SAP ERP Services & Solutions
ERP Solutions underpin many organisations in managing and integrating various core functions and processes across different departments or units within an organisation. The primary goal of an ERP system is to streamline and improve the efficiency of operations, enhance collaboration, and provide real-time visibility into various aspects of an organisation’s activities.
Astral provides ERP Services and Solutions for SAP to help your organisation improve business processes, introduce efficiencies, and support to transition to a better way of working. Astral provides services to efficiently implement your SAP solution and offers standard solutions and frameworks to enhance the capability of SAP to meet your requirements and use cases.
Services are provided based on years of experience with a broad industry knowledge and involvement in many use cases, both from a data and Content management perspective.
Improving Change Request processes, through integration and workflow optimisation
SAP Master Data Governance (MDG) is a component of SAP used to consolidate, cleanse and synchronise a single source of the truth for master data across an organisation and downstream systems.
It provides a unified, trusted view of your business and enables you to work more efficiently and make better decisions. The MDG application helps organisations pull together master data and manage it centrally using a master data management layer based on SAP Business Technology Platform.
Enabling your master data to bring you value, the Astral delivery approach ensures the quality of your business-critical information, that it meets your business standard , and is accurately managed with integrity. Delivery follows a well-structured and comprehensive approach to meet the complexity and scale of our customers’ operations, achieving:
- Enhanced data integrity, consistency & quality.
- Seamless data integration.
- Operational cost reduction and people efficiency.
- Compliance & risk mitigation.
We work closely with our customers on the ground with their business to resolve business and technical challenges in the Material Logistics and Supply Chain Management area. Improving Change Request creation and update processes, to streamline workflows and achieve efficiencies in the assignment of requestor, maintainer, and approval tasks.
As an extension to your SAP S/4 HANA solution, Astral establishes a cohesive and harmonised master data management strategy across your domains to simplify enterprise data management, increase data accuracy, and reduce the total cost of ownership.
Integrate with OpenText Extended ECM (xECM) includes functionality for document and records management, archiving, workflow, and collaboration.
End-to-End Understanding of the complex requirements for work management
Design, development, and implementation services for SAP S/4HANA Asset Work Management (AWM) enable the efficient management and execution of the Asset and work management lifecycle. This includes the operations, planning, maintaining, scheduling, and execution processes for asset-intensive industries. In addition to SAP implementation, Astral delivers the Extended ECM Workspace solutions across all business objects.
Astral brings 12+ years of experience implementing S/4 HANA AWM solutions and driving end-to-end activities for AWM upgrades (including company mergers and demergers) for our mining and utility clients:
- Our implementation approach includes strong business engagement to capture and understand business requirements, solution recommendations, solution design, and build activities including transports, thorough testing, and data migration.
- Astrals’ AWM services include extended Enterprise Content Management (xECM) enabling core ECM functionality and automated access to Controlled Documents such as operational procedures and drawings managed directly in OpenText and/or SharePoint within the SAP AWM business objects.
- We bring the capabilities to bulk upload data and content to cater to the scenarios where the bulk data and content are generated as part of the business processes such as annual inspection programs generating video/photographic content in bulk.
- Additionally Astral supports our clients with offline access to content by enabling core ECM functionality offline, leveraging the offline client integration. This includes the capability to access as well as add content in offline mode for remote site access or in poor network conditions. The solution ensures that the source of truth is maintained through automated sync activities, once the device is back online, reducing manual administrative efforts.
Optimisation of the supply chain process including advanced reporting insights across real-time data
Development and implementation delivery of S/4HANA Supply Chain Management solutions for managing finance, procurement, and supply chain business processes enabling the clients to plan and optimizing stock and goods movements, tracking product availability as well as warehousing and transportation processes. Enabling our clients to work and report in real time.
Astral also offers OpenText extended Enterprise Content Management (xECM) integration for SAP document storage, working alongside and closely with your SAP S/4 HANA implementation. This information is for business objects used by:
- Supply Chain
- Finance
- HSE/GRC, and
- HR (SuccessFactors)
Establishing this integration enables the organisation to store documents directly against business objects in SAP while leveraging the underlying governance and management of the ECM system.
Astral ensures that clients can migrate their existing data and content by streamlining the data and content migration processes using Astral’s migration tools including data migration for SAP, batch workspace creation, and content migration.
Data Privacy and management concerns? Get control of the full information Lifecycle in your S4 Hana implementation
- Astral is an experienced implementor of SAP ILM, the dedicated information lifecycle management product from SAP. The SAP® Information Lifecycle Management (SAP ILM) component provides a broad range of advanced capabilities, including blocking and deletion, residence and retention management, consolidation of legacy data, and more – some of which are relevant to regulatory demands. SAP ILM allows for the use of the ILM Aware Store for archiving into third-party solutions, including OpenText.
- Astral supports organisations to manage live and archived data based on business-specific rules that derive from a company’s own data protection and privacy policies, as well as legal and regulatory mandates such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
Full lifecycle management for all enterprise documents
Your business processes generate and rely upon unstructured content – including documents, images, spreadsheets, controlled documents, drawings, etc. However, the challenge arises when your structured business processes and unstructured content are disjointed, located in information silos across your business. Employees spend hours searching for misplaced content or recreating it, costing you time and money. Additionally, if the records are not compliant you face having a legal exposure. To ensure that your business processes get the right information at the right time and in right context, it is crucial to connect the unstructured content to structured data and business processes in ERP solutions such as SAP.
OpenText Extended ECM (xECM) for SAP Solutions connects Enterprise Content Management to any lead SAP application, improving users’ efficiency, control and access to unstructured content. With xECM for SAP Solutions, you can attach unstructured documents and entire ECM workspaces to transactions in SAP applications.
Astral’s solution accelerators are available to streamline your EIM deployment. The solution accelerator delivers you best practice in the implementation of OpenText xECM for SAP Solutions in a specific business context, reducing cost, time, and risks of such implementation projects.
Astral implement our solution accelerators across various SAP applications including: Plant Maintenance, Projects, Customer Relationship Management, Procurement, Master Data Management, SAP Success Factors, Environment Health and Safety, Finance, and SAP Human Resource (HR).
Fully integrated from invoice capture to posting
Astral’s VIM implementation solution sits on our best of breed invoice management solution: FAST-VIM Invoice. It is tailored to meet the precise needs of accounts payable departments. The approach provides you a pre-configured solution on a baseline SAP IM product offering, enriched by commonly accepted best practices.
VIM is the OpenText Vendor Invoice Management for SAP Solution, the only integrated vendor invoice management solution premium-qualified by SAP. The development standards and tests on this module are identical to those of any other SAP module, therefore VIM is considered a module of SAP.
The delivery of FAST-VIM contains activities specific to business requirements, business process mapping and aspects of design. This allows for a streamlined set of workshops with you, aligning business requirements to the product and development of a tailored solution design. The project is highly focused and contained, drawing upon a wealth of previous experience. It is our clients’ experience that with FAST-VIM few change requests are raised, and for those that are raised, the business case is solid and guaranteed.
The delivered solution is fully integrated from invoice scan and capture through to posting. SAP VIM provides full traceability throughout the whole process and is natively integrated with SAP.
Astral will provide you accurate and detailed estimates for all components of a proposed implementation project. These include external services, hardware, software, and time commitment requirements from your internal resources.
Director of Corporate Services – Leading Australian Educational Institute
Rapid Deployment Vendor Invoice Management
This product accelerator has been developed leveraging an Industry Best Practice Rapid Deployment approach so that customers will be able to achieve a faster return on investment. The rapid-deployment solutions provide a scalable low-cost solution for your invoice-to-pay operations.
Business Challenges
The prospect of implementing Vendor Invoice Management (VIM) for SAP can be a daunting prospect because it requires a skill set that is not normally part of your SAP technical capability. To outsource the entire implementation to an external team can be expensive and it can be a challenge to hire the skill sets internally. It can also be difficult to justify budget due to lack of internal capability and understanding of the tool.
Business Solution
The solution focuses on the implementation of the SAP Invoice Automation Solution using the FAST-Invoice approach. This includes confirmation of business requirements, solution design, solution installation and configuration, system testing, UAT support, delivery of training and go-live support.
The approach focuses on an accelerated implementation of an out-of-the-box, pre-configured vendor invoice management solution which includes:
- Configuration of 10 Exceptions from SAP Invoice Management with itemised costs.
- Purchase Order (PO)
- Implementation of Capture Centre for 3 environments (Development, UAT and Production)
- OpenText Archive Server
- Single Country Implementation
- IM out-of-box reporting: IM Analytics, Liability Reporting, Invoice Ageing Reporting
- Email integration for ingestion of Invoices
- Unit Testing
- System Integration Testing
- Go Live and Support
Business Benefits
- Easy to use solution that drives a consistent business process and includes key capabilities such as automated document classification and a standard set of document types
- Easy to link to latest released version to support key activities in the asset management lifecycle
- Framework enables adoption across all areas of the business, and provides extensions to meet unique IM / safety requirements
- Different areas of the organisation can adopt framework at different stages
