Working at grass-roots level – PROMOS converts to SAP® SD

With combined strength to achieve a successful project implementation

Before SAP^® SD was launched, internal orders were created for commissions. It was then necessary to book the customer invoices manually in the financial accounting system. The generation of the actual invoice was then also carried out manually using a separate CRM system. Although this procedure made it possible to evaluate the orders on a customer, contract or project level, it could not be broken down to individual products. “The conversion to SAP^® SD called for an intensive period of preparation. In the first few months, we were busy developing the structures in the background. In other words, how does the material structure need to be set up in order to guarantee a suitable level of analysability on all levels?” said Ines Schulze-Leifheit, Director Accounting, describing the initial phase of the project. After the SAP^® component had been set up, the materials and contracts were created. There is now a separate contract for every customer order in SAP^®, for which all the corresponding documents had to be scanned and all the contract details, such as the durations, had to be maintained. “Given that there were over 600 contracts in all and that this work ran alongside the existing core activity of the department, it proved to be a particular challenge, which we were only able to overcome on time by 1 January, 2017 by working together as a team,” said Ms Schulze-Leifheit, describing the final stretch of the project.

One requirement, many advantages

After six months of use, the assessment of the department is positive. It has already been possible on a controlling level to generate the first evaluations, broken down into nearly 400 entered products and services. Moreover, the excellent traceability both for the employees and also for external stakeholders is particularly worth mentioning. All the booked documents and offers, commissions and contracts are now clearly included with each respective contract and, if requested, can be called up immediately with the click of a mouse. This saves time and effort in collating the necessary documents, particularly for business audits. “Nowadays, I can track precisely in the system exactly who made which revision or, for example, which change in the contractual constellations on which date,” explained Ms Schulze-Leifheit, stressing the excellent transparency of the system. The work in the earlier dual system has been omitted completely. Today, there is a corresponding range of different invoice types such as monthly invoices, hourly-rate or fixed-rate invoices and templates, that are used to generate invoices directly from SAP^® SD, and which are then attached automatically to the corresponding documents. Regular invoices are even booked automatically. This is carried out using booking templates, which then just need to be processed. For our invoice recipients, we guaranteed the customary quality during the entire conversion process. The original standard was maintained, both in terms of appearance and content. It was only in the item designations that certain individual adjustments had to be made. However, for safety’s sake, a reference to the original designation was stored in the invoices in these cases.

A glance into the future

It is planned that we will also produce the offers of PROMOS from SAP^® in future. In the next development phase, the customer master data will also be supplemented with e-mail addresses, so that we will be able to send invoices from the system by e-mail. Already 20 to 30% of our customers who have already converted to a digital invoice receipt process would prefer to receive their invoices only electronically from now on. “All in all, we are delighted with the result of this conversion. In terms of future business audits too, which are continuously focussing more and more on transparent documentation, security and the immutability of the documents and data, we believe that we are very well equipped for the future,” summed up Ms Schulze-Leifheit.

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