Dec09 - Bp

SAP eBulletin

Building Products 2009, Issue 3

Lead Story Headline The purpose of a newsletter is to provide specialised information to a targeted audience. Newsletters can be a great way to market your pr oduct or service and also can create credibility and build your company’s identity among peer s, members, employees, or vendors. First, determine the audience of the newsl etter. This could be anyone who might benefit from the information it contains, for example, employees or people interested in purchasing a produ ct or in requesting your service. You can compile a mailing list from business reply cards, customer information sheets, business cards collected at trade shows, or membership lists. You might consider purchasi ng a mailing list from a company. Next, establ ish how much time and money you can spend on your newsletter. These factors will help determine how frequentl y you publish the newsletter and its length.

Improvements completed: Improved analysis of Global limits & risk - BPE recently secured a new insurance agreement with AIG. This new credit insurance scheme relies upon extracts of customer debt information from SAP to the AIG Global Limits Manager system to provide timely analysis of customer risk and debt exposure. Office Max catalogue now available in eCat for BPNA Initiatives in progress: Global Plant Maintenance Reporting - This project will provide a global plant maintenance reporting solution in BI 7, supplying all levels of the BPE, BPNA and Automotive organisations with key operational and performance related plant maintenance data. P2P Inter-Company Invoicing

As part of the drive to automate inter-company invoicing, focus is on the invoice automation between BPE and Automotive SAP systems. Currently this process is piloting between Gladbeck and the Automotive Witten plant. eBilling - Cost savings of at least €0.60 per invoice A new solution that will digitally sign a PDF version of the invoice and email it to the customer will go live in the coming weeks in Germany before rolling out across Europe! Spare Parts Management IESA has been selected as the spare parts manager for BPE UK sites. The objective of this outsourced arrangement is to reduce the NSG stock value of spare parts by reducing lead times for stock replenishment, introducing consignment stock for appropriate items and reducing prices whilst retaining the visibility of stock within the SAP system. Coming Soon… Shipment Improvements in Poland & Russia

Streamlining Order Management Building Products Downstream glass requirements from ALCIB can now be processed automatically into SAP using EDI technology. This improved solution reduces manual intervention and positions BPE Upstream operations to accept electronic orders from any source. Since Go Live in mid October, over 500 orders have been received electronically by UK Customer Service and have resulted in a more efficient and integrated order process.

And … Automated Load Validation Replacing a manual process today, all sales orders are now subject to a series of automated checks to ensure that the glass requested can be loaded and transported safely and legally. The Load Validation program ensures orders that do not meet predetermined requirements are blocked with the appropriate status. The Sales Order cannot be processed further until the problem is resolved. Order Management and Load Validation are now live in the UK and currently being rolled out across Europe. “The new order management system introduced to replace Pilkington On-Line is now more effective, and links our upstream and downstream businesses much more closely. The project has been run well and the development has been well received within our Operations” Damian McAreavey, Head of Operations, Planning & Supply

PTML System Migration The PTML operations will move from their current (stand alone) SAP solution to the BPE system. The migration is underway with a Go Live in January. Why are we doing this? There are relatively few users of the PTML system, and the benefits of adding “standard” NSG functionality to the PTML system (that exists in BP and Auto systems) could always be “trumped” by a different initiative in one of these “bigger” systems. Examples include eCat, BI reporting and invoice scanning. So, in addition to lowering maintenance costs by having fewer systems, moving PTML to the BPE SAP solution means that PTML gets these “for free”. If you have any questions relating to this migration please contact Mike Miller (Purchasing), Mark Newton (Finance) or Stuart Boon (SAP).

Batch Traceability for Solar Customers The demands of our Solar customers are challenging us to improve our processes. We have recently implemented improvements in SAP to capture the batches of the input glass used in offline cutting thus enabling traceability back to the original float run. This solution is now operational in Weiherhammer and will shortly be in use in Gladbeck. “Batch traceability is essential to the Solar customer, giving the ability to tie the quality characteristics of the glass at the time of production on the float line to the specific pack delivered. In our offline cutting operations, this new solution provides a systematic way to trace the cut size pack number back to source glass”…Dave Freer, Solar Customer Support & NMI Manager

What’s happening elsewhere? AGR Europe launches new E-commerce A new E-commerce solution has recently launched in AGR wholesale operations in Germany, Benelux, Austria and Poland. The advantage of having one European solution is the guarantee of data consistency and one business process across all countries tightly integrated to SAP. The new on line ordering system offers our customers a quick and flexible product search (by industry codes, description, make, model, model year etc), a real time stock and price check, integrated accessories and backorder functionality. Additionally a wide range of operational reporting is also available. For more information and feed back e-mail:[email protected]