APOS PUBLISHER
Product Components Used: Bursting Manager, Instance Manager
BACKGROUND:
Clifford Hallam Healthcare (CH2) is today Australia’s largest national Pharmaceutical and Medical Wholesaler utilising local knowledge and local people to provide pharmaceuticals, medical consumables and equipment products to the Healthcare market. With branches in each state, CH2 is able to provide a complete supply solution with quality customer service and sales support.
CHALLENGES:
CH2 publishes ‘rebate’ reports to their suppliers each month. On average, 700 reports are generated and sent to over 100 different suppliers via email. These reports needed to be manually created one by one by the finance department, using a system generated report, listing all the suppliers that needed reports run for the month. It took two people up to three weeks of the month to generate the reports and email them out.
SOLUTION:
CH2 needed to produce the monthly rebate reports faster, in order to give their finance team additional time to process regular invoices and payments to and from CH2. CH2 Business Analyst Ian Thompson explains, “Using APOS Solutions, CH2 was able to reduce the process time for running the rebate reports to 12 minutes (from what used to be a 3 week process!). This saves CH2 up to 240 man hours each month.”
The drastically reduced process time for reports has resulted in an improved relationship, as suppliers receive more accurate reports, on-time, and in turn, validate rebate claims more expediously. “Our rebates team now has more time to check reports and follow up payments with our suppliers. The end result is a better working capital outcome for both CH2 and our partners. Our suppliers are happier, as they receive the reports earlier in the month, allowing them to process and close off their financials sooner,” declared Ian Thompson.
CH2 found the implementation of the APOS Bursting Manager and Instance Manager to be very easy. “The software is easy to navigate and configure,” stated Ian Thompson.
CRISIS AVERTED:
In May 2009, CH2 upgraded to SAP BusinessObjects XI Release 3. Ian Thompson recounted, “The migration environment install didn’t go to plan and due to some challenges in the core platform software, we found our recurring jobs were deleting from our production server. To make the issue worse, our SAP BusinessObjects XI Release 2 backup had become corrupted so we couldn’t do a system restore to the old version.”
Since CH2 was already using APOS Instance Manager, they managed to get a list of all their recurring jobs from their SAP BusinessObjects XI Release 2 system and compare them to a list of jobs from the new SAP BusinessObjects XI Release 3 system. This allowed them to generate a list of missing jobs, including over 1,000 recurring instances that had been lost — one report alone had over 300 instances. Ian Thompson described, “We copied the data from Instance Manager into a SQL table and then used APOS Bursting Manager to recreate many of the recurring jobs, saving us from re-entering the jobs into SAP BusinessObjects XI manually. This saved us a lot of time and potential grief from suppliers and customers who may have missed out on getting reports on time.”
WHY APOS SYSTEMS INC:
“Having the APOS applications in our toolset really saved the day,” said Ian Thompson, “In fact, we now use APOS Bursting Manager more frequently. We keep the instance details in the SQL table and burst the reports when required, which makes them much easier to manage. Overall, CH2 is very satisfied with our APOS experience.”