Agfa: Creation of a Single Billing Entity Model for the European Region

Agfa Europe is Agfa's most important regional sales organization. It accounts for 49.8 percent of the group's overall turnover. Since good is never good enough Agfa Europe must constantly improve its sales, logistics and financial processes just to hold their position. One illustration of this is the ongoing restructuring of their logistic process. It eliminated local warehousing costs by direct delivery to each customer from central warehouses.

Agfa Europe recognized that the next phase was to integrate logistic and financial processes within SAP. This was seen as an operation that would lead to increased efficiency throughout the company.

Solution

Together, Agfa and CSC took the project in hand. A joint project team was formed with people from Agfa Europe, familiar with the business needs, the Agfa ICT organization and experts from CSC who understand the business process and have all of the potentials for applying SAP. The team defined various project phases and brought in staff members with the appropriate competencies for each phase.

Today, Agfa Europe's financial and logistic processes are integrated in SAP. All data is grouped into one central database.

Results

This has increased the accuracy of data, reports, and results by 10 percent. Before, integration, financial, and logistic data had to be entered separately. This sometimes led to discussions regarding the accuracy of data. Piet Vandenbroucke, Logistics Manager and Project Leader at Agfa Europe, says that Agfa can now spend more energy on analyzing results and taking appropriate measures to improve the outcomes instead of losing time looking for where the differences are.

"Management also has a better overall view of our business," Vandenbroucke adds. "We can now start identifying key performance indicators. This will enable us to measure profitability much more accurately. In other words, with the integrated data in the central database, we now have the tools in place for improved efficiency."

Why did Agfa choose CSC?

"We decided to work with CSC," says Vandenbroucke, "because they had a good record of implementing sales and logistics processes within SAP. Moreover, they had the pragmatic approach we were looking for. We couldn't quantify the exact benefits of this project in advance, and quantified them on a more strategic level. We decided to evaluate, select, and implement using a goal-oriented approach as we went along, instead of trying to plan every detail beforehand."

Contact Information

For more information, please contact us and let our experience help you produce results.