SAP data gap bridged via Excel

By ADAM GIFFORD

A small Australian firm has come up with a solution for organisations struggling to do planning and budgeting on their multimillion-dollar SAP systems - switch to the familiar Excel program to crunch the data.

Caltex NZ has become one of the first international customers for Gesix Australia's EzyPlan software.

"Most people do their budgets in Excel before they do anything else. Now they can do it in the same format and upload into SAP," said Caltex applications support team leader Brian Andrews. He said initial tests indicated that working in EzyPlan was much quicker than trying to do budgets directly in SAP

Gesix was started four years ago by former Deloitte's consultants who saw a business in helping companies realise the benefits of their expensive enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. EzyPlan was developed jointly by Gesix consultants Geoff Armstrong and Sanjiv Sharma with the Queensland Treasury.

"What our guys were seeing was that organisations weren't able to do planning and budgeting within SAP, so they were developing satellite systems in Excel," said Gesix marketing manager Derek Zilich.

"They would then try to push up the results into SAP. The Queensland Department of Roads used to take a month to manually punch 24,000 cells from a spreadsheet into SAP. It now takes three minutes with EzyPlan."

EzyPlan takes advantage of budget and planning models within SAP R/3, but the user interface is Excel - no additional transactions are required in SAP.

Jon Eriksen, from EzyPlan's New Zealand distributor, e-Cim, says Gesix is good for error checking and the speed of the upload into SAP.

"It means you don't need the IT department to do an overnight batch process to load - and then discover in the morning the upload failed because of an error," Eriksen said.

EzyPlan is sold to match SAP modules, including Cost Centre Planning, General Ledger, Internal Orders, Funds Management, Profit Centre Planning, Maintenance Planning and Special Purpose Ledger.

It costs $20,000 for the first module, reducing to $5000 for the fourth and subsequent modules. ON THE WEB

Gesix

Ecim