Business Challenge

For one of the nation's largest forklift manufacturers, provided the technical team leadership for a large scale, world-wide, Custom In-house Financial System to SAP FI/CO implementation.

Responsibilities included leading the effort associated with implementing the interfaces, conversions, and enhancements.

As a part of these efforts, developed estimates and plans for completing the technical work required, designed the technical architecture used for extracting data from multiple legacy systems and loading it into SAP, and produced the conceptual designs for an interface architecture that would automate and monitor the status of all our runtime file transfers/data feeds.

Once all programs were developed and successfully unit, string, and system tested, led the effort required for preparing the final go-live "checklist" which contained over eight hundred steps.

A breakdown of all the programs required follows:

Program Type	Number	Percentage
Report	25	34%
Interface	23	32%
Conversion	6	8%
Enhancement	9	12%
Form	10	14%
	73

Results

After go-live, no major issues were encountered. Some example feedback follows: "they earned very high praise regarding their work quality and active participation. I feel fortunate to have their consultants as a partner in this project."

Key Considerations

Given there was a large number of legacy systems that supported functionality not being replaced by SAP FI/CO, a number of unique feeds had to be created to support our conversion and interface efforts. Finalizing the requirements for these feeds in a manner that least impacted all of the teams involved was of greatest importance. These issues had to be carefully addressed through the functional and technical designs created for all of the conversion and interface programs developed.

Client Profile During the Project

  Plant operations worldwide.

  Annual revenues of over $2.5 billion.

  Over 12,000 employees worldwide.

Specific SAP R/3 Financial Functionality Implemented

  Accounts Payable

  Accounts Receivable

  Controlling

  Fixed Asset Accounting

  General Ledger