PWP (Polish Professional Publishers – Wolters Kluwer Group) has finished one of the biggest SAP development projects in Poland. A team of BCC consultants and PWP employees has prepared a new module in SAP PWP system, which supports a key process of customer interaction, namely granting, controlling and renewing authorisations to receive updates of e-publications.
Handling securities is one of the most vital elements of PWP product sale. Dozens of thousands of PWP customers use updated publications, such as LEX legal service. Authorisations to further updates, sent out on CDs, are granted to customers with paid subscriptions. It is worth mentioning that customers may use different kinds of subscription, which gives an access to various products. It was necessary to improve despatch preparation, so that information about a CD content for a particular customer could be automatically generated from SAP as a unique key with securities.
‘SAP is a strategic choice for us, as an IT platform supporting PWP’s overall business. That is why we have decided that even though standard SAP functionalities did not manage this characteristic module, namely generating security keys, it was worthwhile trying to create a SAP-based solution that would be compatible with all the ERP system’, says Damian Zajkowski, chief accountant and SAP project manager for PWP.
SAP security management works started six months after SAP was started in PWP and were executed by BCC consultants and PWP employees. As a result they created a virtually new SAP module, which supports assigning updates authorisation to customers’ orders.
The complexity of the project may be proved by its length: 20 months. PWP employees provided knowledge on business needs and together with BCC consultants they prepared a 100-page business concept of the solution. During common programming and implementation works they created more than ten new dialogue transactions, a few dozen new tables in the data base and over 220 new function modules in ABAP programming language.
Since June the effectiveness of the new solution has been checked and tested tens of times a day. The process of authorisation management is supported by SAP in many respects. Currently, along with registration of a new customer order, SAP system generates a security key that contains information about the customer’s access to the updates. On the basis of this key the distribution department prepares the despatch of CD updates according to the filed order.
Paweł Wójcik, logistics and production director in PWP, estimates: ‘Centralised generating security keys as well as connecting then closely and unfailingly with orders practically eliminates a possibility of an error. That is why the implementation of SAP security module, by enforcing our control over the whole process, gives us an opportunity to increase income on product update sales’.
