Creative Memories

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"Waterstone Consulting was able to drive real business value within our Creative Memories organization through leading-edge technology: an electronic commerce system that has helped increase our customer service levels while lowering our costs to generate and process orders." - Daryl Rachey, IS Manager, Creative Memories

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Creative Memories, a growing manufacturer and distributor of diversified consumer products, processes orders from more than 36,000 customers each month. The company was looking for another channel to generate orders quickly, accurately and efficiently. A web-based order entry system could deliver the desired results- if successfully integrated with the SAP order entry, distribution, billing and inventory management processes in use throughout the company. Creative Memories turned to Waterstone Consulting to deliver an e-commerce system that would drive tangible business impact by working seamlessly with the company's enterprise-wide R/3 software.
Executive Summary

Business Strategy

The Waterstone Consulting team combined its expertise in SAP R/3 and e-commerce technologies with a strong functional understanding of Creative Memories' unique business to quickly identify the key objectives that would drive true impact:

• Enhance order processing by extending these functions electronically over the Internet.
• Increase order accuracy.
• Shorten order lead times.

Technology Strategy

Among the solutions implemented by Waterstone Consulting is an advanced sales order entry system that more effectively processes the thousands of customer orders received each month. This new system includes custom tools that provide the company with better access to sales-related information, a web-based front-end application that enables more cost-effective order entry, and a "universal" order entry system that brings sales orders directly into SAP, eliminating manual data entry processes.

Ensuring tight synchronization of the web-based order entry system with Creative Memories' SAP R/3 software, Waterstone Consulting utilized SAP R/3 core business framework tools to automatically input order information into SAP. An Oracle database maintains critical pricing, product and customer information uploaded from the website into the SAP R/3 system. The universal order entry system was developed using custom ABAP/4 programs, function modules and ALE configuration of output determination to consolidate orders from all of Creative Memories' subsystems, create custom SAP IDOCS and insert the orders into the SAP Oracle database. Customized confirmation output, triggered by ALE, provides Creative Memories with an accurate picture of all transactions entered into the system.

Project Approach

Waterstone Consulting's in-depth knowledge of the SAP R/3 BAPI and ALE tools was essential to the successful integration of the front end web-based system with the core SAP R/3 business processes. Once tightly integrated, the new order management system became a key component of the overall ERP solution.

Project Success

With an e-commerce solution from Waterstone Consulting now in place, Creative Memories expects to realize more than a third of its orders from the Internet, a much less costly, and more effective channel.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Industry:	Benefits:
Consumer Products	Increased customer service levels Improved access to order information More cost-effective order processing
Solution:	Technology:
Enterprise Resource Planning, Electronic Commerce, Sales Order Entry	SAP R/3, Windows NT, Oracle DBMS