Support of business processes with inventory

Reports
photo: Universal
Support of Business Processes at Universal Music Germany
with Inventory-neutral Credit and Invoice Tracking
It’s All about Music
By Gero Bruchmann
Universal Music Germany, as a subsidiary of the Universal Music Group, has the most complete music
catalog in the world, including the best-known artists and labels in the industry. With a market share of
around 30%, the company is the indisputable market leader.
When company headquarters moved on July 1, 2002 from Hamburg into the former cold-storage building
of the Berliner Spreespeicher, it wasn’t only a huge coup for the capital, but also just as huge a logistical
undertaking, particularly from the point of view of IT. After all, the goal was to make the move to Berlin with
next to no interruption in day-to-day business, after the last person in Hamburg turned off the music. To
manage this, Universal Music Germany successfully relied on the support of MaK DATA SYSTEM.
Order Processing, Europewide
The processing of each day’s 2,500
orders with a total of around 50,000
items begins with the production
databases (ORACLE 8.1.6) in Berlin.
They do their work on 1,3 GHz DualCPU Compaq servers with 3 GB of
RAM under Windows 2000, and only
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the ORACLE Home resides on a
local server hard disk. All the other
available memory on disks is in the
so-called SAN, the “Storage Area
Network”, a high-speed network
between servers and storage subsystems. In contrast with traditional
dedicated connections between computers and disks, the SAN enables
an any-to-any connection over the
entire network. The hard disks are
thus independent of the servers
within the SAN and just as independent of the platforms installed.
This way, each disk, which is also
mirrored several times in the RAID1
cluster, can be assigned to one or
more servers and even be replaced
on the fly.
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ORACLE Databases with Centura as GUI
This system is only the first link in a
complex processing chain stretching
over all of Europe, with computer
centers in Germany, France, and the
UK.
In the Berlin client/server environment, the entry and processing of an
order occurs first as a “transaction”
using applications developed and
supported by the IT department ISO
(Information Systems and Organization). The development tool used
for client/server applications is nearly
without exception Centura 2.1 (formerly and now again Gupta SQL
Windows). In the production database, which accepts the orders behind the application and supports
day-to-day business as an online
database, OLTP (OnLine Transaction
Processing) is used. This satisfies
requirements with respect to fast
response times, high data transmission rates, and frequent read,
write, and delete operations.
Besides manual order entry and direct entry by users, there is an area
of automated order entry: the CAS
system (Computer Aided Selling).
One part of this system consists of
data from the outside sales force,
who transmit their customer orders
from their laptops via FTP to the
Berlin system. The other part is the
“Phononet”, a joint venture of the
music industry. This enables the
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customer to send nearly all orders via
PC remote data transmission independent of company. The orders are
collected by Phononet, split into individual order items, or “orderlines”, for
the different companies (Universal,
BMG, etc.), and then made available
to the Universal system for transfer.
Logistics
All orders are finally exported from
Berlin into the Adabas/SAP Unix
environment of Universal Manufacturing & Logistics (UML), based in
Hanover, and thus to their actual
destination: UML is home base for
production, warehousing and distribution, and is one of the most modern audio and data media production works in Europe. Among
other things located on the former
PolyGram campus in Hanover are a
CD pressing plant and warehouses.
SAP delivers the orders to the Warehouse Management System, WMS,
which performs the automatic retrieval of goods from the shelving
warehouse (picking) as well as preparation for delivery (shipping) and
then sends a return notification to
SAP.
From this, the SAP system generates
the so-called “shipping info”, the
response to the order, which is then
transferred back into the Berlin IT
environment as deliveries for the day.
There, it is used to prepare exportready SOP data (Sales and Order
Processing) for further processing by
a host system.
Host
In the host computer center in Paris,
which stores data such as customer
and article master data, the SOP data
from Berlin are received, filled in, and
forwarded on for further processing
at a variety of other places. For example, in the Romford computer
center in London, where not only
does the JDEdwards bookkeeping
system do its work on an AS/400, but
also the administration of the host in
Paris is performed. Another destination of the host data is Baarn in the
Netherlands, where the accounting
and payment of licenses and copyrights is performed. Universal Music
Publishing, UMP, is the third largest
publishing company in the world, with
around 1,000,000 copyrights.
After processing on the host comes
the preparation of items in the orderline tables of the IT environment in
Berlin. The database responsible for
this, which stores all line items, is
constructed as an OLAP database
(OnLine Analytical Processing), appropriate for large amounts of data
with moderate access frequency and
mostly read operations.
MaK DATA \ News 15
Reports
Stars of the update music scene belongs to the artists catalog of Universal
Orderline Recalculation
The orderlines represent delivered
items from orders. An order counts
as delivered when the goods are
made available for delivery at the
docks. Since the shipping info, and
therefore the orderline data, are
created immediately after this occurs,
the actual process of transport from
the warehouse to the customer and
receipt of the goods by the customer
have not yet occurred. So, for example, in case of damage during
transport, corrections to the items
encoded in the orderlines must be
made. These orderline recalculations
are performed by the sales administration and customer care departments.
This kind of recalculation is illustrated
by the following scenario: during
transport to Location A of a customer,
there are partial transport damages
at the trucking firm. Customer location A, however, accepts only complete deliveries. Theoretically, the
entire shipment must be brought back
to the warehouse as a return. But if
the customer has the ability to reroute, since for example their Location B in the area can accept the
16 MaK DATA \ News
intact part of the delivery, then the full
return is avoided. The undamaged
products are simply reassigned. This
optimized supply chain leads to a
complex case of credit recalculation
on multiple accounts, which is performed by retrieval of orderline data.
Conceptually, in an orderline recalculation, the respective items on the
delivery note are first completely
cancelled and credited back, and
then recreated with corrected receivers, prices, and distribution costs
(recalculated). This concept of recalculation, however, requires quantities
to remain untouched, since otherwise
there would appear to be a warehouse operation which didn’t actually
exist: the products didn’t actually
return to the warehouse, but were
instead redistributed.
The GRE System
This is one of the original duties of
the Centura application GRE, the
“Gutschriften- und Rechnungs-Erfassung ohne Lagerbestandsfortschreibung”, or “Credit and Invoice
Tracking without Inventory”, which
controls the warehouse-neutral behavior of product quantities. For each
photo: Stöber
item cancelled, a recalculated replacement must exist.
The credit recalculation of orderlines
falls in the realm of the sales administration department, which is
directly involved in the processing of
such orders with the support of GRE.
Using the delivery note number or the
customer number, GRE can import
the desired items from the orderline
database and then recalculate them
for a new order, or even completely
separated new orders.
In the example scenario above, there
would have been three receipts in all:
a complete cancellation of a credit
receipt for Location A, as well as an
invoice for Location B (for the redistributed products) and one for the
trucking company (damaged goods).
The receipt data are related by GRE
and are regarded as a single unit for
later processing. So for example the
printing of the receipts, with simultaneous release for export preparation, is done only as a unit and subject
to checking of the split quantities.
Since the GRE line item data do not
and may not affect the warehouse,
they may be delivered directly to the
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follow-on processes on the host system without the processing step on
the warehousing system.
Use of Fictitious Articles
It can happen that between the time
of its delivery and the recalculation
in GRE, an article is removed from
the product range and thus no longer
exists in the system. The recalculated
GRE line item, containing such an
article, would violate the integrity of
article data in subsequent processing
systems.
To avoid this case, so-called “fictitious
article numbers” were introduced.
These are articles which are known
to the system, but which behave
neutrally as article data and enable
the entry of line item entries into
subsequent processing systems. The
definition of a fictitious article thus
applies not only to those articles
removed from the product range, but
is in general usable for all articles
without inventory because they don’t
physically exist.
Extended Use of GRE
This ability to work with physically
non-existent articles has greatly
increased the usefulness of the GRE
application in the enterprise. For
instance, it supports Universal Music
Publishing, UMP, whose invoices and
credits for copyrights can be implemented in GRE as fictitious articles.
Even completely new product platforms can be immediately served in
GRE screen shot with orderline recalculation (credit and invoice)
on separate receipts
Universal Music
Universal Music is a company in
the Universal Music Group, the
market leader in the music industry, and part of one of the largest entertainment enterprises in
the world. It also includes Universal Studios, Universal Pictures,
Universal TV Networks, Universal Theme Parks and many others.
Universal Music’s labels include
the best-known brands of the
music world:
A&M, Decca, Urban/ Def Jam,
Deutsche Grammophon, Geffen,
Interscope, Karussell, MCA, Island Mercury, Motor Music,
Motown, Polydor, Polystar, Verve und viele andere.
With the recently completed
merger of the tradition-rich labels
Polydor and Island Mercury, the
largest pop company in Germany, the PolydorIslandGroup,
now operates under the umbrella
of Universal Music.
Universal Music has annual sales
in Germany of 450 million Euro,
giving it a market share of around
30%, making it the indisputable
market leader.
Universal Music Group is a part
of Vivendi Universal, the global
media and communications company.
Stars of all genres are among the
artists of Universal Music.
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MaK DATA \ News 17
Reports
Excerpt from the Artist
Catalog:
Vanessa Amorosi, Abba, Ace of
Base, Bee Gees, Bryan Adams,
Bob Marley, Bon Jovi, Boys II
Men, The Cranberries, The Cure,
Chris De Burgh, Dire Straits, Eminem, Enrique Iglesias, Al
Jarreau, Elton John, Ronan Keating, Kelly Family, Limp Bizkit,
Mariah Carey, George Michael,
Metallica, Lionel Richie, No
Doubt, Sting, Sugarbabes, U2,
Stevie Wonder, Zucchero and
more.
Universal Music Germany is also
very successful with national
artists such as:
Absolute Beginner, Die Ärzte,
Echt, Jeannette Biedermann,
Bro‘Sis , No Angels , Rammstein,
Rosenstolz, Sportfreunde Stiller,
André Rieu or Schiller.
With Koch Universal, the market
leader in German-language
repertoire, Universal has a diverse folk music and pop repertoire:
G.G.Anderson, Bernhard Brink,
Howard Carpendale, Karel Gott,
Kastelruther Spatzen, Juliane
Werding, Jürgen Drews and
more.
this manner by GRE: thus the Personalized CD (P-CD), in which the
music collection is individually determined by the customer and then
produced and delivered per order, is
from the point of view of GRE simply
another article which can be handled
with no inventory tracking, since it has
in principle no inventory.
For further information contact:
Michael Nogalski
Phone: +49 (0)431 / 3993-532
eMail:
[email protected]
With these diverse, successively
added areas of operation, the GRE
application has developed over time
into a many-layered application with
considerable functionality, and generates its part of smooth business
operations at Universal Music Germany.
In this way, the users of GRE, the
ISO, and all the employees of Universal Music in Germany work together for a single goal: the success
of their artists, because
....it’s all about the music.
The project team, from left: Ernst Röntgen and Jens Häggrist (Directors
ISO-Development), Jens Kessler (Vice President IT), Gero Bruchmann
(MaK DATA SYSTEM)
The jewels of the classical labels
of Universal include world stars
like:
Luciano Pavarotti, Anne-Sophie
Mutter, Leonard Bernstein,
Renée Fleming, Ten Tenors,
Jessye Norman or Herbert von
Karajan.
And just to name a few from the
jazz world:
Götz Alsmann, Louis Armstrong,
George Benson, Till Brönner,
Chick Corea and Ella Fitzgerald.
18 MaK DATA \ News
photo: Universal
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