Challenges
Siemens Industry Inc. has over 8,000 users of their SAP systems that create hundreds of reports daily using both the SAPGOF/OTF and List type spool files. They estimate that they produce tens of thousands of pages daily and occasionally a single report can be well over 100,000 pages. Some reports combined information from various systems and these could take days to produce and additional time to manually send to vendors for validation. “We spent a lot of time in reporting and combining data from different systems” said Alecia Waddingham, Reporting Administrator. An additional challenge was that Siemens generated reports from the SAP system that included data they wanted to import into a SQL database. This required manually extracting the data from the report to create csv files.
Siemens had tried to tackle some of these challenges using traditional SAP tools such as SAP Script and ABAP on a case by case basis using an offshore development team, but it was too time consuming.
Solution
Siemens initiated an automation project to address reporting issues. They ultimately decided to use Compleo from Symtrax Corporation because they found it to be “inexpensive, productive and efficient” compared to other available options.
They licensed several instances of Compleo Supervisor (Symtrax’s automation tool) to provide flexibility and enough horsepower to insure that, despite large volumes, reporting never bogged down. They use one instance for each of their major business units. In addition they licensed Compleo Explorer which allowed them to create templates that burst reports as needed, converted reports into Excel for review, or combined reports from several systems into csv files for import into the SQL database. The Excel files that are created are automatically emailed to the appropriate vendors (before it took them 3 days to compile and email these.)
According to Alecia “With Compleo we have much more control over reporting. We are still finding new uses for it. Word continues to spread to various business units about this unique reporting tool and they contact me to help them put it to new uses. Its flexibility has allowed us to schedule some of the reporting work during off hours while still being able to react to reports that need to be run during the day.”
Benefits of using Compleo for SAP
Alecia says that “there was a massive amount of time reduced with Compleo”. Automating reports freed up time to cleanse data and have more accurate reports in the system, which simplified the business processes. Compleo is a quick, inexpensive solution that automates our data reporting needs. With Compleo there is less cost, time and effort in creating reports”. She indicated that the solution was easy to install and use and that it took about a month to work through internal authorization issues then only another few weeks to build some templates and put it into production. “I have been very happy with the Symtrax support team. We went through a security audit last year and Symtrax worked with us to insure Compleo passed what was a very thorough audit.”
About Siemens
Siemens is a global powerhouse in electronics and electrical engineering, and operates in the industry, energy and healthcare sectors. For more than 160 years, Siemens has built a reputation for leading-edge innovation and the quality of its products, services and solutions. With 405,000 employees in 190 countries, Siemens reported worldwide sales of $102.9 billion in fiscal 2010.