RBE Plus User and Role Analysis
Enhancing transparency of SAP system usage

The Witzenmann Group is one of the world's leading manufacturers of flexible metal components such as hoses, expansion joints, bellows and automotive parts. Headquartered in Pforzheim, Germany, the group is workplace to 3,200 employees; in 2008 its subsidiaries worldwide generated more than 400 million euros in sales.

IBIS: Mr. Somann, you conducted the RBE Plus User and Role Analysis. What were your goals?
Torsten J. Somann: We currently deploy SAP at eight sites in various user departments. We wanted to understand which functions our SAP users employed at these sites, and how often. Our aim was to improve management of licenses to reduce costs. And we wanted to gain transparency for the sites soon to be implementing SAP.

IBIS: Were you just interested in reducing license costs or did you have other goals too?
Torsten J. Somann: The upcoming negotiations with SAP were certainly the initial motivation. But it's also vital to identify the areas of the worldwide SAP system our staff use most frequently – what authorizations users have, and who uses what most. Another goal was to optimize our authorization system.

IBIS: Could you tell us some of the questions the RBE Plus User and Role Analysis answered for you?
Torsten J. Somann: We wanted to achieve two things: license optimization and a process/ usage analysis. We used the tool to figure out whether we'd assigned users the correct license types and categories. Another major task was to check the quality of user master data – mainly for staff outside Germany. We were able to pinpoint where information had been poorly maintained. Plus, we wanted data on our active users -- whether they logged on to the system and if so, how often and to what extent (which transactions they executed and how frequently.) It was also important to find out about the creation and changing of data and documents. In view of the IT security activities we're currently implementing, it helped us to better define user roles. Another advantage for our proposed license measurement with SAP is that components incurring license fees are analyzed as they really are. At the same time, the tool shows us document and transaction volumes for each component.

IBIS: Did you encounter any problems with employee data privacy?
Torsten J. Somann: No. We had no problems with that because the evaluations did not extend beyond the user master data and information already contained in the SAP system.

IBIS: Can you cite benefits specific to the RBE User and Role Analysis?
Torsten J. Somann: In addition to the findings relevant to license measurement, the User and Role Analysis delivers a lot of statistics – all the way down to document level. This gives us profound insight into our employees' usage, which we can use to tackle a variety of IT and process-related challenges, such as optimization and harmonization. The analysis facilitates support, training sessions, processes, standardization and so on. And management benefits from a large amount of useful information condensed onto just a few pages.

IBIS: Can you see any requirements IBIS should focus on for the RBE Plus User and Role Analysis?
Torsten J. Somann: We're all set at the moment. But we might run into other challenges in non-IT areas after the project presentation. And again, we'll rely heavily on IBIS to help us find solutions.

IBIS: So what comes next? What other projects do you have planned?
Torsten J. Somann: Over and above a comprehensive RBE Plus Analysis of our existing system landscape, we've planned some other projects worth mentioning: implementation of SAP Portal, Identity Management and SCM; plus SAP rollouts in China, Brazil, Russia and India. And we'll be deploying paper-to-ERP software (automatic processing of incoming invoices).