Alstom Power: Baden - Switzerland, August 6th 2012

I left France, the eiffel Tower and the Parisian exciting life and in a few days I'm going to Baden (Aargau canton near Zurich) in Switzerland.

I will work with Alstom Power as SAP Business One Implementation and support Consultant.

A new adventure and life will start for me in the country of Rolex and Chocolate ... :-)

SNETOR, France-Paris 2012:

Snetor is a French SME who is trading with chemicals. They have four companies in France and have customers and suppliers all over the world.

The B1 implementation project has been done by VISEO and took 2 years because of having four companies, complex procedures more the development of big special addons for them.

I started working in this project  since the go-live preparation phase. My principal tasks were linked to Coresuite Addon implementation:

-  Implementing and adapting the French Coresuite layouts for commercial documents for the 4 companies

- Implementing and adapting 30 Coresuite financial reports
- Creation of new financial reports via Coresuite: VAT declaration, VAT declaration preparation and Bank Statement Processing Report

- Setting up automatisms (send automatic email, print Bill Of Exchange when creating the Invoice ect.) using Coresuite Designer and Coresuite Customize Addon

- Key users training 

- Go-live assistance from January to June 2012

The last Picture I took in Snetor's Building before I left.

Picture taken of Snetor's Building in Paris

This project took a long time because of having 4 companies and 70 users. None of the B1 standard procedures was applied by the processes owners (they were very influenced by their old specific system) and there were lots of special cases to take into account.

After the 6 months of Go-live assistance everything went well!

Stroc Industries (Casablanca, Morocco): October 2011

Stroc Industries is a Moroccan company which is specialized in civil engineering. They handle huge projects like installing oil wells. They have subsidiaries in Mauritania and in Equatorial Guinea and they went public in 2011.

My project with Stroc Industries was to implement project Management Addon.

The project team was: purchasing manager, sales manager, engineering project manager, account manager, controller and human resources manager

The aim of project management Addon implementation was:

-          Plan resources for projects

-          Manage project costs

-          Analyse projects by P&L

-          Manage employees and equipments

Me eating coucous in my parents' house in casablanca
during the Stroc Project with my colleagues

SAP Bratislava, Slovakia: July 2011

Before releasing the 8.82 version SAP asked their partners to come to Bratislava to test the new features and report bugs and improvement suggestions. VISEO was the French chosen partner to participate in this session and I was the one who went to Bratislava to handle the test scenarios.

I focused on:

-          MRP improvements

-          Batch and serial numbers management

-          Balnket Agreement

SAP Bulding at Bratislava, July 2011

SAP Business One Testing Flour

The testing sessions were manager by Knis Dalibor from SAP. There were partners from all over the world (eg. Sapfire from London) and we were assisted by a 8.82 SAP developer and were also in contact with the solution manager. 

L’Oreal DUBAI: March 2011

I went to L’Oreal Middle East (LOME) Office in Dubai to work on the standard B1 processes setup and the L’Oreal Core Model adaptation and setup for the Pakistani subsidiary of L’Oreal (LOPAK).

I worked on this project together with LOPAK key users (sales manager, purchase manager, financial responsible, controller and stock responsible) and they were supported by LOME B1 project manager for L’Oreal process issues  and IT manager for infrastructure and B1 administration issues because LOME represents the hub of L’Oreal Middle East and Africa B1 projects. The first implementation in this zone has been done for Dubai subsidiary by VISEO in 2009.

I organized different workshops with the key users in which we had setup the B1 standard processes (Administration, financials and logistics: sales, purchasing and stock management).

Then we worked on the Core model setup. The implemented addons in this project were:

-          Extrafields: to manage products (items) hierarchy, customers hierarchy, add a tab on Purchase Order window and add a window to B1 main menu to manage L’Oreal Core Model setup

-          Price Hierarchical Management (PHM): to manage item prices following item hierarchy definition, marketing campaigns

-          Pricing: apply pricing strategies defined by PHM addon on Sales Order line level then on the Document Total level

-          Split Pick Lists: Split pick list following the comparison result between  the customer truck volume or weight defined by Extrafields addon on Customer level and the Sales Order volume or weight defined by Extrafields addon on item level

-          Substitution addon: Two kinds of items substitution (needs to deactivate B1 standard substitution):

o   Automatic: on sales order level

o   On shortage: while picking the Sales Order

The implemented interfaces were:

-          Sales order import: Import files provided by LOPAK customers and transform them to Sales Orders in B1

-          Purchase Order export: export B1 Purchase Order as a Sales Order file to send it to LOME or to the factory then they can import them as Sales Orders on their B1

-          Stock Interface: compares the stock level between Logistic Partner and B1 inventory

In parallel with setup workshops we did training workshops with the key users by area. This made the setup easier and efficient.

Picture of me taken with Burj Khalifa
the highest skyscraper of the world 

This project phase coincided with the cricket world cup. The final game was played by India and Pakistan. Pakistani lost and the project team was very sad because cricket is the most popular sport in Pakistan.   

VISEO: From 2008 to 2012

I started working with VISEO Company, the leader of French Business One integrators in 2008 in Paris.

When I arrived at VISEO, they didn’t have any official hotline support yet so I created it. I was in charge of the 30 French SMEs existing B1 projects and some of the international subsidiaries of French Groups.

My job was:

-          Take into account the customers’ requests using the B1 support platform which is something similar to the SAP market place. The aim was to respect the SLAs

-          Qualify the customers’ requests:

o   By priority: critical, high, medium or low

o   By issue type: Bug, assistance or change request

o   By area: Financials, Sales, Purchasing, administration, technical…

-          Handle the issues which don’t need a special knowledge of the project

-          Ask the consultant who did the project for the information needed to handle the issue

-          If the issue really needs to be handled by the consultant who did the project, dispatch the ticket and affect it to the concerned consultant and explain the issue to him or her to facilitate the treatment. Then ensure that the issue has been treated and communicate it to the customer

-          Create a support ticket on the SAP market place in case of bug needing SAP action

-          In case of change request, create a functional specification document and communicate it the customer with a workload to be validated before treatment. If a technical development is needed, ask the developers and work on a technical specification with them before communicating the workload to the customer. If necessary, go to customer’s site to work with them

The top customers (interesting scope, best income) were: SISLEY Switzerland, SISLEY Taiwan, Bouygues Construction (Congo, Ethiopia), Socomec (India), VEOLIA Propreté France, COMECA Indonesia, DAITO KASEI EUROPE

Picture taken on my last day in VISEO

I did this job for one year and half then I documented all the procedures and trained the new B1 support team of VISEO before I switched officially to consulting/project mode.