To run efficiently, cars rely on an array of pistons, pumps, belts, joints, and levers acting in concert to convert raw energy into forward motion. As it happens, running a $4.4 billion automotive parts manufacturer with 80 customers in 24 countries on six continents is not too different.

With globally dispersed clients including Ford, General Motors, and Toyota, Illinois-based parts supplier Tenneco puts a premium on responding quickly and efficiently to parts requests from customers worldwide. However, in 2005, Tenneco executives recognized that the company’s decentralized data storage systems were making it difficult to offer fast, consistent price quotes to its customers.

“We did not have an easy way of knowing what the company was doing in North America versus what the company was doing in China or any other part of the world. Our inability to coordinate and act as one global company to our customers, who expect global quotes on new business, was a major obstacle,” says Scott Ready, executive director, Tenneco, Inc., Lake Forest, IL.

On some occasions, Ready says, Tenneco found that various units within the company were competing for the same new business. “We’d wonder why we were building the parts in South America and shipping them to Europe, and then we’d find out we’d bid against ourselves,” says Ready.

The first step in solving the problem was to build a central storehouse for product data — including computer assisted design (CAD) drawings, billing materials, and specifications — so the company’s managers, design engineers, and supply chain workers could track the progress of a new part throughout its life cycle.

“We also needed effective change management so there’s a good audit trail of when things were changed, who changed them, who reviewed the change, and who approved it — from the time the product was created to its design, production, retirement servicing, and end of life,” says Ready.

Working with consultants from SAP and other vendors, Tenneco went live in May 2007 with a data management solution based on SAP Product Lifecycle Management (SAP PLM) and third-party technologies that will serve as the backbone of a larger master data management project aimed at consolidating global business processes.

Four Project Challenges and How Tenneco Met Them

Tenneco vaulted significant obstacles to accomplish its goal of establishing a central repository for product data. Here are four of the biggest challenges, and how the company surmounted each of them:

1. Defining the appropriate scope and choosing the right vendor. Tenneco’s product master data project began as a much larger initiative aimed at global coordination of its business processes. The scope of the so-called Global Process Project included requirements from management, sales, manufacturing, engineering, and other internal departments — as well as automated coordination with customers. Fulfilling those requirements would have been too costly, according to Ready, so Tenneco decided to focus on creating a foundation for future projects.
   
   “We really refocused on where they saw the benefits coming from. Some groups were quick to put in requirements but did not detail many benefits as to where the project was going to save money, reduce overhead, or eliminate cost. The product data management project is where we saw the biggest benefit,” says Ready.
   
   Even after narrowing its focus, however, Tenneco struggled to select the appropriate vendor for its product master data solution, evaluating solutions from MatrixOne, Agile, PTC, and SAP. After initially selecting a different solution and working for nine months to implement it, Tenneco abandoned that project, citing a lack of out-of-the-box functionality for integrating with Tenneco’s CAD technologies.
   
   Around the same time, Tenneco decided to standardize SAP as its preferred ERP system worldwide. Tenneco’s emissions control unit in Europe had already adopted SAP PLM, so Ready’s team selected SAP for its product master data project.
   
   Tenneco relied heavily on consultants from SAP for the implementation and configuration of SAP PLM to manage SAP-specific and cross-platform applications. The SAP PLM components included Material Master, Basic Data, and SAP NetWeaver Application Server. The system’s cross-application components included engineering change notifications, CAD and non-CAD documentation, product and document classification, and CAD integration.
   
   The project team also successfully customized the SAP system to address specific needs and accelerate user acceptance. For example, the team enhanced the Engineering Change Management component to offer drill-downs into certain documents, a “staging” functionality that allows users to advance documents to the next review stage, and a single-button update function that enables the release coordinator to apply changes during processing. SAP consultants also developed 10 to 15 custom reports to support the process and other enhancements.
   
   By initially focusing on standardizing the engineering change management process, Tenneco laid the groundwork for globalizing its business process management.
   
   
2. Managing organizational change. A critical component of Tenneco’s product master data project team was the “Business Readiness Team,” which considered the impact of the new system on the employees’ daily lives.
   
   The team first mapped the current state of business processes at the company’s various units. Next, it defined the user roles necessitated by the new system. By comparing the old process to the new one, the team was able to identify areas where the new processes would alter the way existing employees performed their duties. This approach helped Tenneco prepare training materials and predict pushback from employees whose jobs would change as a result of the implementation.
   
   “In some cases, there were roles, such as the release coordinator role, that were defined in the new process that did not exist. We didn’t have anybody who did that, so we had to figure out how we were going to address that. Were we going to ask one group to take on additional responsibilities? Were we going to create a new position in the organization and either transfer or hire somebody to fill that role? That’s what we had to work through to map what we had today to what the future state would be,” says Ready.
   
   Tenneco staffed the Business Readiness Team with members of many different departments, Ready says, to provide the most detailed picture possible of how changes would affect workers in those areas.
   
   
3. Training users with as much real-world information as possible. Developing an effective training program for employees affected by the project also proved difficult. The project team was forced back to the drawing board after an early pilot of a training program resulted in concern that the training was not thorough enough. Ready says this issue arose because members of the core project team did not have time to work closely with consultants from RWD Technologies, who developed the initial training program and assisted in later revisions.
   
   “At that point, we had to extend our timeline because we weren’t able to start the user training on time. It was clear we had to redo the training materials. We used input from the super users and went through our approach again and rethought everything. We eventually came up with a very good approach,” says Ready.
   
   The improved training program consisted of a multi-tiered, incremental regimen of courses that began with conceptual overviews and moved into SAP training, role-based training, and practicing with real-life scenarios. Figure 1 provides an overview of the training map.
   
   
   
   
   

   Figure 1

   An overview of Tenneco’s multi-layered training program
   
   Ready says a key to success for the training sessions was training engineering managers first and asking them to give other users the information. That way, the managers could convey why the company was asking engineers to enter more data about each product as they worked, rather than just blaming the new system for the added responsibility.
   
   “They are probably not the people that are querying that data because they know it already. It’s in their CAD file. But they need to enter it because another engineer may need to see if we already have a product that looks like something he is thinking about. The overview course featured some of that information up front so that it came from engineering management why certain things were being done and not because ‘the system requires you to do it that way,’” says Ready.
   
   One stumbling block during the training phase was the project team’s failure to upload enough data to successfully run real-world training scenarios for all roles. Ready says the team underestimated the time required to verify the integrity of the data and load it into the test system. “The initial plan was to have all that data loaded for training so people could take what they did yesterday in the old system and look at it in the new system right away. The effectiveness of the training would have been greatly enhanced if people could have actually done their scenario on a full set of data that looked just like it was going to look day one,” he says.
   
   
4. Dealing with cultural differences in a globalized company. One element of the product master data project that surprised Ready was the variance between working groups in different regions or countries.
   
   “That was a real eye-opener for me, having done ERP implementations and other implementations in the past. I had some expectations, but I underappreciated the different organizational influences and cultural influences. That was really something that had an impact on getting decisions done timely and moving forward,” says Ready.
   
   Each unit was typically supportive of consolidating their processes — until they discovered that their own processes were not selected as models for the future. Convincing five groups in six countries to coalesce behind a single solution proved more difficult than Ready imagined. Success required finding a balance between allowing input and simply making and enforcing decisions. Sometimes, even a bit of deception was in order.
   
   “In some cases, we tried to convince people it was their idea. In other cases, we told them that this was just the way the SAP system works. Sometimes we just needed to make decisions and bring it to them — pick one now and let people deal with it later,” he says.
   
   For decisions that required input from key players, Ready says, preparation was vital to building a coalition. “You have to make sure you get the right people in the room and have the process and system developed to a state where you can actually walk through a demo and show them the pros and cons. That is much more effective at driving a consensus,” he says.

Thus far, Tenneco has rolled out its product master data project at two of its five global groups and plans to finish the rest by the end of 2008. Early feedback has been positive, according to Ready, though he cautions that measuring a project of this type’s success can be tricky. For one thing, you are likely to realize anticipated gains in employee efficiency only after users master the new system and their new responsibilities in it. However, Ready is positive that the product data repository will provide significant rewards as Tenneco ties other elements into it.

“I always have a hard time arguing about the benefits unless it’s a very clear thing that can be measured, and when we’re talking about efficiency, that’s not always easy. However, there is value in what’s in place now. As we add additional pieces and get into program management and prices and quoting, we will be able to drive benefits out of that because we’ve got a good foundation of data and processes already in place,” he says.

Davin Wilfrid

Davin Wilfrid was a writer and editor for SAPinsider and SAP Experts. He contributed case studies and research projects aimed at helping the SAP ecosystem get the most out of their existing technology investments.

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