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American
Standard Thailand (ASTL) is part of American Standard
Companies Inc., a leading global competitor with
technologically advanced products in the air
conditioning, bathroom, kitchen fixtures & fittings,
automotive braking & control systems and medical
diagnostics industries. Its internationally recognised
brand names include Trane®, & American Standard®
for air conditioning products; American Standard®,
Ideal Standard®, Standard® & Porcher® for
plumbing products; WABCO® and Perrot® for automotive
products and Copalis® & LARA® for diagnostic
systems.
American Standard is actively developing business
opportunities in high-growth markets globally with a
particular emphasis on the Asia-Pacific region. To
actualise its corporate goals, American Standard realised
that it needed a solution that would integrate
its business information systems. It needed an
information system that could provide flexibility with
real-time information. It needed a solution that would
make its factories more cost-effective &
cost-competitive and the company more customer-focused.
After much deliberation, SAP R/3 was selected as a
global solution.
The implementation in Asia-Pacific started in 1997 with
Korea being the first of its plants to implement the
system.
ISS Consulting had clearly demonstrated its superiority
in knowledge of SAP R/3 when it successfully implemented
the system in Korea. As such, despite the inherent
language barrier and the fact that there were cheaper
consulting firms in Thailand, ASTL selected ISS
Consulting as its implementation partner. At 0800hrs on December 8, 1998, ASTL became the second
American Standard plant in the Asia-Pacific Region to go
live with SAP R/3.
Business
Issues
The old system at
ASTL was not Y2K compliant. The system was IBM
System/36 – RPG II based installed 20 years ago and
it handled accounting only. Logistics, i.e. Sales,
Material Management and Production, were controlled
and monitored manually. As a result, customer demands
were not effectively and efficiently conveyed to
production, therefore causing a large time lag between
orders and delivery, which consequently translated
into loss of competitive advantage.
In addition, the old system did not give up-to-date
information as the general ledger postings were done
only once a month. This resulted in extensive overtime
every month end.
Project Scope and Staffing
The modules that were to be implemented were SD, MM,
PP, FI & CO as well as a Thai front-end support.
As a pure “Vanilla” Solution was not desired,
functionality such as Transportation and Packaging,
Profitability Analysis and a complete new set-up for
the Sales Information Structures (SIS) was part of the
scope. In order to address business procedures that
were not supported in standard SAP, the enhancement
concept provided the possibility to write routines to
help facilitate certain issues. Those routines,
embedded in so-called “user-exits”, allowed ASTL
to change SAP R/3’s functionality to their needs
without giving up release-compatibility and without
modifying standard software. This required in-depth
knowledge of the software, and that was one of the
reasons ISS Consulting was ASTL’s implementation
partner of choice.
The project involved a 30-person team. The core
implementation team was from ISS Consulting and was
supported by American Standard’s Regional SAP
support team, as well as key users and IT support from
ASTL. The entire project was overseen and managed by a
Project Manager from ISS Consulting.
Post
Implementation Support
There was a parallel run between the 2 systems for
a month before ASTL switched the old system off.
During that time ASTL keyed in daily transactions into
both System 36 and SAP R/3.
The first few days of going live were slow. Many users
were reluctant to use the system and it was difficult
to get them started. Some had forgotten what they had
learnt in their training courses, therefore making it
necessary to conduct several re-training sessions;
while others couldn’t cope with the extra work of
having to update transactions in the two systems
concurrently.
One week into going live, a template was set-up to
track daily activity on R/3. This was published daily
to the Management via e-mail in order to inform
everyone of the system’s activity. With the
assistance of the Management pushing the Department
Heads who in turn pushed the Users, activity began
picking up rapidly.
Today, the old system is switched off and ASTL is
running successfully on SAP R/3.
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