SAP – Introduction & Overview

SAP – Introduction & Overview

a10 is being a ‘trusted SAP partner’ for leading companies. Our capabilities and expertise span across the entire SAP life cycle right from consulting, global implementation and rollouts, technical upgrades, migrations and application support and maintenance.

Support with strong industry exposure, we have created an excellent track record in providing SAP services across wide range of many industries such as Manufacturing, Transportation and Logistics, Health Care, Professional services, Financial Services, Retail and many more. Our transformation experience within these industries have enabled us to bring innovative engagement models, aimed at reducing IT spending to address key Business and IT challenges at an accelerated pace.

SAP Practice

SAP Practice at a10: Core & Surround Service Offerings

a10's value proposition is:

• Deliver value added services/bolt-ons around core ERP platforms such as SAP
• Create a transformational roadmap to integrate the back end SAP solutions using
• Collaborative platforms for suppliers, customers and business partners.

a10's SAP Practice has strong functional and technical competency across core and extension modules in SAP. We're building solutions & frameworks in BI, Mobility, CRM and Portal/Collaboration technologies.

Our SAP Practice also incorporates

• Best in class business practices
• Rapid implementation methodologies
• Tools and frameworks in our core service offerings around implementations/rollouts
• BI/Analytics dashboards for operations and executive management
• Shared services support
• Test & ABAP development factory offerings

Approach and methodology

Overview of SAP Methodology

This section provides a general overview of the SAP methodology, which a10 will follow during the SAP implementation.

The SAP implementation roadmap has five general phases:

Phase 1: Project Preparation

• During this phase the team goes through initial planning and preparation for SAP project, including:
• Defining project goals and objectives.
• Clarifying the scope of implementation.
• Defining project schedule, budget plan, and implementation sequence.
• Establishing the project organization and relevant committees, and assigning resources.

Phase 2: Business Blueprint

The purpose of this phase is to achieve a common understanding of how the company intends to run SAP to support its business. In addition, the original project goals and objectives will be refined and the project schedule will be revised in this phase. The result is the Business Blueprint, a detailed documentation of the results gathered during requirements workshops.

Phase 3: Realization

The purpose of this phase is to implement all the business process requirements based on the Business Blueprint. The system configuration methodology is provided in two work packages: Baseline (major scope) and Final configuration (remaining scope). Integration testing is conducted and end-user document is prepared during this phase.

Phase 4: Final Preparation

The purpose of this phase is to complete the final preparation (including testing, end user training, system management, and cutover activities) to finalize your readiness to go live. The Final Preparation phase also serves to resolve all critical open issues.

Phase 5: Go Live & Support

The purpose of this phase is to move from a project-oriented, pre-production environment to live production operation. The most important elements include setting up production support, monitoring system transactions, and optimizing overall system performance.

Global Delivery

a10 has SAP functional and technical specialists at its offices worldwide, which gives us the flexibility to offer both onsite and off-shore solutions. We have had great success implementing SAP applications using a combined onsite/off-shore delivery model where the functional work occurs at the client's site, but much of the technical work is handled from our off-shore facilities. The off-shore component allows us to significantly reduce the costs of the project and to accelerate the timeline by having the onsite and off-shore teams work in parallel.

CPG (Consumer Packaged Goods) Market space

Transforming the CPG Industry with Creative Technology Solutions

With growing commodity prices and volatility in the market, the consumer packaged goods (CPG) sector faces continued pressure on profit margins. From the unstable economy to frugal consumers there has been endless discussion around the challenges facing consumer packaged goods business during the last few years.

To maintain profitability, CPG makers need to sharpen their focus on operations throughout the value chain, from sourcing to manufacturing & distribution to promotions. Leveraging the right IT service providers with the experience of delivering solutions across the value chain becomes critical if CPG firms have to free up time to focus on their core competencies.

a10 Offerings for CPG Industry

Having worked with some of the largest companies in the CPG space, a10 understands the needs of this industry and provides a set of offerings which help CPG customers overcome the current challenges while improving profit margins and creating opportunities for expanding business. a10's offerings for the CPG industry include:

Trade Promotion Management System

Trade Promotion Management solution is designed to help create, rollout and monitor the performance of promotions targeted to various markets. Pre-built Promotion Analyzers are available to measure the performance of the promotions. Some of the analysers available include:

• Actual vs. Budgeted Promotion costs
• Promotion Outcomes
• Period wise comparison for sales generated from different promotions
• ROI from historical Promotions
• Promotion Planning and Predicted Sales impact
• Regional performance on promotions

Field Sales Management

The field sales management system focuses on capturing customer data, route plan to customer location and maps to plan for maximum coverage by field sales team. This offering enables the sales team to capture orders, perform various cash and non-cash transactions, capture customer feedbacks and opinions and drive promotion activities for key accounts. Some of the key outcomes that CPG firms seek from this include:

• Increased market coverage by the sales team
• Ensure consistent and effective market coverage
• Provision right product to the right customer at the right time
• Increase planned sales and promote unplanned sales

Brand Performance Dashboards

Brand performance and the impact of marketing events on brands can be studied and used to drive better offers using the Brand Performance dashboards. These dashboards provide comprehensive information and analysis about the forecasted vs. actual sales, performance of various brands based on product categories, customer channels and other parameters. These reports and dashboards provide drill down capability; compare several parameters that provide insights on important areas to focus, on the price elasticity of products and help drive decisions for key account investments and promotions.

Enterprise Applications, Application Maintenance Services, Testing and Infrastructure Management Services

a10 has over the years acquired expertise in the implementation, maintenance and upgrade of a variety of packaged and bespoke applications for the CPG industry. Additionally we offer Application Maintenance Services, Testing Services, and Infrastructure Management Services.

a10 is focused on leveraging mobility, business intelligence and the cloud to participate in transformational outsourcing engagements with enterprises in the CPG industry. We continue to invest in building our knowledge and capabilities in order to deliver results that matter.

Business Intelligence (BI)

BI capabilities enable organizations to make sound strategic and operational decisions. Having access to data is only a part of the solution; the real issue is to make the best use of this data to drive organizational goals.

Our Offerings:

• Reporting / Scoping
• Requirement Gathering
• Dashboard and Report Developing
• Data Integrating
• Training
• Upgrading
• Implementing / Rollout handling
• Supporting / Monitoring
• Process Designing / Redesigning
• Performance tuning
• Custom Solutions & Consulting

Methodology

Consult	Implement	Support
BI Roadmap Process Design Process Redesign Standard Contents Interactive Analysis Requirement Data Integration BI Utilization	Dashboards / Reports Workbooks Data Mining Information Broadcasting Portal Integration Backend Developments Data Integration Training Rollouts	Bug Fixing Monitoring Enhancements Performance Tuning Change Management BI Security

Integration Tools – a10 Solutions

a10 makes it easy to connect to SAP and to implement flexible business processes to augment and complement existing SAP processes. While all the enterprise data remains with the core SAP system, a10 frees the business to customize the implementation as required based on business needs rather than based on the SAP mandate. In other words, a business does not have to always "work around SAP". Instead, a business can use the benefits of SAP's strong transactional capabilities while getting the flexibility required to rapidly change processes as and when needed, with minimal programming and IT effort.

The links below discuss how several SAP business processes are optimized, augmented and rendered more flexible by a10. This is just a small sample of possible processes optimization possibilities and is not an exhaustive list. The techniques listed here apply to all business processes built around the data stored in the SAP system

Offshore Services

We focus exclusively on maximizing client returns from outsourcing and off-shoring. Our consultants have extensive experience in managing large IT applications on-site at customers in real time as well as in providing high value services around packaged enterprise applications such as SAP. Our experience in the business process outsourcing arena fully offshore Outsourcing Services, SAP Outsourcing complements and strengthens our service spectrum and allows us to operate as an enterprise-class solution delivery company. Our solutions aim to provide high value by optimizing cost of ownership of technology investments for customers.

We combine our comprehensive understanding of a client's business and industry with our cutting edge technology solutions and superb delivery methodology. Our goal is to exceed your expectations. a10 delivers SAP solutions, application support, and development outsourcing.

a10 consultants provide an in-house and remote support in solving problems that arise during everyday use of the system. Moreover, the client's SAP system is constantly monitored with the aim of finding possible faults e.g. in data entered by users or in areas that may cause problems in future. a10 application support concerns the full scope of modules of mySAP ERP (SAP R/3), NetWeaver 2004s, as well as SAP BW/BI (Business Information Warehouse), SAP Solution Manager, mySAP SEM (Strategic Enterprise Management).

Our commitment is to provide solutions that translate into tangible business outcomes for our customers. We want generate high business value for our customers. The company's onsite/offshore delivery model provides significant cost savings.

Offshore services are the following:

• SAP Basis support
• SAP Application support
• ABAP / JAVA Programming