Global companies need reliable enterprise solutions to manage their assets. While enterprise resource planning tools such as SAP help to streamline these processes, their sheer size can sometimes compromise the flexibility required to nimbly manage a worldwide portfolio.

Rowan Companies Inc. has a fleet of 22 high-spec offshore jackup rigs and 32 deep-well land drilling rigs, and it also owns and operates a manufacturing division that produces equipment for the drilling, mining, and timber industries. The company's specialty is delivering innovative drilling products and systems for hard-to-drill deep gas wells.

Rowan's operations – from company headquarters in Houston to offshore drilling locations in the Gulf of Mexico, the Middle East, the North Sea, Mexico, Egypt, and Trinidad – require robust information technology such as SAP's enterprise applications, specifically SAP ECC 6.0.

Because the company uses hundreds of SAP financial documents and thousands of line items on a regular basis, maintaining accurate records and keeping data up to date for planning, billing, and accounting purposes is a major challenge. SAP's reliability, breadth, and depth make it a critical investment for Rowan companies. However, the breadth and depth that make the system so valuable frequently result in new levels of complexity and inflexibility, making it difficult for nontechnical users to fully leverage the power of SAP.

Challenges

Rowan tasked its SAP project team with improving the efficiency of monthly billing cycles as well as simplifying the process for entering new financial data into the system. The team quickly encountered several challenges. Integrating master data from multiple legacy systems into SAP was creating faulty data and causing frequent errors. While assessing the monthly billing process, the SAP project team discovered that every company bill required significant manual input. For example, numerous line items for operating hours, catering, maintenance, etc., had to be input manually from forms into SAP. Finally, the Rowan team found that the billing and journal-entry process consisted of painstaking copying and pasting, as much as 13 lines at a time from Excel spreadsheets. This combination of erroneous data and tedious manual entry caused delays in month-end closing as well as a lot of frustration.

The Transaction tool sped up Rowan’s master data cleanup project. (Image courtesy of Winshuttle)

Solution

Initially, the SAP project team and IT support staff used SAP's Legacy System Migration Workbench (LSMW), a tool that supports the one-time or periodic transfer of data from a variety of sources without programming to upload journal entries. However, the LSMW data-migration fixes were inflexible and, due to the constantly changing requirements either internal or mandated by governing organizations, time-consuming to update.

Then Capgemini, a provider of consulting, technology, and outsourcing services, introduced Rowan to Win-shuttle's Transaction tool at a technology conference. The Transaction tool records the steps that a user takes to complete any SAP transaction and maps the relevant SAP fields to an Excel spreadsheet, creating a file template that can be run to "shuttle" data between Excel and SAP.

Rowan Assistant Controller Andy Hart immediately recognized the value of Transaction. With Winshuttle Transaction, Hart and his team members discovered they could better focus their efforts on specific pieces of data cleanup. "We had one large LSMW that was built to edit all of the fields in a Vendor Master Record," Hart said. "However, it was the Vendor Tax ID numbers within these records that specifically needed to be cleaned up." Once the team gathered the Tax ID numbers, they could easily create a Winshuttle template on the fly to update the Tax ID number field without having to worry about an Excel spreadsheet that contained all of the Vendor fields.

"Projected to take six months, the master data clean-up project was completed in just four, leaving time for additional end-user training and post-production support," Hart said.

Winshuttle Transaction also allows the Rowan SAP project team to address error elimination when uploading data from legacy system. Because Transaction tracks all of the data it "shuttles" into SAP, the software provides automated error alerts to the Rowan team, making it easy and efficient to retrace the data migration steps in Winshuttle and address specific causes of faulty data.

Results

Winshuttle enables Rowan to greatly accelerate SAP data transfer, completing thousands of journal entries in a fraction of the time required with manual data entry. "What were once dreaded and laborious journal entries are now user-friendly and easy to organize," Hart said. "We have saved so much time that we consider Winshuttle worth the cost just for the journal entry input."

Not only do the books now close on time, they are completed a week early. In addition, Transaction reduces the time associated with reporting and reconciliation. Hart said he generated 1,274 cost center reports in 13 minutes.

Transaction also helps increase productivity within the billing department. Employees used to spend many unnecessary hours copying nine lines at a time from the customer contract into Excel, updating the billable hours for each line, and then pasting them into the billing screen in SAP. Now all of Rowan's contract billings are created with a Winshuttle template. The billing agent puts in all the header type information (customer, contract number, date, etc.) and then runs a script to read the contract lines out to the template. The agent fills in the time to bill for each type of service, marking the unused lines for deletion, and runs a second script to create the sales order.

"It probably wouldn't be too bold to say that Winshuttle saved us from an entire process redesign of billing," said Rick Sonora, billing manager at Rowan.

Future plans

Since Winshuttle makes it possible for Rowan to execute more accurate data loads in less time, Hart's team has more resources available to think strategically about SAP deployment.

"Winshuttle improves our productivity as a team and as an organization, so we're better able to step back and take a broad look at the overall efficiency of our financial implementation," Hart said. "The more we do that, the more opportunities we see for Winshuttle to help us perform data conversions in far less time."

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