Sappi awards Britehouse SAP outsourcing deal

Global paper and pulp group, Sappi, has awarded a SAP maintenance and innovation outsourcing deal worth R73 million over three years to Britehouse, Dimension Data's SAP application house.

The Britehouse deal forms part of a larger outsourcing contract worth R130 million over three years in which Dimension Data itself hosts Sappi's regional data and call centres and another Dimension Data company, Internet Solutions, manages Sappi's network requirements.

Sappi Southern Africa IT director, Deon van Aarde, says the company has used both single and multi-outsource facilities since 1997, when it first implemented SAP for all its operations other than manufacturing and certain bespoke functions such as forestry.

"Both types of outsourcing have their advantages, but outsourcing a number of disciplines to a single outsourcer means that we don't have to act as the services aggregator. We can hold one organisation responsible across various service offerings.

"In the Dimension Data deal, that's exactly what happens. By putting both application and infrastructure outsourcing under one roof, we've enabled our users to log only one call - whether it's for a desktop issue, or the network is slow, or a business process isn't working ideally - and the Dimension Data call centre allocates the incident to the appropriate internal specialist, follows up on progress, and then reports back to us."

Some 80% of the overall outsourcing deal, however, revolves around Sappi's SAP application. "Our daily operations globally are run entirely on SAP. We therefore needed a business partner that would immerse itself in our operations, be hands-on, and provide us with extremely structured services. We didn't want to be faced with a bottomless pit.

"Britehouse fitted the bill in every respect. One of their directors is directly involved on a daily basis. We buy a fixed number of hours of innovation services. And Britehouse's approach to innovation suits us, in that they rotate our staff on their projects, so that our people are learning all the time. They also share knowledge with us from other relevant projects that are not under confidentiality constraints. We are therefore benefiting from a much broader knowledge base than would otherwise be available to us."

"Sappi is one of very few companies in South Africa that is able to manage its entire supply chain - from planning and control all the way through to execution - in real-time," says Britehouse director, Rob Hunter. "The company is able to do this because of its extremely advanced use of its SAP tools.

"In an environment that is already so mature, a business partner can only add value if its technology competence and experience is backed by a business consultancy capability that spans all the mission critical business disciplines, including human resources, finance, production, and supply chain.

"Having that kind of strategic business capability as well as specific depth in supply chain management therefore enabled us to migrate Sappi from their previous outsourcer without a single disruption to their business - and to meet every service level agreement along the way."

"We were also very pleased that Britehouse were prepared to take on board some of the contracting talent working on our SAP system at the time that they took over," van Aarde says. "They recognised that the system is very complex and that retaining the institutional and intellectual property vested in the contractors was crucial to not putting Sappi at risk."

Sappi's SAP system is hosted in Vienna by a third party, so Britehouse's SAP maintenance and innovation work on the system is done remotely. "It's not quite cloud computing, but it's a major step in the direction of computing on demand," says Dimension Data customer advocate for Sappi, Jack Coetzee. "And it demonstrates that an organisation can now have the most appropriate skills working for it, no matter where in the world they are based."