Sunday, December 30th, 2007

SAP Final Roll Out and Hand over event


Almost sixty members of SA Family witnessed the launching of SA SAP system in the presence of Tony Kinsman CEO SA who is the sponsor of SIMS (Sohar Integrated Management System) Project. The event was held at the Sur Ball room, Muscat Holiday Hotel on Sunday 9th. Dec 2007 the function was opened by Paul Snyman, Chief Financial Officer who wished a warm welcome to all. In his speech, Paul was praised to see a new milestone achieved on final phase of SAP project which is moving to Operation in the handover. He emphasized on business ownership and confirmed the configuration and testing was successfully done. Paul indicated that the functional SAP final roll out to users is not yet at its finishing touch as there are plenty to do and the requirement now is for the business to take over.

The SA SAP system has been delivered last March on time and on budget. Since then the SAP functionality has been rolled out to fit SA Business needs: Payroll on August 07, Purchase Order on September 07, HR management in October 07. SA is a Greenfield project, so the master data were inexistent initially. They are now created or uploaded into SAP at source as they come, avoiding SA to build temporary or parallel systems. So it is a saving.

SAP at SA is supporting: HR, Payroll, Supply, Inventory, Finance, Documentation management, EHS and Plant maintenance. All employees will have access to it trough the SA Portal gate, based on their respective roles.

Tony Kinsman in his address during the event was very pleased for the achievement done to date and explained the importance to get SAP ready for commissioning and start up. “This is a great team effort” commented Tony as he spoke about SIMS project history and said that the SAP is based on Alcan template. In his conclusion, Tony said how important the need to get SAP to support commissioning phase as he reiterated that, the next 3-6 months will be demanding and our readiness is important to make a successful start-up. The SIMS project Manager Hugues Tremblay in his speech was pleased and went through the different phases of tasks accomplished as he envisages the new challenge ahead in integration, training and infrastructure. “Currently, there is a strong internal network of SAP process custodians and key users (up to 60 persons), mainly subject matter experts, having a key role to maintain and support all the business processes included in the system. The start of this Handover phase is the beginning a of new journey towards Operation.” Hugues added.

Now the SAP training is well on its way, master data creation is progressing well, the users support is in place and the SA IT team (mainly Omanis) has been trained and ready to support the technical components of SAP. Having a strong SAP base at this stage of the project will provide SA with a strong business foundation to move easily towards Operation in the second part of next year. It is our backbone.

SAP is part of a business initiative call SIMS (Sohar Integrated Management System) which includes as well an MES (Manufacturing Execution System) solution for the production departments, to be rolled out early next year in Sohar site. The event was concluded with a sumptuous dinner and gift was distributed to all participants as a recognition for their effort in the SAP implementation so far.