ALCATEL SUBMARINE NETWORKS

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ALCATEL SUBMARINE NETWORKS DATA ARCHIVING SUCCESS STORY

HOW SAP DATA ARCHIVING PACKAGED SERVICE HELPED PREVENT ALCATEL'S SUBMARINE NETWORKS BUSINESS SUBMERGING IN DATA

 

This has been our first experience of using an SAP Packaged Service, but if this experience is anything to go by, it won't be the last.


Alcatel is the world's leading supplier of submarine networks for voice, data and Internet communication, seamlessly linking people, businesses, countries and continents under the oceans that cover 70% of the Earth's surface. Around 40% of the world's undersea transmission systems are manufactured by Alcatel at its plant at Greenwich in London, and it holds two Queen's Awards for its outstanding records of technology innovation and international trade in undersea telecommunications.

Alcatel's submarine networks business is renowned for its leading-edge technology, reliability and high capacity, and the company operates its own fleet of state-of-the-art cable ships for installation and maintenance, equipped with expert crews and highly qualified technicians. It is a complex, data-intensive global enterprise requiring instant access to a swelling store of information -and that's where SAP Data Archiving Packaged Service came to the rescue.

 

TESTING THE WATER

In the fast-moving telecommunications industry it pays to look ahead, and towards the end of 2001 Alcatel's submarine networks business began its search for an archiving solution for SAP. "While we were not suffering performance problems, it was clear that the rate of growth of our database - around two Gigabytes a month - would present us with problems within a year," says Peter Whitehead, SAP Project Manager at Alcatel's submarine networks business. Peter and his team reviewed the major players in the market and eventually selected a solution based on Easy Software. As well as being commercially competitive, it also offered a generic solution to the company's other, non-SAP archiving requirements.

But before they had the opportunity to put their plans into action, certain demands were placed on the business which utilised their resource for the foreseeable future and the team was left with no option but to put the project into dry dock.

SOLUTION ELEMENTS

SAP Packaged Service: SAP Data Archiving
Software: R/3
Version: 4.6B
Components: FI,CO,MM,PP,PS,SD,HR

The SAP Data Archiving Packaged Service encompassed the same Easy Software that the company had identified in its original study, combined with the resources for installation, commissioning and documentation for a single module of their choice. "The concept was that minimal effort is required by the user, but at the end of the project the user is self-sufficient," says Peter Whitehead. "It was claimed that the whole process could be completed in less than a month - and it was also offered at a fixed price that was less than we had estimated to handle the task in-house."

The nature of their business demands a heavy utilisation of the Production Planning module with some very specific reporting requirements that need to be accessible for several years. Alcatel's submarine networks business therefore opted to tackle this module as part of the SAP Data Archiving Packaged Service.

IMPLEMENTATION AT A RATE OF KNOTS!

The solution was implemented by a team of four, comprising staff from SAP, Proceed-Solutions and Easy Software, and proved to be on object lesson in speed and efficiency. "To say that the project has met our expectations would be an understatement, "says Peter Whitehead. "Installation of the hardware was performed by our staff overnight and 48 hours later we had a fully commissioned and documented Production Order archive from the development system. This included the creation of the archiving info structure, which allows us to access our most frequently reported data without recourse to the actual archive."

By the end of the second day Alcatel staff had also been trained in the processes from both a technical and functional aspect and the documentation had been approved in draft form. The schedule for the following days allowed for the completion of the associated documents, and the total time from receipt of the hardware to completion on the production system was an astonishing six working days.

"This has been our first experience of using an SAP Packaged Service, but if this experience is anything to go by, it won't be the last, "says Peter. "As opportunities present themselves to use an 'all-in-one' offering, which releases our own resource for other duties, we will certainly take advantage of them. SAP are redefining the meaning of rapid deployment and customer value."