About Client
MBHE is a 150-year-old company that focuses on plant engineering and construction. They pursue technical leadership in their market sector through continuous research and development. They offer solutions to support complete mineral beneficiation plants and coal washeries.
- http://mbe-cmt.com/
- Location: Cologne, Germany
Project Background – SAP Support Services
MBE’s requirement was to help with SAP systems and manage important changes within their standard processes. Read more about how we provided SAP support services involving specific changes related to workflows, updating SAP forms for sales orders, invoices, and purchase orders. We also assisted with financial reconciliation, including clearing the previous financial year’s data and settling the books.
Scope & Requirement
Below are some of the scope items for the SAP support services we provided:
- Understand the existing books outside of SAP and compare them with what exists in the system. Confirm the AS-IS and TO-BE states of the chart of accounts that would be reflected.
- Set up the refresh of data from the SAP Production environment to the Development environment, ensuring all configurations and data are copied over, and create additional client systems such as 100 and 110.
- Clean up accounts receivable and payable, general ledger, sub-ledger, and registers.
Implementation
Technology and Architecture
Technology
- SAP R/3 system was used.
Integrations
- No specific integration scenario was in scope.
Security
- User authorization and access were cleaned up.
- Developer and admin roles were defined for workflow tables and system management.
- Custom roles were created, and admin users were trained on how to manage the system and grant roles and permissions.
- Organization structures were set up with hierarchies for approvers, managers, organizational units, and employees.
Backup and Recovery
- We created a backup schedule that can be used to restore system data as needed in case of any outage.
Scalability
- This was not in scope.
Cost Optimization
- The client was using a perpetual license, and SAP was running on an existing on-premises server. We informed the client about migrating to the cloud, but this proposal was not converted.
Code Management, Deployment
- All ABAP code was managed within SAP, and no other ABAP tool was used.
Features Implemented – SAP Support Services
- SAP ABAP-based development for updating SAP Script forms, Adobe forms, and implementing changes such as new payment terms, updating standard text, and adding previous invoice details to display purchase history.
- SAP accounts payable and receivable reconciliation for mapping different entries in the system.
- User and security management to help manage the systems more effectively through system refresh activities.
- Adding new payment terms in the system and updating payment terms with discounts and late fees for both vendors and customers.
- Adding a workflow table where approvers were defined based on amount and hierarchy level. The document creation process was updated to trigger approval workflows during sales invoice and sales order creation. If any changes were made to the document, email outputs were prevented until approval was completed.
Challenges
- Changing Business Requirements: The client was not clear on how they wanted the documents to appear. Their TO-BE version differed significantly from the existing system, resulting in multiple iterations and PDF updates to understand the requirements.
- Before starting development, we spent several hours creating mock-ups of PDF documents using actual system data to validate the requirements.
- Lack of Team Members and Ownership: The client did not have an internal team of functional consultants, technical resources, or testers to review changes and provide timely feedback.
- We advised the client on various testing scenarios as part of unit testing; however, obtaining feedback and completing testing was a time-consuming process.
- Outdated Code Using SAP Scripts and Multiple Language Support: The client used SAP Scripts, which had largely been replaced by Smart Forms or Adobe Forms. The solution also required support for multiple languages and multilingual email notifications.
- Copies of the data for both languages were used to create PDF mock-ups. Different scenarios were designed to determine when notifications should be sent in German or English and what text content should be included.
- Budget and Cost Issues: The client had a fixed budget, while requirements continued to evolve. Delays in feedback also caused prolonged waiting periods.
- Certain sales order and invoice types had different configurations and did not work with the same code deployment. Although these requirements were outside the initial scope, we made every effort to accommodate them within the agreed budget.
Support
- For all delivered changes, we agreed to provide two weeks of free support during which the client could test the solution and provide feedback regarding any issues related to the existing logic or request minor changes if required.
Next Phase
We were in discussions with the client regarding multiple projects; however, none of them were finalized.
- Migration of SAP systems from the current on-premises environment to the cloud.
- A 12-month AMC support contract with a fixed cost model. However, the scope was not clearly defined for modules such as FI, MM, SD, and user management.
- Regular refreshes of the current systems from the Production environment to the Development environment.
