Aircraft Maintenance and Engineering Corporation(AMECO), located at the Beijing Capital Airport, is a joint venture between Air China and Lufthansa. It was set up on May 2, 1989 and became operational on August 1st in the same year. The main business of AMECO is to perform maintenance, repair and overhaul of aircraft’s airframes, engines and components. After 12 years of development, the total assets of AMECO have increased by 4. 25 times, operating revenue increased by 5.68 times. AMECO has contributed 0.826 billion to the government from 1990 to 2000. AMECO has become one of the leading MRO providers and achieved significant performance in the international competition marketing.

More efficient and optimized management with mySAP ERP

The organizational structure of AMECO is composed of five executive divisions one of which is the Human Resources division. AMECO counts 3,600 employees, about 2/3 of which are production technical workers.These staffs work by shifts and have no fixed time to meet airline’s requirements. For instance the staffs responsible for line maintenance will often adjust their working shift plan according to scheduled flights and seasonal factors. The staffs in charge of aircraft overhaul will adjust their working plan according to the task intensity and contract time period. This makes HR management is very important and complex task for the company.

The Need for Enterprise Development

The old Human Resource Management System was composed of a series of separate applications such as time recording statistics, position catalog, resource rearrangement, wage calculation and distribution, each designed and developed by different vendors. With the development of AMECO’s HR division’s responsibilities and the continuous modifications to these applications, many troubles occurred such as low software performance, redundant databases, low data security and so on. In the mean time, the company also felt the need to build the link between its HR Management System (HR MS) and other systems such as its training system, human resource planning system in production division, finance management system and so on. To achieve this, AMECO created a HR MS task force in mid-June of 1999 to select a suitable one replacement.

The Human Resource division task force was composed of three persons.The three were all key users familiar with timing-recording, wage calculation and employee master data processing; they also had high level skills on computer application usage. The Human resource manager himself was in charge of the task force. The task force analyzed the main business processes and discussed all the possible solutions to optimize the existing processes. This project’s work formed the company’s baseline to get the new system.

AMECO opted for the mySAP ERP Human PA and PD solution, partly because AMECO’s Finance division had implemented the FI and CO modules of SAP, so they have complete confidence on SAP’s strong functionalities.

Adequate preparation makes the implementation easy

AMECO chose SAP Consulting as the partner to implement its new SAP HR application. SAP consultants provided the basic training to AMECO’s project team in the first ten days. At the same time SAP consultants and the project team began with the design of a company blueprint. With the help of SAP Consulting’s professionals who have rich implementation experience and a very professional background, the project’s implementation’s success was even more ensured. The ASAP project methodology speeded up the implementations phase by using tools and accelerators based on the best practices of SAP Consulting around the world.

Based on the blueprint, SAP’s project team set up the software testing environment. The team made the original model settings and separate function testing. In order to get the best integration results and prepare for the synchronization between SAP and TAS (another 3rd Party application), the team updated the existing time-recording data collection system.

Since the organization structure of two big workshops at AMECO was being restructured during that time, SAP Consulting’s team decided to run the new and old system in parallel, and the old system was suspended on September 1.The PA module went live in September 1 and became the main system in HR division.

The mySAP ERP HR solution has benefited AMECO in many respects.MySAP HR solution streamlined and made the HR workflows standard.The solution decreased the risk that the performance of the business depended too much on a worker’s experience. It made the workers make less mistakes. Improved data reliability and security, especially for SAP’s changing history and working monitoring system achieved significant achievement in correcting many operating error. Strict roles and responsibilities and user access management set up a good base to distinguish the responsibility and functions of different department. MySAP ERP reduced the margin of mistakes during data transfer and made HR work more efficient through the interface with other system. The company could get the information they need such as attendance, work position more quickly and more accurately. In the meantime, the system is a good base to implement an employee self-service system in future. The next step of the project is to implement the PD module and complete all the interfaces with other systems, such as the qualification management system, training management system, SAP logistic system and production management system. With the development of the project, SAP will bring more efficient and fully optimized management to AMECO.