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Our focus is on process improvement, in exceptional cases we even adapt standard SAP

“Major savings in the quotation phase”

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The Easy Quote project team in Eindhoven can look back on a highly successful exercise in quality improvement. In the worldwide Philips Lighting competition in which some 300 teams annually participate, they walked off with First Prize! Rightly so, as their breakthrough is already saving thousands of hours of work on the often complex quotations made for lighting systems. And, the quotations now also look a lot better than they did. Manager Programme Management Office Lighting, Peter Sanders (44):

“In the Business Group Luminaires (fittings) we’re confronted with greatly varying customers and widely ranging projects. For example, if the municipality of Eindhoven is planning a new plaza and wishes to procure the necessary lighting, one part of the order will be ‘standard’ but another part will be custom-made. Also, the pricing structure within Lighting is pretty complex involving all kinds of discount arrangements. Making a quotation, therefore, is a complicated task that keeps the order desk at work for an average of two-and-a-half hours. This is partly due to SAP’s quotation function which, due to the complex pricing structure, has to work through a number of screens for every quotation line. A quotation has upwards of 100 to 200 lines, so you can imagine how time-consuming that used to be. With Easy Quote we have, as it were, built a kind of ‘shell’ over that entire function, so that on the main screen we can now introduce adjustments to price or margin that are automatically passed through to the underlying screens.”

Worldwide implementation
Peter Sanders started up a project in Eindhoven and then encouraged a team at Philips France to go to work with it. The joint effort was a huge success. “In France they turn out about 100,000 quotations per year and they’ve now cut the time per quotation by half. As the SAP IT organization within Philips, we are now implementing SAP in all kinds of branches and the global roll-out is also being coordinated from here.” The second half of the modernization will then be taken in hand, i.e. enhancement and speeding up of the printing process. Peter Sanders: “Illustrations and technical descriptions of the products used are now also printed automatically in the quotation. Accessing this information, which in the past had to be collated from various sources, is now simplicity itself and the print provided is also much more attractive.”

Developers with insight
For more than six months, a lot of hard work was done in the Netherlands and France, particularly on the SAP modules relating to Sales & Distribution, Material Management and F&A. Peter Sanders: “We approached the problem very much from the user’s perspective – focusing on process improvement – and in doing so, I even decided to adapt a standard SAP function. Under special circumstances we can go that far, and in this case, with an eye to optimal user operation, we felt that adaptation was necessary. You’ve got to know what you’re doing, but fortunately I have developers here who have that depth of insight.”

Direct contact with users in the field
Peter expects that the updating of Easy Quote will be incorporated into the next SAP release. “Our activities at Philips Lighting are carried out in direct contact with users in the field. That’s where the most important innovations come from. At SAP they constantly observe their customers to see where the smart applications are being thought out and implemented. Then they make sure that these are built into their own systems. To me it’s precisely this link with the applications world that’s so important. To put it bluntly: almost anybody can work in IT, but designing process improvements in the business and then translating them into IT solutions is a different and much more interesting ball game. It’s also one of the main reasons that I work for Philips.” To Peter, another reason is the balance between work and family life. “I do a lot of traveling. I find working together with people of different cultures very stimulating, but I only go if the work has real added value. I want to spend time with my family too, and the right balance is very important to me. Everyone, of course, has his own idea of just what the right balance is.”

Celebrating successes
We work hard, but we also celebrate our successes. Peter Sanders: “Successes have to be acknowledged in order to validate our teamwork. Teamwork is the key to the success of our organization.”

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