Honeywell Elster improve their business critical operations with a SAP upgrade and support from Invenio
Honeywell Elster group, headquartered in Germany, is the world’s leading manufacturer and supplier of highly accurate, high quality, integrated metering and utilisation solutions to the gas, electricity, water, communications and networking industries. The group, which is part of Honeywell International, employs over 7,500 staff and currently operates in over 39 countries. Honeywell Elster’s diverse portfolio of products and solutions are used worldwide to accurately and reliably measure gas, electricity and water consumption, enabling increased energy efficiency and resource conservation.
The Business Challenges
On the cusp of further growth, Elster faced the challenge of finding a highly skilled, innovative and flexible SAP partner to help them not only improve a number of business-critical operations, but also define a new operational strategy for growth and expansion. As the company continued to grow, their continuing priority became rolling out SAP to new regions and company sectors as they are created. Unlike a single, complete overhaul, such ongoing implementations presented a variety of business challenges, including continuous effort, high cost and ongoing pressure on IT resources.
Elster’s teams required 4 things from a SAP partner:
Expert knowledge
Not just on the SAP modules to be implemented, but on domain issues as well
Speed
Multiple projects were already in the pipeline and required quick implementation in order to meet their deadlines
Support
Due to the ongoing nature of the different projects to be rolled out, often simultaneously, Elster required a high level of ongoing support to keep everything running smoothly
Flexibility
Elster required an on-demand model that could offer more flexible resource management and scalability during peak times
Invenio's Solution
The solutions Invenio implemented for Elster began with designing and executing a knowledge transition plan, based on their business and IT requirements. By adopting an agile, flexible model, Invenio has supported Elster with a wide range of enhancement and support projects.
Invenio were able to support Elster by:
- Working according to an on-demand engagement model, allowing for more flexibility in resource management and scalability during peak times
- Creating a new legal entity to separate the gas and electricity elements of the business
- Designing and setting up a profit centre accounting module to generate financial statements for their energy ICT business, which was merged with Elster Solutions
- Seamless integration of JP Morgan’s outgoing payment mechanism with their new SAP system. This included incorporation of lockbox, electronic bank statement and outgoing payment functionality across multiple business areas in different locations
- Implementation and management of SAP systems to France and Romania
- Implementation of SAP manufacturing execution system in order to standardise and capture real-time information for reporting
Elster were also planning an upgrade to their ECC gas environment to EHP6 (enhancement package, an ER product containing 694 business functions). This was both a technical and functional upgrade, and Invenio were instrumental in helping design and implement a SAP program to match it. This solution included custom ABAP (advanced business application programming) code analysis correction, ABAP program comparison, BDC (batch data communication), RFC (remote function call) and function group analysis and query. This highly specialist tool helped Elster effectively estimate effort and cost for upgrade activities, before carrying them out.
""Invenio was the best partner for our business"" Sangeeta Singh, Global ERP Lead, Elster Group
The Results
Despite being such a complex and ongoing project, Elster has seen multiple benefits to their business since engaging Invenio. Implementation of tailored SAP and ERP solutions lead to an improvement of their supply chain efficiency, with new forecasting models being more accurate and effective. The solution also optimised the production and sales processes through automation, which led to considerable time savings for staff. This in turn led to improved cash flow, helping suppliers immediately covert waiting invoices into cash and improving relationships. Not only that, but Elster saw:
