How a leading paper manufacturer interfaced the SAP system to an external production planning system

When one of the world's leading paper manufacturers decided to implement SAP globally, one of the foremost challenges was to compile, analyse and identify those areas in which the previous release of SAP did not support the functionality required. The SAP software's robustness and flexibility supports bespoke client-specific solutions, configuration and system enhancements.

Indeed, the decision to ensure that all relevant business activity processes were incorporated into SAP led to an additional five client-specific interfaces to the SAP system. The existing order process was interfaced to an external production planning system.

On the creation of an order, an additional three days lead time is required before an end user, can provide a customer with a confirmed delivery date.

Fact finding, information gathering and brainstorming sessions revealed that the functionality of the existing interfaces was not capable of meeting the customer's expectations and therefore a re-engineering of the business process was required to further improve efficiency, productivity and derive the best benefits from the SAP implementation.

Interfacing the data from the on-line order creation process within the SAP software to an external production planning system, and a confirmed delivery date from the external production planning system into the SAP system within twelve seconds, was an interesting and challenging business requirement.

In effect, the transaction to create the sales order in SAP retrieves the planned production date from the external production planning system, and then calculates the confirmed delivery date.

Presented with the confirmed delivery date, the end user has a choice of accepting or rejecting the order. An acceptable date results in an order creation in the SAP system and the reservation of production capacity in the external system; otherwise the order creation is cancelled and an order creation rejection is reported.

The request for a maximum twelve-second response time for an outbound and inbound message exchange between the two systems definitely ruled out any solutions involving Electronic Data Interchange.

A solution utilising 'real time' distributed database functionality enabling both systems to communicate and exchange data within four seconds was successfully implemented and, in anticipation of future roll-outs, much of the interface was in the form of a configurable solution. .