Easa Saleh Al Gurg Group

Without a unified, enterprise-wide Content Services approach, each line of business created its own silos, losing the important benefits of business insight and automation.

“There was a lack of transparency in documentation, which affected our customer service standards across all business units,” said Debasis Panda, group head, Information Technology at Easa Saleh Al Gurg Group. “Finding the right document at the right time was always a challenge.”

Either documents were difficult to trace or were endlessly duplicated, making it hard to determine if a document was current.

Across the group, around 80 percent of all company data is related to SAP^®. ESAG conducted a comprehensive evaluation to identify the solution best suited to its needs. With seamless integration to SAP^® ERP Central Component (ECC), the group’s core ERP platform, OpenText was chosen. The OpenText solutions for SAP deliver standardized, advanced Content Services to SAP business applications, removing the effort and cost of integration, while also eliminating the risk generated by an integration project and version compatibility. Choosing OpenText™ Extended ECM for SAP Solutions and OpenText™ Vendor Invoice Management for SAP^® Solutions was the natural conclusion for ESAG.

“With around 2,500 suppliers and more than 82,000 invoices received annually and growing, the workload to manually process and enter these into SAP meant staff often had to work on weekends during the end of the month to complete any backlog. With OpenText Vendor Invoice Management for SAP Solutions, around 60 percent of all invoices are processed automatically without losing any existing controls. The solution helps us reduce turnaround times for processing a supplier invoice, with the handling of all exceptions via workflow, enabling us to resolve them quickly,” said Debasis Panda.

With high levels of manual data entry, errors were inevitable and key information could also be missed. The OpenText solutions have greatly improved accuracy, released staff from the repetitive nature of data entry to perform other value-added tasks and has sped up overall processing times.

ESAG opted to implement Extended ECM for SAP Solutions group-wide in a single roll-out. By involving key stakeholders from the outset, not only does the solution meet expectations and needs, there is also senior management buy-in, resulting in high user adoption.

For the Vendor Invoice Management for SAP Solutions implementation, ESAG selected five entities as pilot projects, with the remainder following quickly.

“Once the pilot implementation of OpenText Vendor Invoice Management for SAP Solutions was complete, other entities in the group could clearly see the advantages and there was quick acceptance. We were under a lot of pressure to implement in other areas, too. Having fully implemented OpenText Vendor Invoice Management for SAP Solutions and measuring the results, we are achieving time savings of between 35 and 40 percent while handling supplier invoices,” noted Debasis Panda.

The OpenText solution also aids ESAG with audit and compliance, including a comprehensive audit trail that is automatically captured at every stage of the process.

“In the past, it used to take lot of time to provide relevant documents, and at times we couldn’t locate some. Now, we can instantly find all documents related to any transaction done in SAP. This is extremely helpful for dispute and resolution cases, where we need to retrieve previous documents, such as purchase orders received from customers, and acknowledge delivery notes along with all customer related documents,” stated Debasis Panda.

With content now consistently organized in a single, group-wide structure, OpenText automatically links workspaces to create greater synergy between business units. Users can simply drag and drop items into the relevant folder and make them immediately available for collaboration across the enterprise.

Every day, around 250 users benefit from the time savings, efficiency improvements and easier approvals, as well as the speed and ease of locating documents to better handle supplier and customer queries, all thanks to OpenText. Extended ECM for SAP Solutions is also used as the organization’s legal case management system, handling cases throughout the entire lifecycle. All principal agreements and contracts are now managed in a consistent structure with generated automatic notifications of agreement expirations.

ESAG recognizes that “improvement is a journey.” Future plans include exploring the OpenText solution for employee file management, project management documentation, complete end-to-end purchase-to-pay processing, engineering document management and a supplier self-service portal. Already underway is the implementation of “Sales Order Processing” in SAP by scanning purchase orders received from customers.

Debasis Panda concluded, “OpenText is helping us to meet our objectives of improved business partner relationships and better information management with greater efficiency. The close relationship with OpenText helps us to bring the value add to the business at the right time.”