Saving SA companies time and money

SAP solution makes asset management more effective

The Total Facilities Management Company (TFMC) has benefited from cost savings after implementing a mobile asset management solution from SAP.

“This installation is a classic example of how SAP’s business process management is no longer restricted to physical enterprise infrastructure, but has embraced the mobile enterprise environment,” says Alvin Paules, Chief Technology Architect at SAP South Africa.

TFMC manages about 24 000 buildings across the country, completing up to 50 000 work orders per month. Its current and past client list includes giants such as Telkom, South African Airways, Mercedes Benz SA, the DTI, Cell C, and the SABS.

“SAP is a tried-and-tested platform that could solve our challenge of having literally hundreds of agents in the field attending to a range of different facilities-related jobs,” explains Rob Redaelli, TFMC’s IT director.

The system is based on SAP NetWeaver and uses open industry standards Java.  SAP Mobile Infrastructure can be deployed on mobile devices, such as PDAs, laptop computers, and smart phones, and can connect via wireless LANs, Bluetooth, and GPRS networks.

Redaelli says the system has introduced a level of efficiency and responsiveness that was never possible before with their largely manual system. “These improvements reflect our strategy of efficiency and effectiveness and getting closer to our customer’s requirements,” he adds.

This has been made possible through the integration of SAP Mobile Infrastructure with TFMC’s existing SAP Business Suite Modules. According to Dewald Smit, TFMC Technology Manager, the amount of data posed a real challenge with the synchronisation process and special filters and SYNCBO cascading were required to optimise the data flow.