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Company profile
Allergan, Inc., headquartered in Irvine, California, is a technology driven, global healthcare company, providing eye care and specialty pharmaceutical products throughout the world. It develops and commercialises products in the eye care, neuromodulator, skin care and other specialty markets that deliver value to its customers, satisfy unmet medical needs, and improve patients' lives.
Business need
Needing a comprehensive enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution, Allergan began deploying SAP R/3 application software in 1996. The company's SAP R/3 production environment distributed print output to more than 300 printers spread across 46 locations around the world. However, within six months of going live, the company's IT staff recognized that an enterprise output management solution for its R/3-generated printing was needed to oversee the reliable delivery of business-critical documents throughout the enterprise.
Staff noticed management documents, accounting reports, shipping manifests and invoices were sometimes purged while waiting to print due to recurring print spooler problems. When the print spooler hung, the software had to be restarted and the output queue would be lost. Worse still, it was not possible to track these important business documents to a specific R/3 user or job to request resubmission to print.
According to Susan Ondrovic, Director of Enterprise Systems at Allergan, "Employees were having a difficult time managing R/3-generated output, in particular the thousands of invoices that were being printed every week."
Allergan urgently needed to address the output issues before important business functions were crippled and employee confidence in the newly implemented ERP system was lost. Ondrovic noted that the emerging lack of confidence in the reliability of the printing system, combined with the large volume of invoices printed from R/3 each day, resulted in Allergan employees sorting through them by hand to make sure everything got printed.
For the company's information supply chain, the unreliable printed output resulted in employees not knowing which goods to prepare and where they were going, customers not receiving ordered products, and Allergan not getting paid. In essence, the printing issues were a time-consuming problem, a risk to customers' satisfaction, and a burden on Allergan's bottom-line.
Solution overview
Jeff Winston, Vice President of I.S. Technology & Engineering, recognized that beyond the business concerns there existed print reliability and control problems that could not be solved in the native UNIX environment. He specifically looked for a solution that would address three core output management challenges: control, visibility and reliability. Winston believed that by finding a solution that overcame these three challenges, Allergan's business objectives would not be compromised.
"If we can't print, we can't do business," Winston said. "It was at that point that HP Output Management solutions became a priority for us." Winston needed a third-party solution that would integrate well with the existing R/3 implementation and help manage and control the large volumes of output being generated.
HP Output Management solutions are a family of infrastructure products and services that innovate the way enterprise customers manage, distribute and share information ensuring the reliable and cost-effective delivery of documents, anywhere. The solutions provide simple print serving capabilities that make network printing easier and automate delivery capabilities that enable the reliable distribution of application generated documents across printer, fax, web and e-mail destinations. Through easy procurement options, customers can choose to use HP solutions by paying a flat monthly fee, or they can utilize flexible managed services to let HP cost-effectively manage their entire printing and imaging environment. As a result, organizations can simplify their print environment, streamline and accelerate business processes and save valuable IT capital and people resources.
Winston elaborated, "We elected to leverage HP Output Server and HP Output Manager for R/3 to satisfy our business requirements."
Challenge
- Ensuring delivery of SAP R/3-generated output.
- Bolstering employee confidence in reliability of printed output.
- Minimize negative business impact of printing related issues.
Solution components
- Deployment of HP Output Server and HP Output Manager for SAP R/3.
Results and benefits
- Established control over, and visibility into, the entire output management process.
- Automated the information supply chain.
- Virtually eliminated printing problems over the last five years.
Allergan's implementation strategy
Allergan required a unified global system that enabled end-to-end control and ensured reliability of the ERP system output. To accomplish this, Allergan's strategy was to create a corporate repository for transaction information, on a single SAP R/3 instance, located at its Irvine, California headquarters.
Winston reflected, "This approach enabled us to have tremendous visibility into all aspects of our operations no matter where in the world business is transacted. At Allergan, HP Output Server, along with SAP R/3 and our global network, represent the cornerstones of our ERP architecture."
Regained confidence in the ERP system
Winston said, "HP Output Server integrated very well into our SAP R/3 infrastructure, and it has given us confidence that the ERP output functions will always reliably perform to expectations."
After the HP implementation, Ondrovic and Winston witnessed a significant decrease in the number of printing problems. Winston reflected, "The number of printing issues dropped dramatically. Where printing problems used to be a daily occurrence, they only occur very occasionally now."
Today, five years after the initial installation of HP Output Server, Allergan is running SAP R/3 release 4.7 and has a global rollout of both HP Output Server and HP Output Manager for R/3, encompassing 500 printers across 30 locations.
Winston concluded, "HP Output Server continues to give our IT administrators control over, and visibility into, the entire output management process, effectively eliminating confusion in the warehouses, lost orders and missed product deliveries. Feedback from our end-users clearly indicates that printing problems are a thing of the past. Thanks to HP Output Server software, our SAP R/3 printing subsystem works reliably, quickly and efficiently."
For more information, visit our web site:http://www.hp.com/go/outputmanagement
2004 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice. The only warranties for HP products and services are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. HP shall not be liable for technical or editorial errors or omissions contained herein. |
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Print versie
