Acta Ships Inventory Management RapidMart For SAP R/3; Siemens Medical Systems Recognizes Million Dollar Savings
Acta, Inc., a leading provider of packaged ERP data warehouses, has announced the general availability of its Acta RapidMart for Inventory Management. The Acta RapidMart product line greatly reduces the time and level of SAP R/3 and data warehousing expertise required to rapidly deploy an SAP R/3-based data warehouse. Acta's RapidMart for Inventory Management - the latest addition to the Acta RapidMart product line - allows customers to more flexibly analyze and better manage inventory in an SAP R/3 environment providing key performance indicators across a variety of dimensions, with drill-down access to the detailed information contained in SAP R/3.
With the Acta RapidMart for Inventory Management, companies can monitor historical trends and changes in inventory levels across a variety of dimensions including plant, material and storage location. The financial liability of held inventory can be measured - including split valuations - for both current and historical time periods by material and valuation area. In addition, the Acta RapidMart for Inventory Management tracks vendor purchasing, allowing users to link goods receipts back to purchase orders, delivery schedules and purchase requisitions.
Acta's RapidMart for Inventory Management joins previously introduced members of the Acta RapidMart product family that address sales analysis and cost analysis in the SAP R/3 environment.
In addition, Acta announced the sale of its new RapidMart to Siemens Medical Systems, a leading developer and marketer of medical imaging devices. Siemens Medical, headquartered in Iselin, NJ, selected Acta's RapidMarts for Inventory Management, Sales and Cost Analysis, as well as ActaWorks, the company's ERP-to-data warehousing extraction, transformation and loading (ETL) tool, to help the company successfully develop and deploy an enterprise data warehouse and SAP R/3 reporting system. Root Consulting, an Iselin-based consulting services company and Acta Certified Systems Integrator (CSI), acted as systems integrator on the project.
"Acta's RapidMarts for Inventory Management, Sales and Cost Analysis provided us a 70-80 percent solution that we then customized for our immediate needs," said Tony Langford, manager of business systems at Siemens Medical. According to Langford, the performance of the new system, although not formally measured, has been more than acceptable. "We're running 52 data warehouse jobs nightly and easily getting through prior to the next business morning."
In just eight weeks after installing ActaWorks and the Acta RapidMarts, the major components of the key R/3 extracts were being performed and loaded into Siemens Medical's target data warehouse. Just four months after product inception, Siemens Medical successfully deployed phase one of its data warehouse implementation, with two more scheduled for later in the year. Siemens Medical estimates that it saved six months and over one million dollars implementing the Acta solution versus employing ABAP programmers to do the job. "That represents initial implementation costs only," Langford said. "We will also save in ongoing maintenance as well as the cost of producing new reports. The Acta RapidMarts greatly accelerated the development process, along with ActaWorks, which totally insulates us from the programming complexities of R/3," Langford said. "We wanted to find solutions that were 'R/3 smart' from the ETL side as well as one that would accelerate the development of our data warehouse. We found both solutions from Acta."
The Acta RapidMart for Inventory Management supports analysis of material stock levels for the purposes of planning and control. Analysis of stock levels helps to establish an optimally sized buffer between finished goods supply and demand, the end result being improved production scheduling and more efficient use of working capital.
Acta's RapidMart for Inventory Management provides an "out-of-the-box" warehouse solution that includes a target schema, source-to-target mappings and transformations that handle change data capture, hierarchy extraction, error recovery and other complex data warehouse processes. The Acta RapidMart for Inventory Management contains pre-defined data extraction jobs that automatically populate the data warehouse with a company's SAP R/3 data.
"We are currently selling Acta RapidMarts to nearly 80 percent of our customers and will be introducing several additional ones in the coming months," said Acta President and CEO Carol Mills Baldwin. "Acta RapidMarts provide an almost immediate return on investment for our customers, allowing for the quick development and deployment of SAP R/3-based data warehouses and marts for strategic business analysis."
Acta's RapidMart for Inventory Management is available now.
Acta Technology is the data warehouse industry's first vendor focused exclusively on providing packaged ERP data warehouse solutions. Initially focused on SAP AG and PeopleSoft, Acta's solutions include packaged data warehouses, called RapidMarts, built around the industry's only extraction, transformation and loading tool, ActaWorks, architected from inception to be very tightly integrated with ERP systems. Acta is an independent software vendor (ISV) participating in the SAP Complementary Software Program (CSP) and PeopleSoft's Global Alliance Program. ActaWorks has been certified by PeopleSoft and SAP BW interface certified by SAP.
Acta is privately held with international headquarters in Palo Alto, CA and regional headquarters in Frankfurt, London and Paris. Acta's customer list of over 75 Fortune 1000 companies in eight countries includes Chevron, Church & Dwight, the Arm & Hammer Company; FX Meiller, Guinness, Maxtor, Monsanto, Sanofi Winthrop, S-B Power Tools, a division of Bosch GmbH; and Shell Chemical Company. For more information, visit Acta's World Wide Web site at http://www.acta.com.