DXC Oxygen Implements SAP Business ByDesign

DXC Oxygen is helping a multinational asset maintenance company concentrate on its core business – providing second-to-none asset inspection and integrity services. Together with internal personnel, DXC Oxygen implemented a cloud version of SAP, rolling it out across the company’s Australia and New Zealand businesses. The SAP Business ByDesign solution is breaking down information silos within the business and automating core back-office processes.

Challenge

The company maintains, modifies and assures the integrity of production facilities in the oil and gas, chemicals and process, metals and mining, food and pharmaceuticals, power, and manufacturing industries. It assists it’s clients by providing a life-cycle asset solution which is innovative, cost-competitive and respects the company’s key values of safety, integrity, teamwork and excellence.

Recently acquired by a multinational organisation, the company was seeking to implement a “fit-for-purpose” transactional backbone, says says the IT Manager for Australia and New Zealand. Rich functionality, cost efficiency, scalability and the backing of a reputable software company were key criteria in evaluating the solution to be implemented.

The company’s headquarters, based in Europe, runs SAP ECC, and the organisation was looking for a suitable system to support their satellite businesses in the Pacific region. SAP ByDesign was selected because it fulfilled all the key criteria given that it is subscription based and has a small, yet easily scalable IT footprint. DXC Oxygen was identified as the ideal implementation partner.

Solution

The IT Manager says SAP Business ByDesign is an easily scalable solution. “This was ideal for us as we are a business with many customer project sites to support. We needed to ramp our IT capability up and down on demand in a timely manner.”

In a series of workshops DXC Oxygen’s consultants worked with the company to help define its key business requirements and establish its ‘best practice’ processes across a range of business functions. These included functionality to cover its selling and purchasing cycle, operations and warehousing, and HR and payroll processes.

“Once you have your master data in place and the template designed, SAP Business ByDesign can be rolled out very quickly,” says the IT Manager. “DXC Oxygen helped us implement it on both sides of the Tasman and then helped finetune the template based on feedback from the initial deployments.”

Result

Hosted by SAP in the cloud, the company has around 70 SAP users on the system across New Zealand and Australia. “But we only need one-and-a-half persons to support all those business users now,” says the IT Manager. “SAP looks after the system maintenance via a monthly subscription. There were no upfront capital expenditure costs and we have achieved our goal of maintaining a small IT footprint within the business.”

The IT Manager says the system has transformed the way staff look at the IT function within the business. “Provisioning IT used to be complex and totally reliant on one or two people. Now, with SAP Business ByDesign we have managed to remove the whole technology component by outsourcing it to SAP.

“With the cloud template, it is easy to scale up or scale back based on business demands. It’s also much easier to deploy additional functionality.”

The company is now preparing to roll the SAP Business ByDesign template out to other locations with extended functionality, such as mobile asset management capability.

“We wanted to get the backbone in place first to ensure all our back-office functions were automated and integrated. Then we plan to deploy SAP to the front end.”

Business benefits are already flowing, says the IT Manager. Prior to the implementation, the information from paper timesheets was not well connected to customer billing.

“Now the flow of information from timesheets is much better. All the necessary data is collected and sent to payroll and customer billing. Everything is clear and if there is a query, it is easy to find the relevant information within the system.”

With core processes automated, the company can run its steady state business with much more efficiency. Key business processes are now embedded into the system – not held in the heads of a few individuals, allowing the business to fully leverage off the know-how of the entire team.

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