Church & Dwight Simultaneously Deploys SAP R/3 and Data Warehouse Using ActaLink for SAP
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Acta Technology, a leading provider of data warehousing solutions for packaged applications, has announced that Church & Dwight Co., Inc., better known for products it develops and markets under the historic Arm & Hammer brand, has simultaneously completed an enterprise-wide deployment of both SAP R/3 and a crucial sales data warehouse built with ActaLink for SAP. ActaLink is enabling Church & Dwight to extract data from SAP and non-SAP sources, transform and cleanse the data, and load it into a data warehouse for strategic business analysis.

The entire deployment of five modules of SAP Version 3.1h and the sales data mart was accomplished in one year. The sales data mart component-built with ActaLink for SAP-was designed, built and was ready to deploy along with SAP in less than four months. The SAP modules deployed were sales and distribution (SD), finance (FI), controlling (CO), production planning (PP) and materials management (MM).

"In designing the decision support environment in support of our SAP implementation, we wanted to be proactive in preparing for the onslaught of user requests we anticipated," said Church & Dwight MIS Director Mike Panesis. "Early on in our development work we discovered that SAP wasn't really designed for OLAP because the summary tables and other key data elements just aren't there," he said. "We decided the best option was to take the data out of SAP and build a data warehouse, but then the issue became how do we get the data quickly and cost-effectively out of SAP?

"We selected ActaLink for SAP because of its ability to intelligently get SAP data out quickly," Panesis said. "There's a certain amount of complexity in SAP that you can't avoid because there are business rules embedded in the data that you're passing back and forth. ActaLink helps you manage difficult tasks like performing complex calculations, such as creating new fields based on the values in multiple other fields, while insulating you from the programming complexities of SAP's ABAP programming language.

"We consider ActaLink for SAP to be a key component of our data warehousing strategy moving forward, helping the company meet its immediate needs as well as fitting into our long-term strategy," he said. "We have also gotten excellent support from Acta, which is crucial in an enterprise-wide deployment such as this."

Added Acta President and CEO Carol Mills Baldwin, "Church & Dwight is just one example of a multitude of SAP installations wanting to go live with SAP and a data warehouse simultaneously. SAP customers are finding that managers throughout their companies are demanding reporting and analysis capabilities on the day they deploy SAP," Mills Baldwin said. "ActaLink for SAP is the leading solution available today for rapidly and cost effectively building an SAP data warehouse, allowing companies to avoid the costly, cumbersome and resource intensive alternative of custom ABAP programming."

In mid-1997, Church & Dwight, headquartered in Princeton, New Jersey, began a major overhaul of its information systems infrastructure, which included a new SAP R/3 implementation. When the company opted to retire a legacy mainframe system as part of the upgrade, Church & Dwight's IT department knew it needed to be able to reproduce crucial daily sales reports in the new SAP environment before senior management would deem the major project a success.

The reports detail Church & Dwight's sales for the day by brand, new orders received, pending orders for the month, company performance versus last year and against plan, how the company is performing compared to its forecast, as well as reported dollar sales, reported case volume and equivalent case volume. Every manager in the company -- 50 in all -- receives a highly focused, three-page report each morning.

"Management bases a lot of their business decisions on where we stand today, where does it look like we're going to stand by the end of the quarter, and how hard do we need to press to make sure that we meet our numbers,”"Panesis added. "When they get these numbers, typically the first thing they want to know is why, which is a natural lead-in to drilling down into the details," he said. "Actually, this is a pretty good OLAP application, as it requires us to put a substantial amount of data in the data warehouse."

According to Panesis, the company first tried creating the sales reports directly from the SAP production system, but that effort fell short due to the reports' complex calculation requirements and the need to integrate non-SAP data sources into the decision support mix. Panesis said the company experimented with different methods of moving the data out of SAP into the target sales data mart. One alternative, he said, was to use ABAP programmers, but the company knew ABAP consultants were expensive and hard to find, and its in-house staff was just coming up to speed on SAP. "In addition, we didn’t want to have to write a lot of programs that we were then going to have to maintain," Panesis said.

With ActaLink for SAP, users develop and maintain the data warehouse extraction and transformation process in a GUI drag-and-drop environment. Church & Dwight is also using ActaLink to pull non-SAP budget, sales quota and historical data out of a native Oracle database and into the data mart along with the SAP data. ActaLink performs this extraction from multiple sources within a single, consistent environment. All information describing the extracts and data warehouses is stored in an open relational repository.

Church & Dwight utilizes the metadata in the ActaLink Repository to automate the development of a business view of the warehouse information. Daily reports have been developed and are delivered to all the managers in the company for review and further analysis with the BusinessObjects query, reporting and OLAP tool. "We are very proud of our accomplishments to date," Panesis said. We have implemented and deployed SAP and a supporting decision support system in just over one year, providing a powerful new computing environment at Church & Dwight-one that should pay dividends to the company for years to come."

Founded in October 1996, and headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif., Acta Technology is focused exclusively on providing enterprise data warehouse solutions for packaged client-server applications. Initially focused on SAP, Acta's solutions include pre-packaged data marts built around an extraction, transformation and loading tool, ActaLink, architected from inception to be very tightly integrated with SAP's application layer. Acta is a member of the SAP Complementary Software Program (CSP) and has signed a strategic OEM relationship with Cognos.

Privately held, Acta is funded by Greylock Limited Partnerships, Norwest Venture Partners and US Venture Partners. The company was founded by Sachin Chawla and Alex Gorelik, the architect and manager of Sybase, Inc.'s highly successful data movement software, Sybase Replication Server. For more information, visit Acta's World Wide Web site at http://www.acta.com