Sydney, August 05, 2008
GSM Retail today received the SAP 2008 Customer Award of Excellence for Best All in One solution, based on Fujitsu Australia and New Zealand’s record implementation of an integrated SAP based ERP solution.
Fujitsu Australia and New Zealand Chief Executive Officer, Mr Rod Vawdrey, said the award was a strong endorsement of Fujitsu’s knowledge and experience of SAP, and its close partnership with the software vendor both nationally and globally.
Fujitsu is a SAP Channel Partner in Australia and one of the very few SAP partners to achieve global partnerships in Technology, Services and Hosting.
“Our close relationship locally and globally enables us to maximise our customers’ investment in SAP solutions with end-to-end offerings from consulting, systems integration and outsourcing service to infrastructure,” Mr Vawdrey said.
“This award bears testimony to Fujitsu’s bold and ingenious approach to our customers' business challenges and the significant outcomes that GSM Retail has achieved as a result,” he said.
A national reseller of Vodafone mobile solutions, GSM Retail went to market in July 2007 requiring a solution to support an aggressive roll out of Vodafone branded concessions located nationally within Myer department stores.
Fujitsu won a competitive tender over Oracle, Microsoft and Netsuite with a SAP baseline solution using SAP Best Practice™ building blocks with pre-configured processes installed.
“The first retail site went live only four weeks into the project, which is a record delivery timeframe for an SAP project in Australia and New Zealand. We completed deployment across 20 sites in just nine weeks. The Fujitsu solution allows our consultants to leverage existing best-in-class processes to accelerate implementation,” Mr Vawdrey said.
GSM Retail’s Group Financial Controller, Mr Alexis Phitidis said that trading close to a year on SAP, the solution has proven that is capable of providing the functionality, flexibility and scalability to support continued adoption across the retail channel.
“Following the initial success in the Myer channel, we have rolled out the SAP solution to GSM’s remaining core stores in Australia and New Zealand and as a testament to the strength of the foundation and long-term viability of the solution, few changes have been made since the initial configuration,” Mr Phitidis said.
Mr Phitidis, who continues to lead the project internally, said that in addition to building a SAP system based on best practices within a short time frame, there are two other areas that continue to draw attention. Firstly, sales staff utilise a slightly modified SAP sales order process and thus engage directly with the system, as opposed to using a point of sale product. Secondly, at a store level, the company has chosen Apple Mac’s running OS X as the standard operating environment making extensive use of SAP’s improved Java GUI.
“The SAP implementation by Fujitsu has proven a very good fit for our needs, with a bit of tweaking, the best practice solution has given us strong control over the key areas of a telecommunications retailer,” Mr Phitidis said.
This is the fourth year that a customer of Fujitsu – a Global SAP Technology, Services and Hosting Partner and local Channel Partner – has taken out one of the prestigious awards since their introduction by SAP Australia New Zealand in 2001.
The award was presented by President and CEO of SAP Australia New Zealand, Mr Tim Ebbeck during the annual SAP Australian User Group (SAUG) Summit 2008.