Surrey C.C. - Xoomworks provides technical expertise to major IT consultancy firm to resolve SAP issues

Surrey County Council’s SAP SUS system project brought back on track by Xoomworks - The need for SAP integration expertise

The administrative county of Surrey was formed in 1889 when the Provisional Surrey County Council first met, consisting of 19 aldermen and 57 councillors. Surrey had been administered from Newington since the 1790s, and the county council was initially based in the Sessions House there. A decision to build the new County Hall at Kingston was made in 1891, with the building opening in 1893.

Surrey is an affluent county and has the highest GDP per capita of any county in the UK. Surrey also has more organisation and company headquarters than any other county in the UK, including Nikon, Procter & Gamble, Superdrug, Nestle, SC Johnson, Toshiba, Samsung, Philips, Kia Motors and Toyota UK.

Surrey County Council had adopted SAP to deal with its multi-million pound budgets serving the people in its area to the south of London. The council engaged one of the world’s leading global IT consultancies to install and implement the system which covered HR, finance and procurement. The consultants, however, soon encountered problems integrating SAP’s SUS  module which provides a portal for suppliers to service their purchase orders and invoices.

Calling in the experts

SAP SUS (Supplier Self-Services) is a hosted solution that reduces the costs of procurement cycles by improving exchange of business documents and shortening the time it takes to process the content of these documents. Surrey County Council planned to use SAP SUS to integrate suppliers into its procurement processes. One of the benefits of SAP SUS is that the Council’s suppliers would not need their own sales systems to offer products and services to the Council – all they needed was Internet access in order to access the Council’s order and content management functionality.

After several unsuccessful weeks attempting to get the modules to work, the consultants called in Xoomworks, who were known for their expertise in such specialist areas.

Based in central London, Xoomworks is an experienced niche consultancy that provides fully-managed software development services based on years of experience with a range of business partners.

At a meeting with the head of the project, Xoomworks immediately identified the problem. “The SUS module could not be installed into the ‘Extended Classic’ version of SAP being used at the council without some modification,” explained Nic Hutchins, Xoomworks’ Managing Director.

With previous experience of the particular difficulty, Xoomworks was able to recommend a fast, effective way to solve it, and quickly produced a functional specification for the programme enhancement to fix the module and enable it to work efficiently in the SAP environment.

Working with the consultants and the Council’s business functional leads, Xoomworks sent the specification to the consulting firm’s offshore team in India which successfully produced the complex programme enhancements within weeks, which was then integrated into the SAP system. Xoomworks project managed the programme enhancements.

Extensive regression testing

Following the successful development and integration, Xoomworks consultants remained on-site at Surrey Country Council’s IT centre and undertook extensive regression testing to ensure the enhanced solution worked efficiently and did not adversely affect other parts of the system.

An additional challenge arose when, half way through the project, Microsoft launched a new version of Explorer, requiring extra software development to maintain full functionality. Working closely with the consultancy firm and SAP, Xoomworks ensured that the SUS module would work effectively and addressed the remaining integration issues. “Recognising our in-depth technical expertise in the SAP environment, the consultancy firm then asked us to manage the ‘pre go-live’ and go-live processes for the SAP package,” added Nic. “We ran a series of knowledge transfer workshops to demonstrate the new functionality and ensure that IT managers were familiar with the correct ways to use the system.”

A solution fit for purpose

The pre-go-live phase revealed further minor teething problems which Xoomworks was able to fix, co-ordinating go-live activities to ensure all aspects of the SAP system were functioning properly. Xoomworks also produced detailed documentation so that the Council’s IT staff could carry out technical support into the future.

Now live, Surrey County Council’s new portal has enabled the Council to substantially enhance and streamline its supplier managed process. In addition to saving time and money, and obviating missing, misplaced and incorrect invoices and delivery notes, the solution has allowed the Council to enhance its purchase to payment efficiencies and improve supplier relationships.