Mass Maintenance of SAP Master Data with
FIS/mpm® at Titgemeyer
At a glance:
Faster Calculation of Sales Prices
Customer
ƒƒ Gebrüder Titgemeyer GmbH & Co. KG
ƒƒ Founding year: 1901
ƒƒ Based in: Osnabrück
ƒƒ Employees: 500
“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.”
Industry sector
ƒƒ Manufacturing industry
Key figures
Dieter Wasilke,
IT manager
ƒƒ Article master data: 30.000
ƒƒ Price condition records: 250.000
ƒƒ ROI: 18 months
Challenges
The Titgemeyer database of customer
price condition records had been significantly increased so that fast creation of
customer-specific mass price lists became 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
ƒƒ 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.
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
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 maintenance 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 ‘variant configuration’. The customers
from business unit ‘vehicle bodies’,
i.e. all major German vehicle manufacturers,
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 individual parts they use to design their
utility vehicle body.
“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 customerspecific 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 detailed 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 contained 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 maintenance tools are not available in
SAP standard. Consequently, the
employees needed to manually
search and adjust the corresponding condition records for each
article whose price was to be changed.
Therefore, Titgemeyer was looking
for a system enabling the users to
efficiently adjust the mass of condition records and, above all, to
determine customer-specific prices
more rapidly in the future. The customer prices could be processed by
automatically extracting customer
data records (based on any criteria)
and providing the data of processing, 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 individual problems,” says Christian
Lauxtermann, SAP Key User SD at
Titgemeyer. “The standard solution enables us to map our specific
requirements and business processes – 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 articles 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 prices 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 consecutive days, the SAP mass price
lists were consequently not updated as often as desired. “To put
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 process 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. Administration 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
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
FIS software such as the creation of
attributes:
for
each
article,
Titgemeyer defines numerous attributes in the SAP master data
“In the past, it was very hard to extract SAP
master data records manually. Today, the
FIS software does this job for us and enables us to pass purchase price changes on to
our customers more quickly.”
José Santos,
SAP Key User
be deleted customer by customer in
SAP standard. FIS/mpm® automatically lists conditions per customer
and displays them in its own environment where they are marked for
deletion according to specific check
criteria. After completion of this
data consolidation, Titgemeyer will
only have the current approximately 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 operation and working environment. 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 business 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
that describe the products. If an
article is changed – even if it is only
a whole being punched two centimeters further to the right –, the
article attributes need to be changed 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
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 vehicle construction as well as industry and
crafts. Titgemeyer operates four production sites in Lotte, Gevelsberg, Tripton/UK
and Albrechtice nad Vltavou/Czech Republic and is headquartered in Osnabrueck.
FIS GmbH
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.
FIS Informationssysteme und Consulting GmbH
Röthleiner Weg 1
D-97506 Grafenrheinfeld
www.f is-gmbh.de Tel.: +49 97 23 / 91 88-0
Fax: +49 97 23 / 91 88-100
info@f is-gmbh.de
D003/0414
FIS Informationssysteme und Consulting
GmbH is an expanding, independent
enterprise with approximately 500 employees focusing on SAP project implementation and consulting. FIS develop
advanced and efficient solutions complementing and enhancing the SAP standard
software products. With the FIS/wws® industry template, the SAP-certified all-inone 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 Southern Germany.