Companies facing radical internal or external changes, a common scenario in South Africa`s economic sector, need major modifications to be made urgently to their systems, but without any disruption to business. To ensure an easy, quick and cost-effective transition for customers in these situations, world leading enterprise business software player, SAP has recently launched a portfolio of conversion services.
"The problem with a drastic change such as a merger, the splitting of a company, or a change in the company`s chart of accounts or fiscal year, is that it tends to come into effect suddenly," says Claas Kuehnemann, general manager: services of SAP Southern Africa. "This means that the company`s systems have to accommodate the change overnight.
"Enterprise business solution SAP R/3 has been designed to be flexible, and can therefore easily cope with most changes," he says. "Hoechst, for example, used SAP to aid in the integration of several new companies into the group."
Because customised, individual solutions can be expensive and time-consuming, SAP has developed a portfolio of services encompassing strategies for modelling business changes in a live SAP R/3 system. Called `R/3 Conversion Services`, the system consists of turnkey conversion packages that complete business adaptations quickly and cost-effectively.
"Using SAP`s conversion packages, customers can modify custom, master and transaction data in their live R/3 system, and be sure that all the active data in the system will be changed accordingly," says Kuelinemann.
"The predefined packages focus on a range of technical and business issues. The first type of conversion package deals with fiscal year conversion, the second handles changes to existing numbering systems and a third category lets customers modify their organisational structures. And of course if a conversion cannot be handled by an existing conversion package then we offer support on the basis of customer-specific projects," he concludes.
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