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Explore critical topics shaping today’s SAP landscape—from digital transformation and cloud migration to cybersecurity and business intelligence. Each topic is curated to provide in-depth insights, best practices, and the latest trends that help SAP professionals lead with confidence.
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Dive into the most talked-about themes shaping the SAP ecosystem right now. From cross-industry innovations to region-spanning initiatives, explore curated collections that spotlight what’s trending and driving transformation across the SAP community.
Greif, Inc. transitioned from an outdated on-premise time tracking system to Replicon's automated solution, drastically reducing chargeback processing time from 3-5 weeks to just one day.
This transformation matters as it improves administrative efficiency and enhances real-time visibility into project costs, allowing for better resource allocation and quicker decision-making.
The changes impact Greif's IT team, enabling them to manage internal and external consultant resources more effectively, ultimately fostering a more reliable invoicing process and increasing overall operational efficiency.
Greif, Inc. successfully transformed its outdated time tracking system by adopting Replicon, resulting in a dramatic reduction in chargeback processing time from weeks to one day, enhanced resource visibility, and improved accuracy in project costing and invoicing.
Summary
Greif, Inc., a global leader in industrial packaging, needed to replace an outdated on-premise time tracking system that caused delays, data inconsistencies, and limited visibility into project costs. They adopted Replicon to automate time tracking, improve resource visibility, and streamline cost capitalization. Chargeback processing time dropped from 3–5 weeks to just one day, and resourcing decisions became faster and more reliable.
Project Success
Administrative Efficiency: Administrative chargeback timelines reduced from weeks to a day.
Improved Resourcing: Real-time visibility into resource availability enabled better, faster and more accurate decision-making.
Accurate Costing and Billing: Accurate and real-time data empowered teams with correct costing and invoicing insights.
Granular Visibility Drives Efficiency
Greif, Inc. is a global leader in industrial packaging products and services and is pursuing its vision to, in industrial packaging, become the best performing customer service company in the world. The company produces steel, plastic, fiber, flexible, corrugated and reconditioned containers, intermediate bulk containers, containerboard and packaging accessories, and provides filling, packaging and industrial packaging reconditioning services for a wide range of industries.
Greif also manages timber properties in the Southeastern United States. The company is strategically positioned with production facilities in over 45 countries to serve global as well as regional customers.
Challenges
Inefficient project and time tracking for employees and consultants on both external and internal projects complicated invoicing, chargebacks, and tracking the capitalization of project costs.
Lack of granular and real-time visibility into project progress and hours worked called data inconsistencies into question.
Lack of Real-time Project Visibility Causes Chargeback Delays
Greif’s IT department has a mix of 230 internal resources and external consultants who support an array of applications globally for business units across the company (including enhancements, upgrades, etc.), but they also engage in capital funding project work. This means meticulously tracking project time against capitalizable and non-capitalizable project costs.
Legacy System Pangs
They were challenged by their on-premise time tracking system. In relying on this system to capture time worked against a predefined list of projects into their legacy system, Greif IT grappled with frequent delays, a lack of visibility into both project progress and resource availability, lack of granular data on how time was spent, and — ultimately — problems with data consistency.
New Emphasis on Project Visibility and Administrative Efficiency
For a multinational business like Greif, Replicon’s cloud capabilities played a critical role in reducing IT’s administrative overhead. Though based in Delaware, Ohio, Greif has a multitude of ongoing projects around the world at any given time, so it could take weeks to onboard consultants by deploying their on-premise time tracking tool locally to their computers. With Replicon, Mike Domansky, Director of IT Portfolio Management & Governance, affirms that the process of adding users has now been reduced to “about 10 minutes.”
After switching to Replicon, Greif IT was able to capitalize on their new system’s advanced functionalities to enhance governance over what their users had access to. In doing so, they not only made the data entry process less tedious, but they also increased data accuracy and overall holistic visibility by ensuring that the right people had access to the right project information. In turn, this increased level of detail and accuracy afforded by Replicon systems enabled more granular and accurate invoices.
Solution
Automating processes for collating, tracking, and analyzing data on who worked on which projects and when leaves little room for error.
Tagging hours worked specifically based on user, project, and task clarifies chargebacks and enables project and resource visibility.
Today, Greif administrators responsible for handling invoices and cost capitalization have the granular visibility they need to better understand what work is being done, for how long, and by which resources. They no longer have to make the time and effort to parse out this information themselves — the system just provides it, and they know it’s reliable.
As a bonus, this newfound visibility into resources and projects has also dramatically improved Greif’s resource allocation, both reducing the time it takes to make resourcing decisions, and instilling renewed confidence in the integrity of these decisions.
Before Replicon, it was taking far too much administrative time for us to analyze invoices as they came in and manually sort out which costs should be attributed to which projects.
Results
Reduced administrative work for chargebacks from a 3–5-week process to just one day
Collated data is consistently reliable, thanks to an intuitive, configurable user interface and automated time and project tracking for cost capitalization
Resource allocation decisions are based on deep knowledge of real-time resource availability and made more quickly
