellence in Intelligence: Asia-Pacific in one report!
Business Warehouse, SAP R/3, Management Reporting
On behalf of SAP Singapore, ecenta APA Pte. Ltd. is developing a reporting system for a global corporation in the pharmaceutical and health care industry.
The challenge was to show a high number of various key performance indicators in one web report for the country mangement in the whole Asia-Pacific region. These highly-aggregated KPI's are taken from all business units like sales & distribution, logistics, production, and finance. For this purpose, data are required from an SAP R/3 system and the BW system itself.
During the implementation, the ecenta consultants had to come up with creative solutions in order to match the specific requirements with BW standard functionalitity, especially in the area of the data staging and the web frontend. For instance several key figures could not been loaded into one info cube because of different calculations on different aggregation levels. Using a workaround in the Web Application Designer and the Web API, the specific layout demands were met as well.
15. January 2006
Global Leading Telecommunication Company - Shaping the future with SAP BW
SAP BI
ecenta AG has again cooperated with SAP Svenska in supporting a Scandinavian Telecommunications company in the improvement of a SAP BI solution for CRM Service processes. The solution is the replacement of a legacy BI implementation and was introduced in August 2004.
The recent implementation involves extracting and processing large amounts of data without influencing the performance of the source SAP CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system. Additionally, this new solution simplifies the report customization according to the business needs as well as the performance monitoring.
Due to the enhancement of the global service monitoring the customer can now access current or historical information based on organization, customer, fiscal year, status and time. Therefore it is possible to track business performance and goal achievement in depth down to the smallest organizational unit.
