Tuesday, 15 January 2008

Astra Honda Motor Implements SAP NetWeaver Exchange Infrastructure

PT Astra Honda Motor (AHM), Indonesia’s leading motorcycle manufacturer-- a joint venture between Astra International and Honda Motor Company Limited, Japan—has implemented SAP NetWeaver Exchange Infrastructure( SAP NetWeaver XI) to increase its business processes.

SAP Netweaver XI provides open integration technologies that support process-centric collaboration among SAP and non-SAP applications, both within and beyond enterprise boundaries.

Prior to this, AHM system was using legacy IT infrastructure that was internally-developed business systems which had served AHM well for long. But, there is still manual-based system that did not just affect productivity but also prevented employees from focusing on business-critical functions that could add value to the company. Data integrity was difficult to ensure. Without accurate data, managers were unable to plan and make business decisions. Finally, this condition pushed management to do upgrades to keep pace with the company’s rapidly-changing business needs and to achieve company’s vision and mission in order to sustain the market leadership in the ever increasing tough competition, and must deliver more and more value for company and customers.

"We recognise that technology solution is crucial in enabling process innovation. In addition, we also want technology solution that could fit into our requirement, that capable chose to leverage a business process management (BPM) tool to manage its processes as assets, enhancing them over time based on evolving business requirements," said Tedy Mulyono, Program Management Office AHM Prime Project.

"Since one of AHM’s parent companies, Astra International had already implemented SAP and it worked well for them. Therefore, it made sense for AHM to adopt the same solution. But the most important, SAP NetWeaver XI was the solution that was most capable of managing AHM complex business processes. It enables connectivity with applications from different vendors in a heterogeneous IT environment," explained Edy Tanoto, Project Adviser for AHM PRIME Project.

Edy also said that AHM was entering a new era with the SAP system that connects and makes available all the data over all departments via one SAP platform. With the SAP system, stock movements and inventory levels can be updated and accessed in real-time. This enables production planning based on actual and forecasted demand, and minimises unnecessary costs.