Making DKB feel at home with AG SAP Support

DKB Household UK Limited specialises in the design, manufacturing, and retail of many well-known household culinary and kitchen brand names like Zyliss, Cole & Mason, AdHoc. DKB Household also manages under license, popular brands including Jamie Oliver and Ken Hom - just to name a few..

DKB Household UK Limited specialises in the design, manufacturing, and retail of many well-known household culinary and kitchen brand names like Zyliss, Cole & Mason, AdHoc. DKB Household also manages under license, popular brands including Jamie Oliver and Ken Hom - just to name a few..

AG helped a leading cosmetics and skincare company to drastically improve the process in SAP responsible for the development of new products and promotions. Eight different departments and  thousands of items were involved in a disjointed process that saw each team add master data to SAP without sufficient or correct information. This led to errors and multiple stages of corrections.

AG introduced intelligent forms and workflow allowing each department to easily complete their step of the process thanks to a simpler, user-friendly interface and correct and complete information from the stage before. The result was better process governance, data right first time and a much shorter process.

AG helped an oil & gas supermajor with one of the most complex SAP landscapes in the world to improve customer master data synchronisation across multiple IT systems.

The challenge was to extend and enhance the existing solution so that it could cope with complex business scenarios, different statutory requirements and 60+ SAP instances across 70 countries. The solution also needed to be able to handle different types of updates, from bulk uploads to individual and mass changes. The result was a robust, yet easy to use and maintain solution for global customer data integrity and accuracy that could be easily rolled out to other countries.

AG helped this major UK energy provider to significantly improve the process for creating Project Accounting master data in SAP. The company was experiencing long delays and data quality issues due to shared ownership, knowledge gaps and insufficient system and process governance.

In fact, while Finance would provide project figures, it was the task of an off-shore team, who had the SAP knowledge, to enter data in the system. Using Winshuttle, AG developed a smart, user-friendly interface that allowed Finance to directly input project data into SAP easily, in real time and without error. This eliminated the need for the off-shore overhead while improving data governance and quality.

This leading Oil & Gas business’ joint venture accounting (JVA) month end was characterised by frequent delays, a problem aggravated by a recent change in the business environment. AG conducted a review of their SAP JVA solution design and processes and found a number of candidates for improvement.

Lack of onboarding and succession planning was an issue, together with complex SAP system tasks required from accounting resources, lack of automation and manual reports, and poor understanding of the SAP reports and outputs. By showing how they could optimise their use of the system and people resources, AG helped the company reduce risk, improve efficiency and remove the road-blocks to a smooth period end.

When this leading independent exploration and production (E&P) company embarked on a 4-year journey to set new standards in safety-critical maintenance, they chose AG as their SAP implementation partner.

AG developed the SAP design, defined the standards of huge amounts of complex maintenance data and carried out the data remediation activity.  The work allowed the company to achieve IT processes and data in SAP that were fully aligned to their business and industry best practice – such as ISO 14224. While their Maintenance Excellence Programme is not complete, with AG they are fast realising a fully structured, preventative and predictive approach to maintenance management.

AG helped a leading cosmetics and skincare company to drastically improve the process in SAP responsible for the development of new products and promotions. Eight different departments and  thousands of items were involved in a disjointed process that saw each team add master data to SAP without sufficient or correct information. This led to errors and multiple stages of corrections.

AG introduced intelligent forms and workflow allowing each department to easily complete their step of the process thanks to a simpler, user-friendly interface and correct and complete information from the stage before. The result was better process governance, data right first time and a much shorter process.

AG helped a large multinational energy company to move their corporate IT system from ECC to S/4HANA. Having worked for many years as part of their design authority, AG took responsibility for reviewing their implementation partner’s system design. They were also tasked with implementing the Winshuttle and Prometheus upgrades.

AG ensured that the HANA design was right first time and that Winshuttle and Prometheus worked correctly on HANA.  They also ensured that the team was able to use the new Prometheus interface for HANA effectively. The transition from ECC to HANA went smoothly and the project, which was delivered within short lead-times, had no impact on day to day operations.

When this global leader in specialist pharmaceutical active ingredients was acquired, they engaged AG to ensure that the processing of supplier payments amounting to $100M per month was rapidly moved to the new company while still using the old parent’s SAP ERP.

The solution, which met unique integration requirements, synchronised invoice and supplier details between the 2 systems to create payment records that the new company could action. Validation eliminated the risk of payment duplication and ensured that suppliers were paid when invoices were due. The result was a robust solution delivered on time & on budget.

The trading arm of a multinational energy business asked AG for help with automating invoice and settlement reporting. The team were using Power BI for their analytics but were running 10+ reports in SAP to extract the data. This would then be dumped into Excel, reformatted and uploaded onto Power BI.

AG brought great efficiencies to the process. Using Winshuttle, they moved data extraction from multiple SAP screens and reports to a user-friendly spreadsheet that captured only the required fields. The spreadsheet was then be uploaded onto Power BI, making a time consuming and prone-to-error process a breeze.

AG helped an oil & gas supermajor with one of the most complex SAP landscapes in the world to improve customer master data synchronisation across multiple IT systems.

The challenge was to extend and enhance the existing solution so that it could cope with complex business scenarios, different statutory requirements and 60+ SAP instances across 70 countries. The solution also needed to be able to handle different types of updates, from bulk uploads to individual and mass changes. The result was a robust, yet easy to use and maintain solution for global customer data integrity and accuracy that could be easily rolled out to other countries.

This IT service provider engaged AG to run an independent assessment of their S/4HANA system following a recent implementation as they were struggling to realise the benefits.

AG conducted an assessment of the SAP system and related business processes which resulted in specific recommendations and quick wins. Areas included: licence usage optimisation, SAP training to reduce reliance on external support, streamlining of month end and moving data and reporting from external databases and Excel to S/4HANA for improved efficiency and visibility. The quality of the review meant that AG was awarded the implementation of all system changes and as well as the ongoing support and maintenance of S/4HANA.

When this large gas and electricity provider struggled to keep maintenance data up-to-date in SAP, they asked AG for help. Previously, any change requests would be directed to a central IT team who would take up to 8 weeks to action the updates. Errors were also typical due to lack of maintenance knowledge.

AG gave engineers control back over their data. Using Winshuttle, they built a form-based solution that incorporated extensive logic and added features, such as SAP user governance. The forms provided an easy-to-use interface for directly updating SAP in real time and catered for many requirements. This hugely improved lead times and data quality while also allowing IT to focus on value-adding tasks.

AG helped this major UK energy provider to significantly improve the process for creating Project Accounting master data in SAP. The company was experiencing long delays and data quality issues due to shared ownership, knowledge gaps and insufficient system and process governance.

In fact, while Finance would provide project figures, it was the task of an off-shore team, who had the SAP knowledge, to enter data in the system. Using Winshuttle, AG developed a smart, user-friendly interface that allowed Finance to directly input project data into SAP easily, in real time and without error. This eliminated the need for the off-shore overhead while improving data governance and quality.

When this international energy company was formed by separating all fossil fuel assets from its parent, they decided not only to keep a smart solution previously developed by AG, but they called upon the same consultancy to develop it further. The original solution used Winshuttle forms together with extensive logic and smart features to simplify the updating of their maintenance master data in SAP.

Th solution was not only updated to meet new technical and business requirements, but it was invested in further by developing its technical design and usability. As the new team highly valued the AG solution, they decided to extend its footprint when the opportunity arose.

AG led a highly complex project to cleanse and migrate to SAP maintenance data as part of a leading E&P company’s Maintenance Excellence programme. AG had already defined the SAP data standards, but now had to ensure these were applied to all data. The project, were Winshuttle was used to upload the remediated data, involved a high number of activities that followed stringent policies and procedures.

The result was complete maintenance data now in SAP in the right format and following the correct hierarchy. This enabled the business to undertake the right maintenance going forward, prioritising what was safety critical.

When this large gas and electricity provider struggled to keep maintenance data up-to-date in SAP, they asked AG for help. Previously, any change requests would be directed to a central IT team who would take up to 8 weeks to action the updates. Errors were also typical due to lack of maintenance knowledge.

AG gave engineers control back over their data. Using Winshuttle, they built a form-based solution that incorporated extensive logic and added features, such as SAP user governance. The forms provided an easy-to-use interface for directly updating SAP in real time and catered for many requirements. This hugely improved lead times and data quality while also allowing IT to focus on value-adding tasks.

This leading European oil & gas operator did not have a proper system in place for managing safety-critical inspections. These would be recorded on paper, scanned and saved to SAP, which meant it was not possible to report on maintenance data. AG developed a solution to greatly improve usability, making it extremely easy for maintenance engineers to add inspection data to SAP and report on it from one screen. The solution also addresses limitations of standard SAP. For example, it allows the mapping of specific inspection criteria to specific assets, a common requirement for industries with a large number of asset types.

This fast expanding international hotel chain was struggling to manage updates to business-critical menus across their portfolio. The exclusivity of their restaurants meant that each had different, frequently updated menus. This was a problem as making changes in the system was time consuming and flexibility to accommodate peaks in demand was limited. A growing, full-time team were employed to make the changes, but struggled to keep up with ever increasing demand. The hotel group wanted to improve service and capacity while managing costs. AG designed a virtual, unattended helpdesk able to action menu changes in almost real-time, 24/7. With forecast ROI in 7 months, annual savings were estimated at hundreds of 000s of pounds.

AG worked with Winshuttle to help an Oil & Gas Supermajor replace a legacy production revenue accounting system that was costing $1M to support and yet was not meeting business requirements.

The most complex Winshuttle solution ever built, the AG-Winshuttle robot manages 15 different processes in SAP using intelligent forms with extensive logic built-in to drive complex transactions. The solution, which includes over 100 individual scripts and 2,000 lines of code, also provides a highly usable SAP interface and solid process and data governance eliminating the likelihood of errors. The result was an almost immediate ROI, a streamlined period end and timely reports to the Board.

This global market leader in household products was spending too much time managing product master data. They were using manual emails and Excel-based forms to request, maintain and distribute critical product data. Several teams were required to collaborate and data synchronisation was needed in SAP. Overall process was slow, labour intensive and prone to errors. Product managers were spending up to 50% of their time maintaining the master data forms. With 000s of products to manage, keeping on top of product master data was becoming increasingly challenging. The innovative AG solution automates the manually-intensive aspects of the process, saving key team members valuable time, while also building confidence in the process with built-in governance.