Customer Story
B. Braun Medical Remedies SAP® Data Entry Process with Automate Studio
63,000+
global employees
60+
countries with facilities
1839
company founded
Overview
B. Braun Medical Inc. is a global manufacturing and market leader of healthcare products and services. It has helped advance the safety and efficacy of patient care across a number of market segments, ranging from regional anesthesia to orthopedics to safety infusion systems.
In the United States, B. Braun is a leader in infusion therapy, pharmacy and anesthesia, and a pioneer in passive safety and DEHP/PVC-free medical technology. Through its Sharing Expertise® initiative, B. Braun collaborates with customers, partners and employees to perfect the delivery of optimal patient care.
B. Braun deployed SAP version 4.6C in 2000 and has implemented modules FI, SD, CO, and MM. SAP ECC6 will be rolled out in 2009
Business challenge
One challenge B. Braun faced was the monthly electronic American Express bill, containing pages and pages of data, being entered manually into SAP. The company needed to find a way to automate this process and reduce the many days of data entry it was taking. However, this task would require programming resources and with limited IT staff, this wasn’t considered critical enough. Additionally, manual re-entry of data that already existed in other formats was creating errors and causing further delays.
Industry
Healthcare products and services
Solution
Result
- Reduced data entry time from days to seconds
- Increased data accuracy
- Reduced employee burnout
“Automate Studio offers the complete automation solution. It’s easy-to-install, well documented desktop software, with excellent technical support.”
Erin Stone SAP FI/CO Senior Analyst
Solution
After evaluating several solutions, B. Braun selected Automate Studio in 2006. Automate Studio records the steps that a user takes to complete any SAP transaction and maps the relevant SAP fields to an Excel spreadsheet, easily creating a transaction template. Employees in finance, accounts payable, accounts receivables, purchasing, production planning, and other depart-ments use this tool to eliminate tedious, redundant manual data entry and other repetitive tasks in SAP.
Unlike the tools provided by SAP, such as BDC and ABAP, which are too technical for many end-users, Precisely Automate solutions offered easy-to-use automation tools to connect Microsoft Excel or Access with SAP.
“Automate Studio is good for what you need it for and is great for what you didn’t know you needed it for.”
Erin Stone, SAP FI/CO Senior Analyst
B. Braun
Results and future plans
Creating a shuttle file to post the American Express data was a much quicker automated process. What used to take 3 days to enter into SAP, now takes seconds – a time saver and a much more effective way to get information into SAP.
In another instance, a large accounts receivable check comes in monthly in an Excel file format. Users used to spend most of the day inputting all the lines of the data that was required prior to offsetting the information against the subsidiary ledger data. If mistakes were made, the user had to back out the entries. All 900 plus lines would have to be re-entered again. Creating a shuttle file, the 900 lines post within seconds, so that the user can work on the important task of offsetting the receivables against the invoices listed within the customer accounts.
Other examples:
- Accounting journal entries are uploaded during the month and during month end close.
- Customer service representative uploads field technician’s repairs and services records performed each week into an Excel spreadsheet. This task used to take of to 3 days to do, now uploaded in seconds.
- Batch uploads of changes in any of the modules.
B. Braun continues to find new uses for Automate Studio. The company is planning to release a KSB1 process to give budget owners access to cell phone details via emails created by Automate Studio files working with SAP’s own email capabilities
Automate Studio
Automate Studio is the premier Excel-to-SAP solutions platform that enables business users to automate complex SAP business processes and make mass data changes quickly and easily.