Using Winshuttle

Managing Data Entry Projects

In the course of routine business, data must be entered into ERP systems such as SAP. There is a wide spectrum of data entry projects. At the low end, there is the simple case with a relatively small number of records entered infrequently, for example less than 100 records in a month, that may be handled best by manual data-entry. At the other end of the spectrum, we find more complex data with extremely large numbers of records, e.g. over ten million per month. Such volumes usually require the assistance of a company's IT department to provide automated solutions via programming in ABAP or in some cases by using tools like LSMW, or CATT. However, there is a wide gap in the middle ground of the spectrum, and it is in this gap that most data entry projects fall.

Solutions to Data Uploading Processes

Some companies hope that outsourcing may lower the costs associated with manual data entry, but it does not eliminate the errors nor decrease the processing time. While there are some data uploading processes that are well served by enhancing and maintaining a proprietary program, most are not.

Common data loading projects include the following cases:

Data Entry
Inputting of new data, either master or transactional, that is required by all departments in a business to keep operations running smoothly. Some simple examples include new materials and new sales orders in supply chain, hiring actions in HR, new purchase orders or contracts in procurement, and journal entries or invoices in finance.

Data Maintenance
Mass changes to master or transactional data in SAP driven by changing business requirements. This is a routine business process that is usually the responsibility of the business process owner, the data owner or a data steward such as a materials manager, financial data analyst, or an HR analyst.

Data Integration
Synchronizing data in multiple disparate production systems. Many companies use systems outside of SAP for specific applications, e.g., Siebel or SalesForce.com for CRM, or PeopleSoft for HR. The data between these systems needs to remain consistent at all times in order to support critical business decisions and operations. Also, data is often received from external business partners, such as invoices from vendors or monthly statements from the bank, that need to be loaded into your SAP system.

Data Import
Data Import(or data migration/ data conversion): A core activity during new SAP implementations, upgrades, or mergers and acquisition-driven consolidations. The accurate and timely mass import of large volumes of data into an SAP system has tremendous value during these projects and can accelerate the return-on-investment for SAP projects.

Smarter Solutions to Data Entry Projects

Regardless of the exact business reason driving the need to enter data, most of this range is too large for manual data entry, which is extremely time-consuming and error-prone. And in most cases, the project is too small or too time-critical to petition the IT department to write programs for uploading the data, which can strain a company's technical resources and may take several days or even weeks to complete. By empowering business users to automate such data loading tasks using easy-to-use solutions from Winshuttle, while maintaining the necessary IT security and controls, companies can increase productivity, significantly reduce data management costs and generate tremendous business efficiencies.

Winshuttle's tools solve these SAP data challenges. Thanks to the power and flexibility of transactionSHUTTLE, billions of records have been automatically moved. Winshuttle's solutions have been used in every SAP Module and for hundreds of different transactions. In fact, if there is a transaction code (tcode) accessible from the SAP User Interface, then Winshuttle can automate it.