"We are proud to use transactionSHUTTLE for transaction generation in SAP. The alternative would have been costly EDI / ABAP customizing."
Kris Van Belle, MIS & Reporting Manager - NV Roche SA
The Belgian affiliate N.V. ROCHE S.A. (Pharmaceuticals) has been using transactionSHUTTLE since end of 2000. In the beginning transactionSHUTTLE was used for the “classic” applications like update of customer master, material master and vendor master data. Today, transactionSHUTTLE is used on a daily basis by the Order Entry Department to load Free of charge orders in SAP R/3.
Recently, Roche Brussels decided to redefine the distribution process of samples to doctors and to have each request processed in SAP R/3 as a Free of charge order (transaction VA01).
All requests are collected and entered in an ACCESS database to check if the maximum defined quantities per doctor are not exceeded. This control has to be done outside SAP R/3 because not all 40,000 Belgian doctors are created in SAP R/3. Instead, the orders are posted on a one-time customer account. For each order, a national reference number is completed that identifies the doctor. Also the ship-to name and address of the one-time customer account have to be overwritten.
Because of the high number of transactions, an automated solution was needed to avoid the workload of double coding – once in ACCESS and a second time in SAP R/3 as Free of charge order.
Every day, a TXT file is produced from ACCESS that contains all information needed to generate sales orders in SAP R/3. The Order Entry Department receives the TXT file and pastes the data in an Excel load template with built-in macros that converts the information in a format suitable for upload in SAP R/3.
About Roche
Headquartered in Basel, Switzerland, Roche is one of the world’s leading research-orientated healthcare groups. The company's two core businesses in pharmaceuticals and diagnostics provide innovative products and services that address prevention, diagnosis and treatment of diseases, thus enhancing people’s health and quality of life. The two core businesses achieved a turnover of 19.3 billion Swiss Francs in the first three quarters of 2002 and employed about 57,000 employee’s world-wide.
