Jennifer Foreshew | May 27, 2008
case study | Meat and Livestock Australia
WITH more than 3000 research partners and suppliers, Meat and Livestock Australia must tailor contracts for a range of applications and arrangements - everything from parasites affecting beef cattle to the best ways to serve a particular cut of meat.
Amy Pritchard says the system helps in tailoring contracts Picture: Bob Finlayson
The producer-owned company's complicated contracting requirements could not be accommodated in standard reports generated on its SAP system.
"We have two systems - one for contract project management and the other for finance," MLA business analyst and project manager Amy Pritchard says.
"It was very hard to get a link between the two to reduce double-handling and expand our reporting capabilities."
MLA's role is to support the Australian red meat industry with marketing and research.
Its core activities include driving demand and market access for red meat sales and growing industry capability. Its 250 staff are headquartered in Sydney, with offices all over the world.
MLA needed to extract data from SAP into Microsoft Word to create customised contracts to deliver better flexibility in producing a range of contract types in a standard way.
While setting up an enterprise-wide SAP enterprise resource planning system in September 2006, MLA was advised the document composition platform from SAP business partner Aia Software was the answer.
Intelligent Text Processing (ITP) was the only system that was certified for SAP NetWeaver to offer full integration with SAP, and able to create custom documents in Word. Pritchard says ITP is flexible and easier to use than MLA's previous system, and more people able to generate documents and make changes.
"We needed it to extract information from projects and put it into a contract document so we could then send it out to our vendors and they could sign the agreement for a project," Pritchard says.
ITP offers the flexibility to customise contracts and generate automated reports for all of MLA's requirements, which saves time and effort.
Users in management, finance, administration and project management access reports and contract documents via the company's SAP Enterprise Portal, which integrates with the ITP online server.
"It sits on a website and you go in and choose the projects that you want and then, using a BAPI - a SAP-specific code - it sucks the relevant information out of the projects module in SAP, formats it nicely and puts it into a template that we have set up on the system," Pritchard says.
"For example, we have a document template with our standard terms and conditions and our standard format, and it will take things like the project title, the vendor name and the milestones and put it into the document, make sure it is formatted correctly, and then we have a complete agreement."
MLA, which has about 15 licences for ITP and deals with 500 to 600 contracts ranging from small to millions of dollars, has added a couple of additional contract templates. "We are using some of the code that we developed to work with ITP for other applications, but we are not using ITP for other purposes at this point," Pritchard says.
MLA is working on the next phase of the SAP ERP system. Workflow, sales and distribution went live earlier this month and plans for business intelligence and warehousing are under way.
"ITP has allowed us to maintain what we had before so we didn't go backwards when we set up SAP," Pritchard says.
"It has saved us from having to enter the information twice and it has increased the accuracy because we are only entering it in one place. There is less risk of error."
THE PROBLEM
Standard SAP reporting capabilities were insufficient.
THE PROCESS
Aia's Intelligent Text Processing operates with SAP NetWeaver, integrates with SAP and allows use of Word.
THE RESULT
The new system eliminates data double-handling and reduces errors.
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