Denel subsidiary Kentron is experiencing dramatic business improvements through use of a customisable time sheet capturing tool. One of the first South African sites to implement the SAP Cross Application Time Sheet (CATS), Kentron is also one of the first companies globally to use the tool on such a large scale.
The company, which develops, produces and supports aerospace and defence systems, is using CATS to automate the recording and billing of hours worked, currently booking more than 25 000 hours per week via CATS.
Kentron is dependent on accurately monitoring actual man hours worked, as these are the company`s primary source of income. With the use of CATS, Kentron has automated the control, monitoring and billing of hours, thus reducing errors, and eliminating bottlenecks and backlogs.
"CATS, now part of the standard SAP solution, is essentially a customisable time sheet capture environment, that brings together all the `objects` within SAP," says Phillip Booth, product manager: human resources, SAP Southern Africa. "It allows time to be posted against HR-related information, and also ensures the SAP logistics and financial modules are updated."
"In the past we used a largely manual process for recording and billing hours," says Pat Williams, Kentron`s cross-application specialist. "Time sheets were written by hand, we drew paper-based reports, and there was a human decision as to which hours were billable. This caused bottlenecks, and we had a backlog of thousands of hours that had never been billed. We did make some changes to our SAP HR functionality to cope with this, but the process was frustrating and cumbersome for everyone.
"The introduction of CATS has saved us an enormous amount of administrative work," he says. "Now hours are electronically posted to the relevant SAP modules on a regular basis. Our backlog of man hours worked, but never billed, has dropped dramatically, and our forecasts are far more accurate.
"Time sheet data is currently entered directly into a SAP screen on a weekly basis, still from a paper-based time sheet. Once a week it is posted electronically to the target SAP modules ( eg. HR, CO, PS). The system has been adopted with relish by our staff because of the time and effort it saves. We`ve had nothing but positive feedback since implementation two months ago," says Williams. "We are now also well positioned for employees to enter their time on a daily basis in future, together with a facility for electronic release and approval of time sheet data, thus eliminating paper-based time sheets altogether."
Kentron installed wall-to-wall SAP R/3 last year as part of its mission to establish itself as a major player in the international aerospace/defence market. It needed business systems that were global and could be accessed from anywhere in the world. An internationally-recognised and integrated business solution that could be a platform for the company to conduct business and support its customers was critical.
"We saw an early prototype of CATS at that stage, and were very excited by it," says Williams. "We therefore customised our IIR module to create a temporary solution until we were able to get a pre-release of CATS.
"SAP is continually bringing new functionality to the market and as an installed site we are able to benefit from this immediately. As soon as we saw the tool, we knew it would be ideal to solve our time sheet problems," he says.
"We upgraded from SAP R/3 release 3.0F to 3.1II in January 1998, and are now taking full advantage of the new functionality in the new release. This enabled us to install CATS, prior to its becoming a standard component of SAP R/3 in later releases. And because the tool is part of the standard SAP solution, we are guaranteed ongoing development and support."
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