SAP Supplies BHP Billiton with Global Supply Chain Solution

Feb. 25, 2003
MELBOURNE VICTORIA, Australia -- Feb. 25, 2003 -- SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) today announced that BHP Billiton has successfully implemented mySAP? Supply Chain

MELBOURNE VICTORIA, Australia -- Feb. 25, 2003 -- SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) today announced that BHP Billiton has successfully implemented mySAP? Supply Chain Management (mySAP SCM) to manage its global manganese business from the mines to stockpiles to end customers. BHP Billiton, the world's largest diversified resources company, joins an ever-growing list of global companies leveraging mySAP SCM, the world's leading supply chain management solution.

Key capabilities of mySAP SCM will help BHP Billiton manage every aspect of its global supply chain, enabling more visibility into operations, flexible decision-making, and integrated planning to reduce inventories and transportation costs.

"Our vision at BHP Billiton clearly is to become a demand-driven resources company and to move our entire enterprise-wide processes to a more customer-centric approach while reducing costs and improving our profitability," said Marius Kloppers, chief marketing officer at BHP Billiton. "By deploying mySAP SCM, we will increase our flexibility to respond to our customer's changing demands and we will be able to realize significant savings in our global supply chains by reducing inventories and handling costs."

The implementation of mySAP SCM for BHP Billiton's global manganese business was the first phase of a global rollout project of mySAP SCM. It was realized within a timeframe of nine months and comprised the usage of different capabilities of SAP Advanced Planning and Optimization (SAP APO): demand planning, supply network planning, and global available-to-promise. For the second phase of the rollout, BHP Billiton plans to extend the current supply chain solution model to include transportation planning and execution. BHP Billiton selected the SAP Trader's and Scheduler's Workbench (SAP TSW), a component of SAP's industry solutions mySAP? Mining and mySAP? Oil & Gas, to specifically handle bulk transportation management. This enhanced solution model will be gradually rolled out to all commodities starting with iron ore and coal.

"Together with BHP Billiton, we have created a complete supply chain management solution that is unique in the resources industry," said Nils Herzberg, senior vice president, Manufacturing & Distribution, SAP AG. "SAP took the innovative approach of adapting functionality of SAP TSW that was originally developed for the petroleum industry but closely fit the needs of mining companies. Working jointly with BHP Billiton, we tailored it to directly meet mining-specific requirements. The co-developed solution component is now available in the latest release of mySAP Mining and will be made available to other customers in the industry."

SAP will present its solutions together with its service, technology, and small and midsize business (SMB) partners at SAP's main booth in hall 4 at CeBIT 2003, being held in Hanover, Germany, March 12-19.

For more information about mySAP SCM, visit http://www.sap.com/scm.
For more information about mySAP Mining, visit http://www.sap.com/mining/.