Demand Planning at Borealis

I had the pleasure to meet and interview Birgitta Thoresson, at Borealis, which resulted in the following article about Borealis and her role. She is highly skilled for the job. Birgitta has been with Borealis since 1979 and has during this time worked in many different areas, as example production planning, procurement of transport services and corporate sales planning for two of the business units. She has worked at the head office in Copenhagen for as long as five years. Today she is working as a Business process specialist.

Translator role
She is good at the job and enjoys most of all, the translator role, were she is the link between the business and the IT organization. This interview is part of our preparation for the Nordic Connection Conference in March, were Birgitta will be a speaker.

She works with the support of the Business
Birgitta has in her mission traveled outside Sweden more than 30 times this year. This shows the magnitude of her role in the development project. She recently trained sales managers in Brazil as an example of the variation of her role.

The organization Business - IT
Her role as the link between the business and the IT organization is demanding and her background makes her perfect for this work. The structure at Borealis is, she told us, that IT controls the technical developments, the IT landscape architecture, upgrades etc and changes in the IT structure. They are also responsible for response times, IT costs etc. The business owns the processes and they are raising demands for the functional specifications and the system support, which are necessary for the development of the business. As a necessary
requirement is identified it is documented according to a standard specification. The request for change is then handed over to IT.

Three year plans
Borealis has an IT steering group where business and IT set up the three year plans and decide about what will be implemented out of the wishes for developments supported by the business. There are off course limited resources as well as limited budgets and it’s important to use the people & available money in the best way. Birgitta told us that in large lines this three year plan, has in the past normally been followed, she recommended this way or working as being easy to communicate and understand by the business.

Project leader
All IT projects related to SAP have two project leaders. One from IT, this person is a professional project leader were the project leadership is a large part of the role and one from the business. The project leader from the business is a person suitable for the role picked out of the business.

Business understanding
Birgitta states the most important part of her role is to understand the business. The understanding of the business process can only be learned by experience and here Birgitta has the benefit of knowing Borealis since long time and from many different roles. The SAP system knowledge can be found within IT or outside Borealis and can be called in to set up new functionality or solve tricky issues. The Borealis SAP system is well documented and many things can be found in the documentation which shortens the startup time for external SAP experts. The aim is to use SAP standard solutions and all deviations need to be approved by an IT modification board.

System support/ Organizational Structure
The help desk is responsible for overall IT service, the office packages and the technical infrastructure. Birgitta and her colleagues are responsible for second level support of the SAP system. The first level of support is found in the line of the business. Birgitta states it’s a large user community, from Asia to Americas and Europe. It’s not even possible to meet all the first line support people she is supporting in the Borealis world.

SAP landscape
Several SAP modules are supporting the polyolefin business at Borealis. The implementation of SAP started with an R/3 solution in 1997 and since then BW (Business warehouse), SCM (DM=demand planning, PP/DS=production planning detailed scheduling, GATP=Global available to promise-under implementation), CRM (Interaction centre, Mobile sales), SRM (Supplier relationship management) and XI (Business connector) has been added.

The Supply Chain Process
Birgitta’s responsibility is the business support tools for Supply Chain, which are SAP based. Demand Planning is the part in which Birgitta will share her experience, at the Nordic Connection conference in March 2009. The presentation is recorded and can be downloaded if this event was missed. At Borealis DP(demand planning), PPDS (production planning)and Global ATP (under implementation) are used. She will explain the overall business process, the system solution and talk about the organization and the roles in the project, focusing on Demand planning.

I look forward to the presentation and hereby thank here for a nice visit and lunch at Borealis.
EM Fahrer, author of this article and General Manager of Adfahrer AB.

About Borealis:

Borealis is a leading provider of plastics solutions.
Borealis has more than 40 years of experience. The business focus is to provide innovative plastics solutions to the infrastructure, automotive and advanced packaging markets across Europe, the Middle East and Asia.
Borealis has customers in more than 120 countries.
Borealis has 5400 employees and a sales revenue (2007) of 6350 m Euro. Borealis was formed in 1994 by merging the polyolefin and cracker business of Neste Chemicals and Statoil. The company has over 40 years of heritage in polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP) and is today 64% owned by the International Petroleum Investment Company (IPIC) of Abu Dhabi and 36% By OMW, Central Europe’s leading oil and natural gas group. Borealis business is organized in two groups, polyolefins (PE and PP) and base chemicals. The base chemical group includes olefins, phenol, aromatics, melamine and plant nutrients. The mission of Borealis is to be THE leading provider of innovative, value creating plastics solutions.

The picture shows:
Bengt Janson, System functional specialist-Business warehouse
Birgitta Thoresson, Business process specialist-Demand planning
Anna-Lena Elfving, System functional specialist-Product data sheets
Mikael Bergvall, System functional specialist-Distribution

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