By providing a one stop window for supporting a global SAP landscape, Patni helped a leading Fortune 500 company drive continuous improvements in process efficiency and performance.
The Client
The company is a Fortune 500 company in field of specialty chemicals. It has more than hundred manufacturing sites and technical centers across
the globe employing more than 17,000 employees.
The Challenge
Operating in a global market, the client's business operations were supported by a heterogeneous systems landscape consisting of SAP ERP, SAP CRM, SAP HRMS, SAP BW and Manugistics. Ensuring high availability and performance of these systems was a critical necessity, due to the high dependency of the organization on these applications for running day to day operations. For instance, SAP applications were used by more than 11,000 users, while the Manugistic application was used by more than 500 users. The SAP system had also interfaces with other internal
systems such as Taxware, G*Log and Optura for various functions.
A further level of complexity was added by the fact that user interfaces were available in more than 10 languages, including Japanese, Mandarin, Korean, German, French and Italian. While the client had outsourced the support of these applications to two organizations, the process was not completely efficient. For instance, the support processes were neither operational on a 24x7x365 basis nor were they tracked by a SLA. Further, Level 1 support was being handled out of China, while Level 2 and Level 3 support calls were handled out of the US. Users had to a face a lot of inconvenience, as they had to call different numbers for different types of support. Further, with locations, being in China and US, there were times during the day when the teams in Europe and Asia did not have support at all.
To address these issues, the client decided to identify a strategic IT partner who could provide a single point-of-support globally. The same partner would also identify metrics that would significantly improve the efficiency of the processes.
The Solution
To streamline the process of resolving support queries, Patni defined SLA's for different support operations. Patni also setup a 24/7 centralized
remote support center to ensure end-to-end SAP application support, which meant that the SLA’s were based on resolving an entire problem, and not just a single component of the process. This meant that the support structure had to be evaluated based on the time taken for the user to
receive a response to his/her query rather than the time taken by Patni. To ensure this, a responsibility matrix was created to identify the microprocesses with clearly identified responsibilities.
A seamless global always available support center was created by an innovative integration between the BPO services provided by Patni, the
L2/L3 support to be provided by Patni, and the business process team in the US. The objective was to ensure that no team of the customer across
the globe had a time when support was not available. This created the “single phone call model” for all support services across the globe. Patni was also responsible for:
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Identification of root cause of delays Creating automated scripts for monitoring of batch jobs |
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Creating Graphical Evaluation and Review Techniques involving graphical representation of what-if scenarios to predict the completion of the
batch based on different situations |
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Incident Management where Patni analyzed frequent modules / application components under frequent failure. |
Patni is also involved in providing maintenance and support services for the production environment associated with the EDI workflow and IT controls for SOX and other audits.
The Technology
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ERP: SAP |
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SCM: Manugistics |
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CRM: SAP |
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HRMS: SAP |
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BW: SAP |
The Benefits
The robust processes introduced by Patni enabled the client to seamlessly transition to an integrated support model quickly and as per schedule.
Patni introduced a number of best practices into the support model to provide the end users with a process that was easy-to-use. These included
best practices in the areas of the processes, the management of the incidences, managing development requests and overall project management practices.
Other significant business benefits include:
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First call resolution percentage at 85% |
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Average response time to user requests reduced by more than 50% during the first 6 months of the take over of the support Significant reduction of the age of incidents by more than 30% |
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Significant reduction of incident volumes by more than 25% within three months of steady state support. This was done through a combination of “root cause analysis” and an analysis of the ageing of the incidents |
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Standardization of support processes across all applications. |
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