Warburtons takes SAP mobile

Warburtons, the UK bakers, has extended the use of its core SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform to streamline its purchase order approval process for managers on the move.

Having begun a transition from an IBM AS400-based IT infrastructure running mainly homegrown systems to SAP in 2000, the company wanted to continue to extend the use of its ERP investment six years on, after finally retiring all its legacy systems last year.

Damien Ghee, Warburtons IT and programme director told delegates at the SAP UK user conference being held in Birmingham today that, having gained confidence in running its SAP environment through staged rollouts to all parts of the business, they wanted to do more with its more recent investment in BlackBerry mobile technology from provider, Research In Motion (RIM).

"When we changed our BlackBerry service provider from Orange to O2 last year, the contract included an upgrade to the BlackBerry Enterprise Server and a couple of their latest 8100 Pearl handsets," he said.

"Until then the BlackBerry had been just for a few management and board members and, from an IT perspective, we didn't do too much with it except push email and calendar syncing."

When managers were away from their desks, Ghee observed that the inability to maintain operational contact through the SAP system was creating bottlenecks in some procedural areas.

"It was a nightmare to get approvals on purchase orders, to the point where we lost out on some good deals on wheat, for example," he said where, although Warburtons serves a UK-only market, much of its wheat is sourced overseas. "We had no workflow in SAP, so were reliant on very manual processes."

In conjunction with its mobile provider O2, Warburtons contracted SAP integrator iQlink to implement the SkyMobile SAP purchase order approval application running inside SAP from independent software provider Sky Technologies in less than four weeks and earlier this summer without the need for additional middleware.

Now when a purchase order is ready for approval the iQlink application automatically creates an email in Warburton's Lotus Notes email client, which is then delivered to the manager's BlackBerry.

The manager has the option to approve, hold or reject the order, typing reasons for the action in an email reply, which automatically updates the central SAP system. It also works both off- and online, syncing when a GPRS connection becomes available.

"The bottleneck in the procurement cycle is now gone," said Ghee. He added that users would now rather scroll through their BlackBerry to do approvals than use the SAP interface at their desks.

"We've been able to do something to make senior managers' lives better and at relatively little cost, that also clearly leverages the existing investment in SAP and the BlackBerry," he said.

He added that he is now looking to exploit the same technology in other areas of the business, including radio frequency inventory and engineering management for the field force.

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