African Explosives breaks new ground with R15m project to improve business processes

SAP Africa announced today that African Explosives Limited (AEL), one of the largest manufacturers and suppliers of commercial explosives, initiating systems and blasting services, has gone live with SAP R/3 system.

The upgrade from SAP R/2 formed part of a R15 million implementation project to provide AEL with an integrated transactional and information technology platform across all business units to support its continuous business improvement philosophy and drive for improved competitiveness.

Approximately 600 employees went live with the assistance of SAP Africa's implementation partner EDS Enterprise Solutions and the Avraham Y. Goldratt Institute's (AGI), AEL's Theory of Constraints (TOC) implementation partner. These two companies collaborated with a focused and dedicated project team from AEL to ensure that the project was executed successfully ahead of schedule and budget.

"Upgrading our previous legacy system, SAP R/2, became a necessary prerequisite to establish an integrated technology framework to manage our business according to our new Theory of Constraints (TOC) management philosophy. Additionally, we also needed to consolidate the legacy systems of three separate business units into one integrated ERP system," says Dave Athey, Information Technology manager at African Explosives.

Alan Barnard, a Certified Associate of the AGI and AEL TOC Project Leader, explains that TOC is a holistic approach to continuous business improvement that uses rigorous cause-effect logic and common sense solutions to focus companies on identifying and removing organisational and supply chain constraints. "The approach starts with identifying the undesirable effects or symptoms for each of the key stakeholders and the core problems or constraints causing these symptoms. The approach ends with a detailed action plan that will be both necessary, sufficient and sequenced correctly to align the organisation to identify, remove and replace the constraining policies, measurements, technology, processes or behaviours," says Barnard.

Additionally, the upgrade to SAP R/3 allowed AEL to deploy an effective mobile strategy. "AEL's sales force is now able to gain remote access from mining sites via our Nokia mobile solution," says Athey.

Marleze von Loggerenberg, Project Manager from EDS Enterprise Solutions, SAP's implementation partner, added: "We originally allowed for eight months implementation as this is the first formal SAP/TOC implementation in the world and we anticipated additional time for configuration and other adjustments. By utilising the Accelerated SAP (ASAP) toolset and methodology we managed to complete the project two months ahead of schedule.

"ASAP is a standard working practice for us. It facilitates our commitment of resources and the timeframe that we offer our clients," says Von Loggerenberg.

To date, system users have commented positively on the more intuitive and easier to use SAP R/3 front-end and the excellent reporting and analysis functions. "Business units will benefit from having faster access to more accurate financial information. Additionally, we expect a reduction in IT support costs, as we no longer need to support three different ERP systems. Stock availability is also expected to be managed more efficiently due to better streamlined business processes," concludes Athey.