Customer Story
Hubbell Advances SAP Data Quality with Automate Studio
Hubbell Incorporated is an international manufacturer of quality electrical and electronic products for residential, commercial, industrial, utility and telecommunications markets. Based in Orange, Connecticut, the company operates manufacturing divisions and subsidiaries in the United States, Canada, Puerto Rico, Mexico, Italy, Switzerland, Brazil, Australia and the United Kingdom. The manufacturer is organized across five platforms: Hubbell Wiring Systems, Hubbell Electrical Products, Hubbell Lighting Systems, Hubbell Power Systems and Hubbell Industrial Technologies.
The Challenge
Hubbell Wiring Systems (HWS) was the first of the five platforms to implement SAP R/3 in October of 2004 and was followed by the other four platforms. Immediately after HWS went live with SAP in October of 2004 the company faced a number of master data challenges, and promoting data ownership. “During our SAP implementation, and for 11 months following, we relied on a data migration and management group that helped us with the day-to-day migration of data from 16 systems going into SAP,” said Paul Cahill, Director of Information Technology at Hubbell.
“We hired temporary employees to manually key in and correct master data, as well as utilized an SAP mass transaction tool which was difficult to use. What we discovered was that a lot of the data going into SAP was of poor quality and could definitely impact customer, material, vendor and pricing conditions.” HWS understood the importance of empowering business users to own their data, but due to all of the errors occurring with the hand keying of data and the technical features of the SAP tool for data migration, it was difficult to achieve. In addition, HWS was impacted by needing to go through the central information technology group for their master data requests. Generally, any requests would take a number of days for the IT group to process which resulted in delays.
Industry
Electronic manufacturing
Challenge
- Time intensive data entry
- Data quality
- Limited IT staff
Solution
Results
- Enhanced data quality
- Reduced manual labor costs
- Reduced headcount by 3 full time employees
- Minimized the burden on IT resources
“We were impressed with the ease-of-use of Automate Studio and how quickly it was able to correct large volumes of master data”
Michel Mathy Project Manager, Information, Systems Department (ISD) at Institut Pasteur
Solution
HWS was introduced to Automate Studio, a software tool used by business and functional analysts that need to upload and download data to and from SAP solutions, at one of its plants located in Puerto Rico.
Since Automate Studio was Excel-based and it didn’t require programming, word quickly spread about how easy it was to use. HWS also appreciated that Automate Studio limits user access based on assigned SAP roles and has complete audit trails recording all updates and activity. HWS deployed Automate Studio for master data including customer information updates such as sales hierarchy and partner functions, material creations and updates, vendor updates, pricing creation and updates, and employee updates. Since then, HWS has expanded its use of Automate Studio to include transactional data for inventory, receivables, purchase orders, production orders and quote updates.
Results
Hubbell has seen a number of benefits since deploying Automate Studio across all of its five platforms. The company has enjoyed a dramatic increase in the overall quality of data due to eliminating manual data entry. The tool has also been informative in that it documents the business processes. Hubbell reports that Automate Studio has also impacted the speed and responsiveness of each platform. With data requests no longer needing to go to the central IT group, the platforms are enjoying greater responsiveness for their requests from IT, as well as seeing improved service levels to the platforms.
“Automate Studio gives us the ability to do things we weren’t able to do before. Our business users can now quickly, efficiently and automatically upload master data information, as well as easily manipulate data already in SAP”
Paul Cahill Director of Information Technology, Hubbell Wiring SystemsAutomate Studio
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