|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
ERP applications play a central role in maintaining the health of large companies. However, for many organizations with aging systems, Year 2000 concerns prompted them to replace their legacy applications because of the difficulty of renovating homegrown or heavily customized vendor code.
Beyond resolution of Y2K problems, replacing legacy systems with modern, packaged ERP applications carries many other advantages. The most obvious is that the modern technology foundation of current ERP products allows companies to take advantage of multi-tier, open systems architectures, which in turn makes Web and third-party software integration possible. Additionally, because most of the modern ERP packages are more functional than their legacy counterparts, maintenance burdens are lower because there is less customized code to manage.
Yet, in some cases, it can be a challenge to duplicate the functionality of the legacy system when migrating to a new ERP package. At Hydril, a Houston-based world leader in supply tooling to the oil and gas exploration industry, the challenge was twofold: maintaining a sales analysis system when the company migrated its AS/400-based enterprise systems from the Computer Associates PRMS to the J.D. Edwards World package; and giving their users more sophisticated reporting and analysis systems for managing their extensive product lines and global operations.
|
|
|
 |
| Diane Furst, Hydril's Project Manager for the Information Builders Implementation | |
|
Choosing the Best Solution
The J.D. Edwards migration provided Hydril with the opportunity, not only to upgrade to a state-of-the-art ERP application, but also to add more flexible sales and financial analysis reporting capabilities. But because J.D. Edwards did not offer sales analysis modules, Hydril had to look for an effective third-party solution.
Furst's exploration for technology options in the reporting area led her to Information Builders' SNAPpack and WorldMART products for J.D. Edwards. SNAPpack is Information Builders' suite of integrated reporting solutions for J.D. Edwards. WorldMART is a prepackaged, analytical datamart application, developed in partnership with J.D. Edwards and consisting of an integrated set of tools for data access, data migration, and analysis. WorldMART's sales analysis modules enable executives to optimize their sales and marketing efforts by providing access to significant information about customer and product sales performance. Executives can quickly view patterns, and much more. WorldMART's financial module enables CFOs, CEOs, and profit center managers to analyze their data for strategic planning and identify business hot spots.
"Our first option was to acquire a proven reporting solution," Furst continued. "After Information Builders demonstrated WorldMART to us, we immediately determined that an analytical datamart strategy would better meet our information needs." Hydril chose the WorldMART financial and sales applications and the SNAPpack products to help meet their IT challenge. "WorldMART met 85 to 90 percent of Hydril's requirements right out of the box," said Furst. "The last 10 to 15 percent has been for the customization required to deliver Hydril's own business views of the information. WorldMART proved a good match because it uses J.D. Edwards' own data model, and provides security that is similar to what we were implementing with the World package." Besides providing a replacement for their legacy sales and financial reporting system, WorldMART added a friendlier interface, plus flexible drill-down capabilities that enabled their field personnel and executives to get access to the data they needed. More importantly, its platform-independence will allow them to use the same reports should they migrate to J.D. Edwards OneWorld application.
"Hydril is currently implementing the J.D. Edwards network-centric computing version of OneWorld," Furst continues. "We selected WorldMART for financial and sales analysis because WorldMART is platform-independent and works with both the World and OneWorld products from J.D. Edwards. We could have added more consulting to develop FASTR programs to meet our reporting requirements, but this would not have been the most efficient or cost-effective solution. The FASTR method would have created twice as much work since the reports would need to be developed a second time in OneWorld."
Fueling the Project
Once Hydril made its decision, implementation kicked into high gear. Hydril formed an implementation team to expedite this project, and sent 15 power users for SNAPpack training. "The students were chosen from the 400-plus J.D. Edwards users and represent most Hydril divisions and departments, according to James Carmean, an Information Builders senior technical rep. These power users will use SNAPpack to develop mission-critical reports.
The Hydril implementation began with setting up a managed reporting environment with SNAPpacks, and then followed with the configuration and customization of WorldMART's sales and financial applications. Reflecting on their aggressive implementation schedule, Furst says that the projects have been successful because of the close involvement of both Hydril and Information Builders in the customization and design of their systems.
"We went live with our J.D. Edwards transaction system over Memorial Day weekend. Just three months later, we went live with WorldMART. We were able to maintain our aggressive schedule because both sides adhered to their original commitments and remained in close communication throughput the project," Furst continues. "We were impressed with Information Builders' knowledge, not only of the reporting process, but of the J.D. Edwards application architecture and data model."
Most important, Furst says they were impressed by Information Builders' willingness to expand the scope of the project and the scope of WorldMART when they requested the addition of a major feature, a product configurator. The Sales Analysis module of WorldMART was a joint application development effort by Information Builders and Hydril, Furst adds. This close effort resulted in the inclusion of J.D. Edwards Configurator, Contract Billing and Job Cost.
Running the World
Hydril plans to gradually deploy WorldMART's sales and financial analysis modules selectively throughout the organization, to corporate managers and its sales force throughout all world regions. They expect that SNAPpack and WorldMART will enable them to track their sales operations and financial information globally.
The next step of the project will extend the WorldMART sales and financial applications over Hydril's corporate intranet to expand its user base in their company. "Our goal is to extend WorldMART's availability to all field locations, so remote managers can come in and see information over our corporate WAN," Furst concludes.
