Canada Post Delivers Automated Data Loading to SAP Users

We save around $1.9 Million per year in avoided programming, reduced data entry workload costs and Service Level Agreement (SLA) costs. Most importantly, we have given our users a tool that enhances their productivity and the accuracy of the data in our systems.

Chantal Gauvreau, Business Process Manager, SAP Center of Excellence, Canada Post

Canada Post is one of the largest postal administrations in the world delivering 37 million pieces of mail each day to more than 31 million Canadians. Headquartered in Ottawa Ontario Canada, the company has 72,000 employees, 24 processing plants, 13.7 million points of call, and 6,000 vehicles. Each year Canada Post delivers 10 billion pieces of mail and earns approximately $6.2 billion.

With over 72,000 SAP users, Canada Post has one of the largest SAP implementation in North America. Canada Post began their SAP implementation in 2000 and is currently on SAP version 4.6D with enterprise portals 4.7. Canada Post has implemented the SAP HR, EHS, FI/CO, SCM, CRM, EBP, Event Manager and ESS products.

Challenge

Like many large SAP installations, Canada Post faced several challenges in loading data into its SAP solution. The first challenge the postal giant faced was that all data loads required their 3rd party IT supplier to develop CATT and/or ABAP scripts for them. This was both time consuming and costly. The second challenge Canada Post faced was the increase in data entry errors caused by manual data entry from Excel spreadsheets into SAP R/3. And the third challenge the company faced was the labour intensive work processes. Canada Post realized that manual data entry of data into SAP was not an effective use of employees time.

Canada Posts decision to invest in an automated solution came as a result of the number of CATT script requests in Time Management and a project within their Organization Planning function in 2004. The Organizational Planning unit needed to load job evaluation points for over 8,000 job positions into SAP. Each job position had many different job evaluation points and it was estimated that all of the manual data entry required to load this data would take as long as several months work.

Time Management was another unit at Canada Post that was also experiencing delays. It generally took the Time Management team 12 to 16 hours an each week to unlock employee records by manually entering data from Excel sheets into SAP.

Industry

Postaladministration

Challenge

Time intensive data entry Dataaccuracy

Limited IT staff

Solution

WinshuttleTransaction

Results

$1.9 Million in operational cost savings per year

Improved data quality by elimi- nating manual data errors

Reducedrelianceonthird-partysuppliers

Solution

After evaluating solutions from several vendors, Canada Post selected Winshuttle TransactionTM which allows business users or functional analysts to shuttle data between Microsoft Excel and any SAP application without requiring any programming. Excel or Access provide the familiar interface for Transtaction, simplifying the process of interacting with the various SAP solutions including mySAP and SAP NetWeaver without requiring any programming or IT support. Canada Post selected Winshuttle due to its ease of use, cost and speed when integrating data.

Results

By using Winshuttle, the business user in the Organizational Planning unit was able to automate the loading of job evaluation points in over 8,000 positions into SAP in less than one week compared to the several month estimate for this project if done manually. It now takes the Time Management team approximately an hour to unlock employee records, compared to up to 16 hours it was taking prior to implementing Transaction.

Since then, a number of other departments at Canada Post have used Winshuttle including payroll processing. Payroll processing is utilizing Winshuttle for making salary revisions and for time and schedule management for the letter carriers. Canada Post has expanded its use of Transaction for a number of other applications including updating customer master data based on customers credit rating as received from an external Excel file, changing GL codes in master data, and asset management data changes.

Winshuttle Transaction has become a critical tool for the business users at Canada Post. By deploying Transaction we have improved efficiencies across a number of departments, increased productivity by giving employees the tools to augment their current tasks, and enhanced the quality of data in our SAP solutions.

Chantal Gauvreau, Business Process Manager, SAP Center of Excellence, Canada Post