At a glance:

Mass Maintenance of SAP Master Data with FIS/mpm® at Titgemeyer

Faster Calculation of Sales PricesCustomer

� Gebrüder Titgemeyer GmbH & Co. KG

� Founding year: 1901

� Based in: Osnabrück

� Employees: 500

Industry sector

� Manufacturing industry

Key figures

� Article master data: 30.000

� Price condition records: 250.000

� ROI: 18 months

Challenges

The Titgemeyer database of customer price condition records had been signifi-cantly increased so that fast creation of customer-specific mass price lists be- came more and more problematic and arduous. That is why Titgemeyer was looking for a system that enabled the parking of SAP master data in order to respond more quickly and flexibly to vendor price changes.

Solution

� FIS/mpm® - Master data management

Benefits

Because of FIS/mpm®, Titgemeyer has been able to reduce the SAP database records of customer price conditions by 75 %. By entering master data changes in the FIS software, customer-specific mass price lists can be generated more rapidly. The master data quality has increased and the software enables effective profit margin checks.

been IT manager at Titgemeyer (an Osnabrueck manufacturer of vehicle parts and fastening technique) since 2007! “Either our HR master data or the data of the sender is not up to date,” states Mr Wasilke. Just as important is the main-tenance of material master data. Titgemeyer has listed in SAP 30,000 part numbers from both business units ‘fastening technique’ and ‘vehicle bodies’; two thirds of these part numbers are trade goods and the rest are products. Titgemeyer delivers typical construction kits to its customers by using the ‘vari-ant configuration’. The customers from business unit ‘vehicle bodies’, i.e. all major German vehicle manu- facturers, communicate their specifications to Titgemeyer who determines all articles required by utilizing the configuration. A bill of material is generated and the vehicle manufacturers will be delivered their pre-assembled indi-vidual parts they use to design their utility vehicle body.

40% of all purchase orders are delayed due to master data problems. This is an estimate made by users of the standard business software. Dieter Wasilke, IT manager at Titgemeyer Group headquartered in Osnabrueck, who has long been familiar with SAP systems, cannot fully confirm this statement from his own experience. However, he knows that the Titgemeyer employees are not able to respond to vendor price changes as quickly as desired due to the complicated maintenance of material master data in SAP. As a consequence, Titgemeyer started to use FIS/mpm® as integrated system for the parking of SAP master data in 2011.

Each system is only as good as its master data maintenance. Even today, Dieter Wasilke occasionally receives letters addressed to his predecessor – although he has

“The FIS competence team has just implemented our tasks (examples) in the FIS/mpm® standard without any changes. Other software manufacturers would have had to make complex adjustments to their solutions.”

Dieter Wasilke,IT manager

each customer in SAP standard is laborious and leaves little time for more valuable tasks. It is hard to find the conditions and they have to

be deleted customer by customer in SAP standard. FIS/mpm® automati-cally lists conditions per customer and displays them in its own envi-ronment where they are marked for deletion according to specific check criteria. After completion of this data consolidation, Titgemeyer will only have the current approximate-ly 250,000 conditions without any unnecessary excess.

“FIS/mpm® is like an SAP transaction”

According to José Sandoz, “FIS/mpm® is basically like SAP” with regard to opera-tion and working environ-ment. The requested data is exported from the original SAP dataset to a temporary area which will be addressed by FIS/mpm®. In this area, the users can process data and develop and check busi-ness scenarios. Once a price decision has been made, the data will be re-imported into the original SAP datasets at the touch of a button. In this way, the operating SAP business will not be affected. For the users, working with FIS/mpm® is like working with an SAP transaction.

Pricing is only one of many important tasks that can be handled more easily with the

it plainly: we were not able to pass purchase price changes on to our customers as quickly as we would have liked to,” says José Sandoz.

Today, the FIS solution does this work for the office-based personnel: they can freely select which SAP table fields are to be extracted per article – material number, sales prices, current sales volumes etc.

- and FIS/mpm® combines them automatically. Consequently, the extraction of article master data records from SAP to FIS/mpm® only takes 30 minutes instead of a whole workday in the past. An Excel table is still created from the FIS software. The employees pro-cess the data from this table and determine the new article prices per customer. Using FIS/mpm®, the re-transfer of the new article master data and their condition records into the SAP database only takes half an hour.

Well-founded corporate decisions

Although it was possible in the past to re-enter prices in SAP, the new entry of customer conditions was so complex that it was only done a few times per year. Administra-tion times have been considerably reduced. If a vendor increases the prices, today Titgemeyer is able to adjust its own customer-specific prices quickly and with greater flexibility which leads to more substantiated corporate decisions. From the working time saved alone, Dieter Wasilke calculates a Return on Investment of 18 months for the solution. The effects on a better margin per product reduce the ROI to a few months. Moreover, the SAP data quality has been considerably increased because of the avoidance of transmission errors. Due to the automatic extraction of condition records via FIS/mpm®, the sales team was also able to streamline its database enormously because three quarters of a total of 1 million active price conditions were obsolete and were duplicated (with errors) when they could have been deleted. However, manually searching such data records for

“In the past, it was very hard to extract SAP master data records manually. Today, the FIS software does this job for us and enab-les us to pass purchase price changes on to our customers more quickly.”

José Santos, SAP Key User

FIS software such as the creation of attributes: for each article, Titgemeyer defines numerous at-tributes in the SAP master data

that describe the products. If an article is changed – even if it is only a whole being punched two centi-meters further to the right –, the article attributes need to be chan-ged as well. Today, this is done by FIS/mpm®. At the same time, the software realizes automatically that attribute changes to article A may affect further articles forming a construction kit when they are combined with article A. Within

“Input errors are avoided due to standardized inbound and outbound interfaces and check routines in FIS/mpm®, which considerably increases the data quality in SAP. FIS/mpm® keeps our master data, prices and conditions always up to date.”

Christian Lauxtermann, SAP Key User

Customer-specific pricing complicated Titgemeyer pricing

With regard to the pricing of these customer-specific orders, Titgemeyer has developed an individual method for customer-specific prices. “It had always been a problem in SAP to quickly enter the current sales prices that depend on our purchase prices. The master data record of an article contains only one price; we, however, have customer-specific prices,” explains Dieter Wasilke.

This means: Titgemeyer has de-tailed price scales that are linked to specific requirements of the respective customers such as size, purchase quantity etc. In this way, a matrix of prices and customers has been developed, the ‘price conditions’. When FIS/mpm® was introduced, the SAP system con-tained more than one million such price condition records. It was no surprise that it had become more and more difficult to determine new sales prices as real mass main-tenance tools are not available in SAP standard. Consequently, the employees needed to manually search and adjust the correspon-ding condition records for each article whose price was to be chan-ged.

Therefore, Titgemeyer was looking for a system enabling the users to efficiently adjust the mass of con-dition records and, above all, to determine customer-specific prices more rapidly in the future. The cus-tomer prices could be processed by

automatically extracting customer data records (based on any criteria) and providing the data of proces-sing, evaluation and deletion in FIS/mpm®’s separate dataspace.

The FIS/mpm® standard handles all requirements

FIS GmbH had the right software for Titgemeyer: FIS/mpm®, an SAP add-on for the parking of SAP master data. “Compared to other solutions, the FIS solution was the one that required the smallest amount of time and effort in adjusting the software to our in-dividual problems,” says Christian Lauxtermann, SAP Key User SD at Titgemeyer. “The standard solu-tion enables us to map our specific requirements and business proces-ses – other manufacturers would have had to adjust their system to

such an extent that the result would have been to install new software. This is helpful when it comes to SAP release upgrades for which we can also use FIS/mpm®.” Easy operation and a high degree of SAP integration were also criteria for the decision in favor of the FIS solution.

Time required for pricing reduced by one third

Thanks to the FIS solution, today the SAP users from the individual business departments only need one third of the time to create new price conditions. “In the past, it took an entire day to export the master data records of the artic-les to be processed from SAP into an Excel table,” explains SAP Key User José Sandoz. The sales team needed another day to check the table and recalculate the sales pri-ces for each and every customer. Many details had to be taken into consideration: which prices can be achieved on the market, how will the profit margin change relative to the entire product group if the sales price is increased or reduced etc. It took a third day to re-import the new price conditions into SAP. This meant a lot of manual effort for the key users. As the data was not always processed on three con-secutive days, the SAP mass price lists were consequently not up-dated as often as desired. “To put

FIS Informationssysteme und Consulting GmbH

Röthleiner Weg 1 Tel.: +49 97 23 / 91 88-0D-97506 Grafenrheinfeld Fax: +49 97 23 / 91 88-100www.f is-gmbh.de info@f is-gmbh.de

D00

3/04

14

supply chain, these adjustments will be transferred immediately to the Web shop.

Nowadays, master data changes much more rapidly than in the past. Therefore, the Titgemeyer Group

decided to use the FIS/mpm® tool, which helps to make such changes quickly and flexibly. Moreover, it guarantees higher data quality and does not affect the SAP operations.

TITGEMEYER GmbH & Co. KG

The Titgemeyer Group positions manifold products in the international markets for vehicle bodies and fastening technique. It offers tailor-made solutions and practical innovations for customers from industry sectors such as shipyards, aircraft and ve-hicle construction as well as industry and crafts. Titgemeyer operates four produc-tion sites in Lotte, Gevelsberg, Tripton/UK and Albrechtice nad Vltavou/Czech Repu-blic and is headquartered in Osnabrueck.

FIS GmbH

FIS Informationssysteme und Consulting GmbH is an expanding, independent enterprise with approximately 500 em-ployees focusing on SAP project imple-mentation and consulting. FIS develop advanced and efficient solutions comple-menting and enhancing the SAP standard software products. With the FIS/wws® in-dustry template, the SAP-certified all-in-one solution for the technical wholesale industry, FIS is market leader in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. In addition, FIS, as an SAP VAR partner with “Gold” status, offers industry-independent SAP add-ons

– the FIS Smart Products. In our subsidiary FIS-ASP GmbH, more than 80 specialists operate and administrate the customers’ SAP systems in own data centers in Sou-thern Germany.