IT Applications Strategy

In the fall of 2004 we decided to fully embraced the SAP NetWeaver platform and started by upgrading from SAP R/3 4.6C to 4.7. We continued in 2005 by implementing SAP's BW (Business Warehouse), EP (Enterprise Portals), APO (Advanced Planning Optimization), ICH (Inventory Collaboration Hub), and XI (Exchange Infrastructure). We were very successful in reducing the complexity of our applications environment. We have enjoyed the benefits of spending much less time troubleshooting connectivity issues allowing us more time to focus on other things.

That was just in time, because we went public again in 2006 giving us until the end of fiscal 2007 to be in compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley Act Section 404. We have spent the last year and a half helping to prepare our company for this. Luckily all but one of our facilities was already on a single instance of SAP, so we only had to implement SAP at this site in Brazil. But we also had to re-write all of our SAP Roles and put work flow tools in place for approving and monitoring access privileges. For this we chose Virsa's Compliance Calibrator, Access Enforcer and Fire Fighter. Virsa was acquired by SAP the day after we signed the deal with Virsa. These tools are now in place and working well. We also had several Application Controls to work out. These Application Controls refer to business process controls that are configured into and enforced by systems. We are almost finished replacing our Financial Consolidation worksheets with SAP's BCS (Business Consolidation System) which is a component of SEM (Strategy Enterprise Management). This will reduce the number of spreadsheets which need to be tightly controlled. We will wrap up our compliance projects with the implementation of GTS (Global Trade Server). This is not a SOX requirement, but it will help us with international trade compliance.

During all of this time focusing on compliance projects, we have not done a great job supporting the new requests from our business users. I am looking forward to this next fiscal year where I plan to make tremendous headway in system usability. Our focus for Fiscal 2008 will simply be on productivity. We have already started by offering BW reporting and dashboards over the intranet. We have also started offering access to applications via our intranet (Enterprise Portals). We will continue by creating wizards in EP for maintaining master data leaving very little room for error. We also plan to implement the Fusion Ops rules engine to decrease the work of our material planners letting them focus on the supply gaps. We may also undertake a supplier EDI initiative to reduce the manual pushing of documents between us and our suppliers. We will also be implementing a lot more work flow.

I am very excited about this coming fiscal year. The compliance projects definitely helped our corporation as a whole. These projects are not very glamorous and are not extremely appreciated by the common system user. With the compliance projects out of the way, we will be able to focus on enhancing the user experience. The productivity projects will help the individuals within our organization and within our supply chain. Productivity projects are definitely more fun and more self-rewarding.