Antalis, the biggest European paper distributor, has started a comprehensive SAP implementation in four Central Eastern European countries. The corporation's partner in the project scheduled for longer than a year is BCC.
The project, started in September, is aimed at strengthening the market position of Antalis in Central Eastern Europe. This will be made possible thanks to unifying business processes and reporting standards, the transfer of managing best practices and integrating departments and units in one IT system.
Joanna Smolińska, Antalis managing director in Central Eastern Europe (CEE), points out: ’For Antalis units this is a priority project for next year. We expect that thanks to cooperation with BCC we will obtain an efficient tool that will provide us with comprehensive, reliable and up-to-date information on profitability of particular products, distribution channels and market segments’.
The project covers the most important areas of the company’s operations: SAP solutions in financial accounting (FI) and fixed assets (FI-AA), treasury (TR), controlling (CO), materials management (MM), sales and distribution (SD) and elements of production planning (PP). The integral parts of the implemented corporate solution are external systems, connected with SAP, which support warehouse management, transport planning, data warehouse and the CRM system. Antalis units in Poland and Lithuania are scheduled to start using SAP in October 2006, the units in the Czech Republic and Slovakia– in January 2007.
Tomasz Górecki, Antalis IT director in Central Eastern Europe and project manager for Antalis CEE, points out: ‘The scale of the project may be proved by the size of the team it involves: more than 100 people of 5 countries, including Antalis headquarters in France. The commitment and business knowledge of the employees, together with BCC expertise in corporate SAP project management and the consultants’ know-how will allow us to start a solution which will lend Antalis management comprehensive support in all the countries covered by the implementation ’.
BCC coordinates all the implementation works in cooperation with project management for Antalis. The scope of works for BCC covers such areas as the concept of the target IT solution on the basis of a corporate model with the specificity of units in particular countries, then configuration works, preparing and executing tests and supervision over preparing master data and programming works.
Bartłomiej Buszczak, BCC general director, says: ’Antalis is a very important client for us. I consider this to be the largest international SAP project to have ever been executed with such an involvement of a Polish implementation company. We are all the more pleased with the corporation’s choice as our competitors were companies operating on international market for a long time. For BCC it is a next step in building our strong market standing in the regional market of SAP implementations in Central Eastern Europe’.
Antalis is the biggest in Europe and fourth in the world distributor of materials for visual communication (paper for printing industry and offices, packaging materials and VisCom products). The concern, with its yearly income of EUR 2.3 billion, employs 7,000 people that serve over 180,000 customers, both companies and printing houses in 37 countries. Antalis Poland, for years listed in rankings of the biggest companies in Poland, is a leader in distributing materials for visual communication. In 2004 Antalis Poland reported a turnover of PLN 363m and 25% market share. Further information: www.antalis.com