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Making it easier to manage your data in SAP - Winshuttle

Friday, January 8, 2016

Winshuttle, a company headquartered in Washington State, USA, has developed a software platform which makes entering and updating data in SAP much easier.

Consider the task to update the payment details for a number of suppliers in SAP.

The standard method of doing it with SAP is to logon, go to the contacts section, find the right contact, and the right field, update the field, then several other staff members have to go through the same process to approve it.

Using Winshuttle's software, you can easily create a spreadsheet template that extracts the existing supplier details from SAP, update the details in Excel, and then press a button and Winshuttle's tool will 'shuttle' the data into SAP.

It will give you a list of any records which fail to pass data validation checks and why, so you can correct it.

If the data needs to be approved by a colleague, she can also see the data which needs to be checked and approved on a spreadsheet.

Enterprise software people might despise spreadsheets, but they are a great tool for one person to work on their own data. So perhaps instead of trying to persuade users to move from spreadsheets to entering data directly into enterprise systems, it would be easier to build a bridge to move the data from the spreadsheet into the enterprise system.

Winshuttle also has tools to enter or approve data via a simpler online form, which might be easier if there is less data to enter.

Oil and gas companies can get control of their SAP ERP data by using these 'lean applications' to streamline data collection, validation and movement (upload/download). Because of the relative simplicity of the solutions, IT teams can delegate ownership and maintenance of data back to the business, allowing them to increase the number and speed of projects.

Winshuttle's lean data management platform is used by 8 of the top 10 oil and gas companies, according to Winshuttle.

More data updating

The easier it is to enter data, the more likely it is that the data actually gets entered.

It is not uncommon for incorrect data in SAP to be left uncorrected, because it can be too tedious to correct it, says Kristian Kalsing, VP of Enterprise Solutions at Winshuttle.

To take an oil and gas industry example, some drilling data experts say that there are many ways to optimise drilling work which is not being done, simply because offshore drilling engineers cannot be persuaded to enter the necessary data into computer systems. The easier it is to enter data, the less likely this is.

A side benefit is that employees doing less tedious data entry are probably happier and in a more proactive frame of mind.

SAP's main strength is that it is 'a great transactional backbone in large companies,' Mr Kalsing says.

But many companies which deploy it underestimate how much work is involved in maintaining the data.

'We often hear senior managers say, we didn't realise before we put in SAP that we would commit 30% of everybody's time committing data in the system,' he says.

It can mean that staffers, for example supply chain managers, spend 20-40% of their time doing manual data work.

And as the amount of data companies work with increases, so will the amount of time needed to keep it up to date.

'SAP is a very data hungry application. To get the benefit of SAP, you need to have all the data in there and really high data quality,' Mr Kalsing says.

This means that data needs to be entered correctly into SAP, and any errors need to be quickly corrected.

'Perhaps the main reason people complain about SAP is because they find inaccuracies in the data within it', Mr Kalsing says.

SAP has been designed to try to work with many different industries, and so it is not optimised for individual users. It can be customised, but that is expensive.

Winshuttle's lean approach to data management

What is perhaps most surprising about Winshuttle is that it is so unusual to hear about a software company finding success by helping make software easier to use.

Winshuttle finds its foothold in companies by providing a simple solution to a really difficult or tedious data updating problem.

Once SAP users start to see the benefit, they find other ways to use it, and usage spreads in the company.

This is very different from the usual 'big bang' IT roll out approach,' Mr Kalsing says. 'Our lean applications are built iteratively in short cycle times, so you can gain quick wins while remaining agile as business processes evolve,' he said.

How Rowan Companies utilized Winshuttle to accelerate SAP data transfer

One customer in the oil & gas industry is Rowan Companies Inc., a drilling company which operates 22 offshore jack-up rigs and 32 deep well land drilling rigs, and has an equipment manufacturing division.

Rowan's SAP project team had a project to clean up master data, and find an easier way to load financial data into the system.

The company was finding that the process of gathering master data from other legacy computer systems was leading to faults in the data.

The company was sending its customers bills every month, with each bill including many different line items such as drill rig operating hours, catering, and maintenance.

In order to create the bills, it was pasting lines from the customer contract into Excel, updating the billable hours for each line, and then pasting all of this in the billing screen of SAP, with 13 line blocks of data from Excel into SAP; a very tedious process, which also caused delays at the end of the month.

Now it is all completed with a Winshuttle template.

The billing agent puts in all the header type information (customer, contract no, date), then runs a script to read the contract lines out to the template.

The agent then fills in the time to bill for each type of service, marking the unused lines for deletion, running a second script to create the sales order.

'It probably wouldn't be too bold to say that Winshuttle saved us from an entire process redesign of billing,' says Rick Sonora, Billing Manager at Rowan.

The company started doing it using SAP 'LSMWs' (Legacy System Migration Workbench) tools to upload the journal entries, but these were not flexible, and needed to be flexible because the requirements were constantly changing.

Rowan started using Winshuttle's 'Transaction' tool, which maps the relevant SAP fields to an Excel spreadsheet.

It can create a 'Shuttle' file template, where the user adds the data into Excel, creating a template for shuttling the data into SAP.

'We had one large LSMW [Legacy System Migration Workbench] which was built to edit all of the fields in a Vendor Master Record,' says Andy Hart, assistant controller at Rowan.

'However, it was the Vendor Tax ID numbers within these records that specifically needed to be cleaned up.'

'Once the team gathered the Tax ID numbers, they could easily create a Winshuttle template on the fly to update the Tax ID number field, and not have to worry about an Excel spreadsheet which contained all of the Vendor fields.'

The master data clean-up project was completed in just 4 months, leaving time for additional end-user training and post-production support.

'What were once dreaded and laborious journal entries, are now user-friendly and easy to organise,' he says.

'Winshuttle improves our productivity as a team and as an organization, so we're better able to step back and take a broad look at the overall efficiency of our financial implementation,' says Mr Hart.

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» Winshuttle

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