A GROWING RELATIONSHIP

According to Wolfram Konertz, CIO of the European IT Center, Sharp’s relationship with SAP began in 1983 with the implementation of SAP R/2®. Since then, the company has steadily added to its SAP capabilities, and today uses SAP R/3 Enterprise.

The solution serves more than a dozen of Sharp’s European sales organizations, including those in Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, France, Austria, Switzerland, Poland, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom.

ACHIEVING UNIFICATION

“Our goal in implementing R/3 Enterprise,” Wolfram Konertz explains, “was to have one center of operations, as well as unification of our hardware and applications. The solution has helped us meet that goal.”

“We very much appreciate the common features of the SAP R/3 Enterprise solution,” he continues, “such as user adaptable screen layouts, downloads into Excel, and decentralized reporting and printing. It helps minimize interfaces between our subsidiaries and locations, reduces the need for local development, and simplifies documentation and training.”

“With SAP, we achieved standardization of codes, customer groups, and other factors. This also enabled us to set up standardized interfaces to other IT systems and to have joint development of add-on functions,” adds Wolfram Konertz.

MULTI-LANGUAGE, MULTI-CURRENCY SUPPORT

Operating in so many different countries, Sharp has made extensive use of the multilingual capabilities of SAP solutions.

“Our groups work in German, English, French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, and even Polish,” explains Michael Helm, Manager of IT Systems for Sharp Electronics (Europe). “And SAP supports them all, including the printing of the non-Latin based Polish characters.”

SAP has also helped Sharp cope with the currency issues of its European operations and supported the transition to the euro currency in June 2001.