Plessey South Africa has completed the roll-out of its SAP R/3 Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) business system throughout its core businesses with manufacturing and marketing divisions now live and in full production.
The final implementation by Spearhead Logistics, some 18 months after the first Plessey operating division went live, marks the end of an extended project which has been described as one of the most complex SAP R/3 manufacturing, sales and distribution sites in South Africa in terms of the number of different solutions implemented and the scope of the project.
Even though the company has moved from a decentralised computing environment to a single centralised, 600 user, R/3 business system, Plessey decided to implement the integrated solutions at an individual business unit level rather than progressively bringing on functional modules throughout the organisation.
"We wanted to get each business up and running rapidly by giving them the whole solution as quickly as possible rather than implement different modules over a longer period of time. So really, we adopted a series of `little` Big Bang implementations at individual companies," says Colin Davidson, Plessey SAP project manager.
The conclusion of the roll-out meets Plessey`s original objective, which was not to re-engineer the company , but to replace its decentralised systems with integrated systems that could be managed centrally, he adds. "The company is now realising the advantages of real-time integrated environments across our businesses," says Davidson. "The latest implementation sees our national marketing and distribution business units linked to the production and development facilities based in Cape Town and enables us to consider extending the system across the supply chain.".
Plessey is using the full SAP suite excluding the Human Resources module. Apart from implementing the standard Financial, Materials Management and Sales & Distribution functionality, this implementation included Project Management and Service Management in the telecommunications divisions as well as Warehouse Management, Quality Management and full Product Data Management in the manufacturing division. Detailed Cost and Profitability analysis was also required down to product level.
"The whole implementation has been one of the most complex performed locally," says Warrick Leslie, the Spearhead Logistics project manager assisting Plessey with its SAP implementation.
"Plessey`s continually evolving organisational structure also added to the complexity of the implementation forcing the development of a framework that supports full inter-divisional trading. This flexible design allows for the rapid integration of newly acquired businesses and also facilitates group-wide financial reporting and consolidation," he says.
On the hardware side, Plessey has replaced its HP 3000 and IBM AS/400 legacy systems with Unix-based HP 9000 computers capable of meeting the on-line needs of 600 users across local and wide area networks. Davidson highlighted the close cooperation with Spearhead Logistics and joint responsibility between the two companies as the key to successful conclusion of the implementation.
In order to overcome geographical difficulties Spearhead project managed and provided effective post-implementation support for the Gauteng based businesses while Plessey resources concentrated their efforts in Cape Town, where Spearhead also provided specialist resources and project management assistance.
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