Gill Hanlon, Senior Technical Consultant Sony Europe
Sony
is a name that I think everyone knows. It is up there with
Coca-Cola and IBM, that if you mention it anywhere in the world
people will know. The little bit of Sony that I work for is the
consumer, the televisions; the radio; the Walkman, and the
broadcast professionals.
SAP solutions at Sony
Sony have implemented R/3, weve
been running that productively since 1996. Weve been running SAP
BW productively since 1998.
When Sony decided to take SAP, one of the original management
briefs was that management would have a single view of Sony
Europe, both at the financial and the stock level. The simplest
way to achieve this was to put it all in a single system, which
is what we did.
One system for Europe
We have 4,000 registered users on
our R/3 system, about half of them are concurrent, so 2,000 users
concurrently, but at the same time as those 2,000 users we have a
heavy batch load, we have a heavy work-flow load, we interface to
4 or 5 external warehouse systems, so the system is very busy.
For the last three or four years weve had a system which has
lived up to all that we expected from it. We have about a 1000
users on BW currently. The businesses have discovered what BW can
do for them and are very pleased with it.
Upgrade at Sony
About eighteen months ago we migrated our
system from its previous 31H release to 46C. That project was
mainly driven by a need to get in and hire a lease for Euro
conversion but we thought there would be benefit as well for
getting onto a higher lease for SAP.com products.
SAP Services at Sony
To help us with the management of
our systems and landscapes were just implementing solution
manager. We have used some of the solution tools; we had a
pre-upgrade and a post-upgrade check from SAP.
We are a ramp-up customer for R/3 Enterprise - were putting in
a stand-alone warehouse system using that. We have a pilot CRM
system, which were evaluating. Sony business has a need to
improve their supply chain - APO is seen as a big driver and a
big help towards that. We are planning to use it also for global
ATP if we are going to use CRM then we have to have a central
available to promise system. Its initially going to be purely for
Germany but the plan is that by next summer well have the whole
of Europe onto it, so it will be a large APO system.
Interview conducted by Sarah Turner, Customer
Marketing Manager, SAP UK on 5th September 2002.