Customers

Essroc

Essroc"The cement business is very competitive. We need to supply our sales people with the best data possible, so they can capitalize on opportunities without delay. That's why it's so important for us to have a solution like the BusinessObjects Sales Rapid Mart for SAP."

Bruce Eppensteiner
senior IT business analyst
Essroc

Challenge

SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) represents a formidable arsenal of data for many companies. ERP data, integrated with other data (internal and external) and transformed into information and knowledge, is often the key to success in a highly competitive marketplace. But there are two problems. First, it's hard to get data into SAP via the system's complex transaction-entry screens. Second, it's even harder to get meaningful data out. It is, as Bruce Eppensteiner ruefully concedes, sort of like feeding a monster.

Eppensteiner should know. He's a senior IT business analyst at Essroc, a leading North American cement producer, and every shred of his company's data—from accounts receivable and daily shipments to product pricing, year-to-date sales, plant maintenance, production planning, and customer information—is stored in its corporate SAP system. (Essroc is a member of the Italcementi Group headquartered in Bergamo, Italy, a world leader in cement production with annual sales topping 4.5 billion euros and operations on four continents.)

Together with business analyst Pat Reed and the rest of Essroc's small IT staff, Eppensteiner is intimately familiar with SAP's strengths and weaknesses. "On the positive side, SAP has given us a single system that we use to manage our entire enterprise, rather than having many disparate systems," he says. "It promotes integration and common business processes among the various departments. And it produces reports that are well suited for the group and senior management levels."

But SAP fell short when it came to satisfying divisional reporting needs. "In order to meet the information requirements of our sales and marketing users, we needed a disproportionate number of specialized ABAP programmers to create custom, point-in-time reports," says Eppensteiner. "This created a huge drain on our limited IT resources, and we still had frustrated users who weren't getting their information fast enough." ABAP, or Advanced Business Application Programming, is a proprietary language for developing applications for SAP R/3.

In addition to the custom ABAP reports, Essroc had a legacy sales data reporting application that extracted data from SAP and sent it to sales people's laptops every night. The overall system was inflexible, and it also posed security risks. So Essroc went looking for a better solution, and found it with Business Objects.

Approach

"Our partner, Conversion Services International (CSI), showed us what Business Objects could do," says Eppensteiner. "We took a set of flat files to CSI headquarters, and they built a prototype application for us in Crystal Reports® in an afternoon. That was pretty impressive."

From there, Eppensteiner and his team built a SQL Server database outside SAP, in an attempt to mimic the initial file extract process. The result was an improved reporting system, with BusinessObjects™ InfoView presenting reports over the internet. But the BusinessObjects Sales Rapid Mart™ looked even more promising. "The Rapid Mart opened up a whole universe of additional data that wasn't in our reporting system, and introduced the possibility of ad hoc reporting," says Eppensteiner. "It was easy to implement, and it delivered value very quickly. Suddenly, our power users had the ability to develop their own reports in BusinessObjects Web Intelligence®."

Results

The BusinessObjects Sales Rapid Mart has had a profound impact on Essroc's IT operations. "It freed up our ABAP resources and enabled us to start focusing on higher-level IT problems," says Eppensteiner. "Perhaps more importantly, it has truly empowered our users. We have one super power user in the sales and marketing group, who has developed close to 50 Web Intelligence reports to meet his specific requirements. The Business Objects solution gives him the ability to slice the data exactly the way he wants to. He never would have been able to do that in the legacy system."

Essroc has additional plans for the Sales Rapid Mart. "In the near future, we expect to replace an existing system with the Rapid Mart," says Eppensteiner. "This is a customer portal called myessroc.com, a highly customized solution that we built during the internet boom days. It's ready to be redeveloped, and we're going to back-end that whole system with the Sales Rapid Mart." Because of its inherent flexibility, the Sales Rapid Mart will also accommodate a new product line—concrete maintenance products that are measured in gallons, as opposed to tons—with no customized coding required. Previously, this seemingly simple change would have required recoding parts of an existing ABAP report or creating an entirely new report.

Other BusinessObjects Rapid Marts, notably Purchasing and Inventory, are also on tap for deployment at Essroc. "We are heavily involved in a supply chain redesign effort, and we're turning on the Purchasing Rapid Mart as part of this program," says business analyst Pat Reed. "We plan to set the Purchasing Rapid Mart up so it will produce reports, enabling us to transform our business and procurement processes around buying channels. Basically, we are trying to leverage our SAP business processes to get better pricing from our suppliers. Squeezing every last dime out of supply cost is a pretty big deal in today's business cycle, and we'll use the Purchasing Rapid Mart to measure and evaluate the success of that transformation."

Essroc's plants produce cement 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. "The idea is to keep everything running and sell all the cement we can manufacture," concludes Eppensteiner. "Cement is basically a commodity product—what one company manufactures is pretty close to what another company manufactures. Because of the highly competitive nature of the business, we need to supply our sales people with the best data possible, so they can capitalize on opportunities without delay. That's why it's so important for us to have a solution like the BusinessObjects Sales Rapid Mart for SAP. It has been a major success story for us in the sales and marketing group here at Essroc."

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