Background : Customer is a $2.4 billion global footwear company with more than 1,100 Famous Footwear stores selling more than 100 million pairs of shoes around the world each year through its partnerships with department stores, national chains, independent retailers and Internet sales. They deliver top quality products by utilizing world-class sourcing and product development organizations, extensive research into marketplace and consumer insights and collaborative relationships with both leading retailers and manufacturers of footwear.
Issue : In its continued efforts to reinvent itself with the changing markets forces, in mid-2008, Company decided to replace its existing home-grown and third-party applications with the SAP Business Suite. The company decided to utilize SAP’s industry-specific solution, SAP® Apparel and Footwear Solution for Consumer Products package, to help manage its supply chain. The company also selected the Business Objects business intelligence solutions from SAP to help close the loop between business strategy and execution. The company decided to utilize this tightly integrated solution to collectively address the organization’s business needs and to enable company to meet its long-term growth and strategic expectations while remaining customer focused.
"The anticipated multi-year implementation of the SAP ERP application is an integral step in company’s efforts to create an interconnected business model and leverage our inter-company synergies to better meet the needs of our customers,” said Chairman and CEO of the Company. “As a proven, scalable operating platform, SAP is expected to be a key enabler toward reaching our strategic goals of becoming the leading fashion footwear marketer."
As part of the on-going efforts towards effective governance, including enterprise risk management, transparency, accountability, and optimized performance Company initiated the deployment of the SAP Business Objects Governance Risk and Compliance solution (SAP GRC). The objective of this initiative was to address proactive performance management across the enterprise with risk-balanced strategy management, and risk-based controls embedded in business process areas ranging from financial to human resources, environmental to trade management.
Resolution : Tekskills joined the implementation team at a critical juncture of the SAP GRC implementation when the existing SAP Security/GRC resource had to withdraw from the engagement. Our Principal Consultant took up the critical responsibility of validating the infrastructure and technical design of the overall SAP security and the GRC 5.3 Access Control Suite. In a very short time Tekskills helped the Company to optimize the architecture based on SAP best practices, completed GRC integration, development, testing and implementation plans. Our resources worked closely with the customers IT and Business teams to implement RAR and SPM for HCM (including ESS, MSS, and WFM), FI, and BI.
Landscapes for their global environment that supports ~12K users. With Tekskills assistance, the customer will be shortly completing its implementation of GRC RAR 5.3 (CUP & ERM) interfaced with identity management (Net Weaver IDM 7.1).
Outcome : Tekskills has been able to assist the company in completing the implementation of the SAP Security and GRC on time and in budget. Tekskills was able to hit the ground running with its highly skilled and experienced resources and delivered superior service with on-time delivery, initial set-back notwithstanding. Tekskills engagement with customer for providing SAP Security and GRC expertise has concluded. However, the overall implementation of SAP still continues. Our resources have received accolades from the customer for their excellent services and adherence to schedules and have been requested to render services again for subsequent activities in the areas of SAP security and GRC.