Business Connexion is a black empowered information and communications technology (ICT) company who prides itself on innovative business solutions. Their solutions are designed to meet clients’ strategic and operational needs, which are fully developed and maintained.
With a proven track record as a SAP implementation and support partner ( a National Services Alliance partner of SAP South Africa) , Business Connexion has adopted the RunSAP principles, SAP’s best-practice methodology for consistently high quality service delivery and the reduction of operating costs in SAP support environments.
With such a phenomenal base it comes as no surprise that the Business Connexion Master Data Team as subject matter experts, complemented by their SAP Services Functional Consultants and a highly skilled MDM Specialist Partner sourced from Knowledge Integration Dynamics (KID), Johann van der Walt embarked on this project in November 2011.
Knowledge Integration Dynamics (KID), following its appointment as a SAP South Africa Special Expertise Service partner in enterprise information management (EIM) and specifically MDM, had previous experience in successful implementations.
The requirement for a Master Data Management Tool was identified as a solution to various challenges such as duplicate master data; inefficient unstructured communication; process delays impacting lead times; an intricate IT landscape and multiple spreadsheets to migrate and upload data.
SAP MDM was selected for its capability to leverage master data from disparate sources to gain access to critical business insights; to work interactively with any kind of unstructured content; to provide continuous access to a single unified view of global data; to integrate data from multiple sources to eliminate supply chain delays and bring suppliers on board faster and distribute master data from one source.
Business Connexion’s SAP MDM project team went through a rigorous process in preparation for the implementation.
“Constant education is a primary driver of the process that precedes the SAP MDM implementation,” says Van der Walt. “Business Connexion’s team was excellent in their preparation and we all took a number of lessons from the process.”
Preparation included identifying the executive sponsor; implementing master data governance forums; initiating MDM discussion and collaboration sessions; establishing a clear roadmap; identifying data stewards in the business; defining and streamlining the process; mapping attributes and establishing standards for fields and input; initiating data cleanup in collaboration with dedicated business involvement and continuous change management to obtain buy-in.
The project was initiated in November 2011 and the implementation was concluded with materials and services going live in May 2012, followed by customers and vendors in July 2012.
Once they embarked on the implementation the key design principle was to make the MDM solution as easy and user-friendly as possible, to ensure the highest possible level of data integrity and compliance in line with the Business Connexion Master Data Governance rules.
All the challenges were meticulously addressed by the SAP Services Functional Consultants and KID’s MDM specialist during constant collaboration with the Master Data subject matter experts.
Within two weeks of going live, Business Connexion was back to producing the same volumes of transactions on SAP MDM. The benefits included obtaining a single version of the truth, reduction in maintenance costs, acceleration and tracking of business processes, simplified modelling of hierarchies and reduction in lead times. Communication was structured with workflow driving business processes and call logging.
“We worked towards a high level of automated completion of the customer, material and service data rather than adding validations to ensure correct selections by users,” says Inri Möller Business Connexion’s Master Data Manager
“It meant that 92% of the service and material master record data was already completed for the user and based on the users’ input no more than six fields on MDM were required.”
In addition to the tangible benefits the implementation of SAP MDM contributed to the culture of skills- and knowledge sharing with active networking and established new relationships by providing a total solution to meet the business’ needs contrary to purely putting a technology in place.
Business Connexion was subsequently invited to join the SAP reference customer programme to showcase how this tool highlights accountability, promotes visibility and ignites business awareness.
