4-page Case Study - Posted 9/27/2007

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Canada Post

OBA Boosts Productivity, Helps Increase Customer Satisfaction at Canada Post

Canada Post, one of the largest mail systems in the world, was spending increasing amounts of time and money to get data into the SAP enterprise resource planning system that ran its mammoth operations. It needed a faster and more economical way—but one that would also boost data accuracy. That’s what it has with Winshuttle TxShuttle, an Office Business Application solution. Business users at Canada Post upload information directly from familiar Microsoft® Office Excel® spreadsheets, eliminating the need to learn and use multiple SAP screens. The organization boosts productivity (for example, the time for key business processes is cut by up to 94 percent), increases customer satisfaction with more timely and accurate bills, and enables employees to focus on their jobs, rather than on learning and using SAP software.

Situation

Canada Post is one of the largest postal administrations in the world. The numbers involved in the management of the operations of the company are staggering:

• 37 million pieces of mail delivered each day—more than 10 billion pieces of mail each year—to more than 31 million people
• 72,000 employees
• 13.7 million points of call
• 6,000 vehicles
• CD$6.2 billion [U.S.$6.17 billion] in annual revenues

In order to run its operations effectively, Canada Post decided to implement SAP R/3 enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. The organization licensed the SAP software in 2002 and quickly became Canada’s largest SAP implementation, with more than 72,000 users. Canada Post currently uses SAP R/3 version 4.6D with SAP Enterprise Portal 4.7 and has implemented a broad range of SAP components.

As important as the SAP software was to Canada Post—or, perhaps more accurately, because of the pervasiveness of the SAP software at Canada Post—bulk data entry into the backend ERP system became a large and growing drain on the organization’s resources and personnel. Data uploads to the SAP software generally required custom scripts from an outsourced provider —at prices higher than Canada Post would incur if the work were completed by internal employees.

We are essentially a customer service organization. TxShuttle helps to ensure that SAP doesn’t get in the way of our delivering top service to our customers. The result is greater customer satisfaction. Chantal Gauvreau IT Advisor, Enterprise Information Management, Canada Post

“The administrative duties that came with SAP increased the complexity of our employees’ jobs and reduced the time they could spend their core responsibilities—including customer and employee interaction,” says Chantal Gauvreau, IT Advisor, Enterprise Information Management, Canada Post. “Shortly after we released the SAP R/3 payroll module, we saw a big impact on the amount of time employees were spending on data entry into the system.”

Yet another concern at Canada Post was accuracy. Manual bulk data entry for SAP updates inevitably meant keystroke errors and erroneous information. Mistakes in turn showed up in employees’ paychecks and customers’ invoices—forcing another round of labor investment to correct the problems.

The problem came to a head in 2004 as the number of script requests increased to handle Time Management and Organizational Planning issues. The Organizational Planning unit needed to load data for more than 8,000 job positions into SAP.

Each job position had many job evaluation points. Canada Post estimated it would take months of manual data entry to complete the project. Meanwhile, the Time Management team was taking 12 to 16 hours per week to work with employee records by manually entering data from spreadsheets into SAP.

Gauvreau and her colleagues decided they needed a better way to get information into SAP R/3.

Solution

Canada Post considered several commercial software solutions for automating data input into SAP R/3, but rejected all but one of them as being too difficult for business users to use. That exception: Winshuttle TxShuttle, an Office Business Application (OBA) used by business and functional analysts who need to upload and download data to and from SAP solutions.

The solution, from Bothell, Washington–based Winshuttle, speeds the process of getting data into, and out of, SAP solutions—including R/3, mySAP and SAP NetWeaver—by enabling users to interact with the Microsoft® Office Excel® spreadsheet software and Microsoft Office Access™ database software with which they’re already familiar, rather than forcing them to learn the SAP interface. Users at Canada Post, for example, enter data into familiar Excel spreadsheets, with TxShuttle then automating the process of uploading the data into SAP.

Winshuttle TxShuttle uses the SAP .Net Connector to communicate with the SAP backend. Winshuttle migrated the solution to the Microsoft .NET Framework when that technology became available. The updated .NET-based Winshuttle application became a SAP Certified Integration and was certified as a Powered by SAP Netweaver application. 

Both the .NET-based implementation and the SAP certifications demonstrate the extent to which TxShuttle is optimized for enterprise architectures. In 2007, Winshuttle was recognized as the fastest growing company in the SAP ecosystem and it ranked 124th on the Inc. 500 list of fastest growing companies. 

To implement a TxShuttle solution for a specific SAP transaction, a user first installs the TxShuttle software to his or her desktop. The user then implements a sample SAP upload, with TxShuttle recording the upload process and creating an automated script. This process can span several SAP screens. The user then maps the SAP fields captured during the recording process to the initial data fields in Office Excel, using the highly graphical drag-and-drop process of TxShuttle’s EasyMapper tool.

To automate the process of uploading vast amounts of data to SAP, a Canada Post user then runs the recorded and mapped script in batch-mode using data from the Excel file. Each run executes the recorded SAP transaction as many times as there are rows of data in the Excel file. The same recording can be run on any number of Excel files.

A small group of power users—23 people at Canada Post—create the TxShuttle maps and use them and the templates to upload data to SAP. To ensure the integrity of data, Canada Post created a staging area to which data is uploaded and reviewed prior to import into the SAP production database.

Training on the solution is completely informal, according to Gauvreau. Instead of participating in formal training sessions, users rely on the tool’s internal help functionality and on advice passed along by more experienced users.

Canada Post has been using the Winshuttle TxShuttle solution since 2004.

Benefits

As a result of adopting Winshuttle TxShuttle to interface with SAP R/3, Canada Post has saved more than CN$1 million, reduced sole reliance on third-party IT suppliers, enabled greater productivity among its employees, and improved data accuracy, customer satisfaction, and employee morale.

Increases Productivity
Canada Post has increased productivity by using TxShuttle. The productivity savings come from the rapidly growing areas within the organization that have replaced manual SAP data input with automated input through TxShuttle.

One of the most significant areas is the loading of payroll records, including the new terms of labor agreements, and adjustments to bonuses, incentives, and salaries. More than 150,000 employee records are updated annually in the organization’s SAP HR (payroll) module.

Canada Post eliminates the need for an expensive third-party script as well as for much of the manual data entry that accompanied it. And because manual data-entry errors are avoided, the organization saves from increased accuracy, as well. A process that formerly took 12 to 16 hours over 5 days has been reduced to just 1 hour.

The Organizational Planning project requiring the uploading of more than 8,000 positions had been estimated to take months. With TxShuttle, the process was reduced to less than one week.

“As we achieve increasing success with TxShuttle, more departments throughout the organization want to take advantage of it,” says Gauvreau. “The solution is now used to interface with SAP for unlocking of letter-carrier records to enter time worked on a weekly basis, for loading customer records, for order creation and billing, for asset creation, and much more.

Increases Speed, Accuracy of Customer Bills
But productivity gains aren’t the only benefits from Canada Post’s use of TxShuttle. Customer billing data is uploaded faster and with greater accuracy, which means that customer invoices can get out to customers more quickly and with fewer errors.

“We are essentially a customer service organization,” says Gauvreau. “TxShuttle helps to ensure that SAP doesn’t get in the way of our delivering top service to our customers. The result is greater customer satisfaction because now our system does a better job of enabling us to serve our customers.”

Increases End-User Adoption
Canada Post’s customers aren’t the only ones pleased with the greater speed and accuracy enabled by TxShuttle—so are the organization’s employees.

“Just as we use TxShuttle to produce faster and more accurate customer invoices, we use it to produce faster and more accurate paychecks for our more than 17,000 mail carriers,” says Gauvreau. “But satisfaction with the solution is even more pervasive. The feedback we’ve received from the vast majority of people who use the tool is overwhelmingly positive. They now have a tool that’s very user friendly and that comes with excellent support. They can do their jobs better, faster, more accurately, and more cost-effectively than when they had to rely on outside vendors to create their scripts. So the word-of-mouth on TxShuttle is just great. It’s also the reason that users are so eager to help train and support other employees as they adopt the solution.”

Microsoft Office System
The Microsoft Office system is the business world’s chosen environment for information work, providing the programs, servers, and services that help you succeed by transforming information into impact.

For more information about the Microsoft Office system, go to:
www.microsoft.com/office

For More Information

For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:
www.microsoft.com

For more information about Winshuttle products and services, visit the Web site at:
www.Winshuttle.com

For more information about Canada Post products and services, call (613) 734-8126 or visit the Web site at:
www.postescanada.ca/splash.asp