SAP

Any organization embarking on business transformation will experience wider ramifications than just on the systems supporting it. Infosys has worked with multiple clients on such transformation journeys. The key facets of such transformations are organizational change - people/structure and business process change - besides the systems and applications enabling it. SAP as a leading Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) package is one of the enablers for organizations to achieve the objectives of such transformations.

Infosys has developed a robust framework Integrated - SAP Implementation Framework (I-SIF) to enable and fast track such transformation programs leveraging SAP as a package for addressing end-to-end business requirements. I-SIF leverages Infosys' domain and implementation experience, Accelerated SAP (ASAP) methodology, solution manager and Infosys' custom-built accelerators to effectively deliver the program, and is part of the overall IMPACT frameworks to deliver a complete and stable solution to business requirements.

Companies are growing globally to ensure greater growth or reduce cost or a combination of both. As part of optimizing or reducing cost, they focus on integrating the processes, systems and organization structure, and on streamlining the reporting and decision-making process. In order to achieve these objectives, it's critical for the organizations to harmonize the processes and consolidate the application landscape to the optimal level. Moreover, it needs to be completed in a shorter span of time to start realizing the benefits faster.

Key success factors for deriving optimal value from global roll-outs are:

• Harmonized global business processes
• Speed of implementation or execution of roll-out
• Organizational change management
• Legal, regulatory and statutory compliance
• Robust production support on on-going basis

Infosys' roll-out methodology has an inbuilt mechanism to ensure that the key success factor levers in the project are identified, tracked and achieved successfully.

Rapid growth in the last decade has led to a multifold increase in investment in systems and applications supporting/ enabling the business. So, today, a lot of organizations are either consolidating or planning to consolidate the processes onto single or few instances.

Key objectives for this are:

• Focus on cost reduction
• Replacing a lot of legacy applications that have not been well-maintained
• Need for more accurate, fast reporting and decision-making systems
• Compliance requirements - both local and global - lesser cost, effort and higher chances of being compliant

Over a period of time, organizations tend to develop an application landscape that resembles a cottage industry, with everything being done and delivered either by niche applications or persons with niche skills. What organizations feel is the need for a consolidated instance of application which can feed their appetite for concurrent reporting, information dissemination and most importantly a common platform across all their relevant entities. This would ensure that synergies are achieved, business-wise and technically. Infosys has been engaged in this domain for a while now and has participated in complex and engaging consolidation exercises.

While it may seem a straight-forward case of consolidation for the global players, the question that haunts them is what is the end result of it? Does it provide the deemed value, does it help in transforming business to the next level of dynamism or does it create a cosmetic image of being one but without the requisite edge in business for quick decision-making. This is where Infosys can be of help, in not only the technical consolidation, but in helping drive the cultural change through a measured exercise, to understand and count the effectiveness of the change.

IMPACT Framework is a comprehensive integrated approach to achieve business transformation objectives. Integral to this framework is VRM, which identifies a set of core process metrics with targets to ensure value realization through the design and implementation. It's designed to be modular and customizable for each client's situation, and works seamlessly with implementations enabled by SAP.

Large company-wide transformations require a framework that can logically break down an effort into more manageable threads, while simultaneously keeping them interconnected. Nine threads (horizontals) represent the major focus areas of the transformation. They are specifically focused on the outcomes for each phase. The framework has four distinct phases (the vertical elements) that map to the ASAP methodology. These phases are supported by nine horizontal threads.

As a transformation progresses from visioning to operations, it should follow a logical progression. At each phase in the journey, the organization is working towards real change.

Our proposed contractual framework links Infosys' 'billing for services' with realization of key process metrics identified through VRM.

The flattening world is constantly evolving and impacting the way you do your business. Manufacturing companies are contending with diverse global markets, evolving customer needs and expectations, increasing complexity of operations and an expanding supply chain. Manufacturing companies need to shift their operational priorities to turn these into opportunities that drive profitable growth.

The Infosys organizational structure is designed to provide maximum value to the manufacturing customer. Infosys provides Consulting, IT, Product Development and Process Engineering services to a spectrum of manufacturing organizations. This articulates our capability to fine-tune our offerings to specific sub-verticals while allowing us to absorb best practices that can then be applied across Manufacturing sub-verticals.

Business value can be derived from many stages/ areas of your planned SAP program (e.g., implementation). Infosys offerings can provide/ maximize business value across the entire lifespan of a SAP program:

• Pre-sales: deal structuring (dynamic service model, outcome-based pricing)
• Business blueprint: use of a value realization method/ framework to identify applicable Key Performance Indicators (KPI) and process improvement opportunities
• Realization: tools/ accelerators that will be used to shorten this cycle but ensure quality

In addition, Infosys supports a global delivery model with competency and delivery centers around the world.

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Operations of CPG, Retail and Logistics firms have become increasingly global, complex and dynamic. Today the consumer is truly empowered because of the plethora of information and channels to buy products from.

The success of your company hinges on developing innovative merchandizing strategies, efficient inventory management, compliance with regulatory guidelines, and customer centric store operations that help you win in turns and make money from information while driving continuous improvement. Infosys is uniquely positioned to help you overcome these challenges by leveraging our extensive experience across SAP and rich domain expertise.

Our highly innovative solutions built on SAP and leading industry best practices will ensure maximized return on investments for your SAP programs thereby enhancing the experience and value delivered to customers.

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Infosys' SAP Life Sciences practice has a large pool of trained and experienced professionals dedicated to helping our clients in the Life Sciences space to accomplish their business goals and objectives. The practice at Infosys has grown at a phenomenal pace of 60% a year for the last five years and has attained the stature of a practice with the strongest Life Sciences domain credentials among offshore vendors across the globe. We work with two of the top five global pharmaceutical organizations and with many of the top 20 pharmaceutical companies across geographies. We are the only strategic partner to cater to all requirements from Life Sciences organizations running on a SAP platform.

We have built the practice with prime emphasis on domain expertise. Every SAP consultant from the practice brings up the right mix of domain know-how along with SAP skills. We conduct mandatory training in GxP and regulatory compliance, pharma supply chain, manufacturing processes in the pharmaceutical industry, to name a few. Each of our professionals undergoes pharmaceutical training, shares knowledge from the domain experts and gets himself certified within the Infosys' certification framework.

We have also proactively built solutions to go to the market with complimentary offerings to address client's pain points where SAP solution is still evolving. Pharma Product Complaint Handling solution, Change Request Management using Solman for Pharma environment, Track and Trace solution are some such offerings ready-for-deployment. This has differentiated our SAP LS practice and positioned us as a thought leader in the industry.

We have established a Pharma-compliance sub-practice to address the compliance requirements in the industry and serve our clients with the specialized offering to address their compliance needs, especially when the work is done miles away from their operational facilities. These special offerings have created a unique positioning in the industry.

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The Utilities industry is rapidly adapting itself to changing regulations and ownership structures. To achieve success in such a dynamic market, Utilities need rapidly adapt to the changes, while maintaining focus on improving operational efficiencies and high levels of customer service.

Infosys provides a pre-configured and accelerated implementation solution for Utilities Billing and Customer Care. It's based on our deep utility domain knowledge coupled with industry best practices. Built on SAP IS-Utilities/CCS (ERP 6.0), this solution comes bundled with various artifacts and accelerators and can be extended to incorporate specific needs of Utilities. It also provides seamless integration to back-office processes and upcoming technologies like AMI and GIS. The solution not only reduces cost and time to implement but also facilitates risk mitigation and easy change management.

When combined with Infosys' offering in the area of 'Enterprise Asset Management' and 'Enterprise Resource Management', Infosys will provide a robust predictable and cost-effective end-to-end SAP-based solution across the Utility Value Chain.

Infosys provides the following value-additions through the solution:

• Solution backed by 15 years of utility domain expertise
• Implementation supported by unique global support model
• Bundled tools, accelerators and artifacts incorporated from our experience in multiple North American utilities

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To combat the downturn and its aftermath, we have to improve the efficiency of IT projects. One way of achieving this is to identify and implement improvements in how projects are currently managed. Another could be to change the rules of the game, so that by design, all parties involved are encouraged to act in the most economically efficient manner, while also meeting fluctuating business needs. New engagement models have been created to do just that.

These models have been specifically designed to:

• Create a working environment where the client and vendor(s) collaborate to act in the most economical manner by planning better and prioritizing work while optimizing the effort used in delivering business value
• Take into consideration fluctuations in business demand
• Achieve better predictability of IT spend
• Reduce operational overheads
• Simplify budgeting and planning
• Convert CapEx to OpEx

These new engagement models have been tried and tested in various engagements and client scenarios with results that have exceeded expectations.

Infosys Business Platform is a synchronized combination of best-in-class business process execution with leading technology to maximize value by enhancing process efficiency and effectiveness. Infosys has partnered with SAP to develop business platforms for indirect procurement (horizontal processes) and publishing industry (industry-specific processes). This adopts a "managed services approach" to deliver business services through a preconfigured, best-in-class, business-ready technology engine. Infosys provisions and manages the entire technology lifecycle across application and infrastructure layers along with business process service delivery.

Infosys' Source-to-Pay platform offers a new business model delivering an end-to-end indirect procurement process. By unifying process outsourcing with technology, it provides an integrated offering to manage indirect spend in the Source-to-Pay life-cycle.Infosys Business Platform provides immediate benefits to organizations such as enhanced spend visibility and reduction in fragmented spending.

The "pay-per-use" pricing provides an operational expenditure model and aligns expenditure with usage. This delivers business value by bringing more spend under management and spend reduction through "right buy". Clients can also benefit from higher efficiency and effectiveness resulting from increased automation, enhanced collaboration, increased spend-visibility, early payment discounts, and lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).

Newspaper in a Box (NIAB) is an end-to-end offering for the publishing industry where Infosys provides best-of-breed platform-based services to multiple clients on shared model and subscription-based pricing.

Clients benefit from reduced cost of operations, improved customer relationship management through better portfolio visibility and higher quality of service through cycle-time reduction.

In the past, organizations worldwide have had great success stories in outsourcing and offshoring the support and maintenance of their IT systems and applications. Customers have been enjoying the benefits of the Global Delivery Mode (GDM), pioneered by Indian IT companies, leveraging the cost savings mainly due to labor arbitrage. This model has greatly benefitted customers and IT services providers alike.

However, due to current economic conditions, organizations are compelled to find new ways to increase operational efficiency and reduce sustenance costs while continuing to maintain the service levels with business users.

Do you think you have explored all possible ways to cut costs? Think Again!

Infosys' Maintenance Center of Excellence (MCOE) and Enterprise Shared Services can help you achieve your business goals. Our clients have realized several benefits:

• 30% reduction in TCO when compared with existing support models
• On-demand ramp up in capacity to address changing business needs
• Round-the-clock access to highly skilled consultants
• Risk-free transition through proven methodologies, tools and processes
• State-of-the-art infrastructure with robust security policies

It's often quoted that strategies fail because "less than 10% of strategies effectively formulated are effectively executed" or "in majority of the cases (70%) the real problem isn't bad strategy... it's bad execution". While both these quotes from Fortune emphasize the importance of strategy and execution, Infosys believes that they need to be as much aligned as they need to be effective.

An organization may try to build the best of strategies and try to achieve excellence in its operations but if strategy decisions are made without context of the operations - if strategy remains disconnected from operations then there will be misaligned action across the organization leading to value destruction rather than value creation.

Infosys brings it all together with its unified SAP services and special focus on providing its customers with the ability to mitigate risks and accelerate savings by being agile and adapting its strategies to changing business needs and triggers. Infosys makes a difference by providing best-in-class services ranging from building Business Intelligence to Enterprise Analytics and Performance Management strategy and roadmap, business and architecture consulting for implementation, upgrades, roll-out, and application support across all of the below areas.

Enterprise Performance Management

• KPI Framework for industries and functions
• Strategy management
• Business planning, budgeting and forecasting
• Financial consolidation
• Profitability and cost management
• Spend performance management
• Supply chain performance management

Information Delivery and Discovery

• Query, reporting and analysis
• Dashboards and visualization
• Search and navigation

Information Management

• Enterprise data warehouse
• Data quality
• Data integration
• Data federation
• Master Data Management

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A number of large corporations, having implemented SAP a few years ago, are not in a position to leverage information from the system to make decisions. The data in the system has grown to multi-terabytes and most of the growth has come about due to increased roll-out of an original solution or plain acquisition and integration of new companies.

How do corporations ensure that while managing these tons of information, they also are able to provide clean and trustworthy data to the business users? How can they make information accessed by the business more reliable for business decisions?

There are two ways that the quality of data suffers from over a period of time. They are listed below:

1. Incorrect quality of master data
2. Data entry errors on transactional data including incorrect data and wrong usage of the system

Of the two, the "data entry errors" on transactional data are attributable to change management related issues or disciplinary issues where users may enter incorrect transactions. These are easier to handle in the sense that once realized reversing it or limiting the damage is quite possible.

But the same cannot be said about master data. Master data along with organizational structure in applications is the core to the well being of the application. Any errors in these will fundamentally affect the system in terms of reliability. Proliferation of the incorrectness spreads from the master data to all the transactions and reporting areas of the application. It can become very difficult to manage over a period of time, thus losing out on the trust the business has on the application.

Hence, it becomes mandatory to periodically monitor the health of the master data to ensure that the proliferations of errors in master data are limited and in control.

Infosys has an offering by which the master data quality can be monitored periodically using the dashboard facility, using an enterprise portal. The solution does the following:

1. Dashboard to monitor your data quality
2. Framework to evaluate data quality using different parameters
3. Drill down facility to trap data quality issues
4. Facility to change and update data from the dashboard to ensure clean data

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Seven years after the US Sarbanes Oxley Act has been passed, the two legislators continue to be the most respected and worshipped people by the consulting/ audit community and most disliked people by the CXO community. Many geographies have passed similar legislation be it JSOX, CSOX, ASOX, ESOX or our own ISOX (Clause 49). Why is compliance such a big investment even today? According to unconfirmed reports and industry insiders, many of the large multinationals are spending anywhere between $80 million to $130 million per year on SOX compliance. This cost is made up of internal head count consulting and IT spend (hardware and software). Payment to statutory auditors is generally not included in these calculations. According to some analysts, CXOs have given up and reconciled to the never-decreasing compliance spend.

The compliance space has matured over a period of time and is aiming for achieving efficiency along with effectiveness. Efficiency leads to cost reduction but efficiency cannot be achieved unless the compliance initiative is automated and controls are optimized. Controls cannot be optimized unless they are standardized. No amount of effort for standardization of controls will yield results unless business processes are standardized.

Hence, business processes and IT landscape standardization are important to reduce cost of compliance. Infosys' "Efficient Compliance" approach is an innovative approach to help our clients make their compliance process efficient in addition to effectiveness and thus aim at on-going compliance cost reduction.

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XY2XI^SM Migration - A Proven Approach from Integration Roadmap to Realization

Infosys' service marked XY2XI^SM Migration solution is designed to address customers' requirements to define and implement a roadmap for consolidation of their IT integration investments and migrate to the SOA-enabled NetWeaver Process Integration (PI) platform. The end-to-end solution addresses the requirements of companies looking to start the SAP PI product assessment, implement SAP PI for new projects and to also migrate existing interfaces from other middleware technologies to SAP PI.

XY2XI^SM Migration solution is an integrated consulting to implementation framework which enables SAP customers to reduce their overall integration TCO:

• Product assessment and roadmap
• Business case with ROI
• Product implementation (Ramp Up)
• Dual or multi product strategy
• Accelerated migration (consolidation)

Migration (consolidation) of integration landscapes to SAP PI is a key stage of XY2XI SM Migration, where the varied integration needs of multiple middleware's servicing are consolidated to the end state architecture of SAP PI. The migration of interfaces is achieved in an accelerated tool-based approach with minimum business impact.

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In the economic environment that forces you to continually innovate, increase customer service responsiveness and yet reduce costs, you consider doing business at locations where costs are lower. Developing global suppliers and outsourcing non-strategic activities throws further challenges of integrating the different entities and managing information flow. Organizations are thus looking at IT models that can help them manage these challenges.

Infosys offers solutions that enable greater business agility through collaboration. The solutions built on SAP's SCM platforms integrates heterogeneous platforms enabling collaboration with suppliers and sub-contractors, improving forecasts, reducing response times, improving replenishment, and thus augmenting customers' responsiveness with 'no compromise' on security and compliance.

With your suppliers integrated with seamless access to supply chain information, it's easier to move the management of inventory to your supplier and reduce your working capital. Infosys provides solutions that have been built on the SAP SCM platforms to help you achieve this.

Infosys' tools and accelerators are designed specifically for these solutions and are combined with an innovative service delivery model to unify technology with business process outsourcing in a managed services framework. This results in a shortened delivery time with reduced TCO.

In a flattening world, companies are aiming to attain operational excellence through customer-centric processes and it is becoming increasingly imperative for companies to provide a superior customer experience in order to differentiate themselves in the market. Infosys helps you in configuring and implementing a CRM solution that assists you right from 'customer acquisition' to 'customer retention'.

Infosys is an early adaptor of latest technologies including 6.0 and 7.0 including SOA. Infosys leverages SAP CRM's flexibility, scalability and modular deployment to boost the returns on your SAP CRM investments. Combined with its rich expertise in providing solutions in the CRM domain across geographies, a deep understanding of industry domains, & the ability to 'program manage and deliver' complex global deployment and multi-country rollouts, Infosys is uniquely positioned to enhance your business to deliver better value.

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Centralized Procurement Through SRM:The Next Great Wave of Savings

A constantly changing turbulent economic environment is forcing organizations to adopt innovative business strategies to stay competitive and efficient in order to ensure that the stakeholders receive the highest level of benefits. Procurement function plays an important role in this transformation journey and its importance is becoming more and more visible.

Benchmark data suggests that organizations are shifting towards a centralized procurement model, one which decouples the logical and physical locations of procurement activities. Reasons for this are obvious benefits of spend consolidation, product standardization and enhanced negotiating power. Along with direct materials, indirect materials are a focus area for many organizations from this perspective. Indirect materials procurement typically contributes to approximately 5% of the overall procurement costs in an organization. Apply the Pareto principle and this would mean 20% of the indirect materials procurement would lead to 80% of spend. Hence, an effective strategy to minimize 4% (80% of 5%) indirect material procurement spend for 20% of materials can have massive bottom-line benefits.

Infosys' consultants can help develop strategies that organizations can undertake to implement a centralized procurement model by leveraging SAP SRM solution as a business transformation enabler. SAP SRM provides the following features - organization structure mapping to enable shift from classic decentralized procurement model towards centralization, centralized contract management and centralized sourcing to enable the process. A judicious combination of these will help arrive at a solution that will drive and ease the journey of mammoth organizational change.Infosys can ensure a streamlined procurement strategy reaping in huge bottom line savings for your organization.

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Global organizations do not restrict themselves to geographical boundaries when it comes to pushing themselves to ensure that their workforce across the globe has an identical environment. Next generation leadership, driving of change to ensure competitiveness and being a learning organization are initiatives that are on offer to every individual across the globe within the organization. The need of the hour is a common platform to ensure that these can be delivered at the desk of the remotest worker with equal value and understanding, so that business transformation does not remain a core group's initiative but cascades down the rank and file of the organization. SAP HCM offers a tremendous opportunity to have localized versions for transactional purposes, but what generally is ignored is its tremendous potential in offering global processes especially in the areas of performance management, succession planning and moving the organization to the plane of being a learning organization using the learning solution. Looking at the design of the product itself, gives one a feeling that processes in these areas have the capability to fit across geographical and organizational borders because they deal with how the workforce is nurtured and educated to replenish leadership with a strong vision.