Visit at the Norwegian Defense accounting

The purpose of this article is to give you a feeling for the great number of SAP customers there is and the kind of business which can be supported by SAP. I also hope to be able to enable exchange of experience in the areas covered by the Norwegian Defence Accounting office.

If you are interested contact information to Ståle Eriksen, Manager of the Defense Accounting Office can be retrieved from sbn@adfahrer.com.

This article is based on an interview made at a visit in the Bergen office performed by Aksel F Sinding and EM Fahrer in December 2008 and written by EM Fahrer, Adfahrer.

Visit at the Norwegian
Defense accounting office
(Norske Forsvarets
Regnskapsavdeling (=FRA))

We meet to very nice officers named Øyvind Hannisdal and John Erik Fiske. They were responsible of the vendor invoice processes, customer invoicing and accounting. The office were they worked was located in an old beautiful building. The building had an interesting history suitable for the Bergen defense office. It was not noticeable from outside and we had missed it if it hadn’t been pointed out by our hosts. Looking up the stairs the top floor was missing. The stairs ended, in “the inner roof” and the last decimeter of the stair rail was broken, ruff and unrepaired. Our hosts explained the top floor was gone by an accidental explosion during the Second World War. The top floor was never rebuilt; a new roof was just build on the top of the broken house, an interesting approach which today creates a visible connection back to ancient times.

A strategically excellent position

The meeting room where we sat had a great view of the biggest outdoor concert area in Bergen and our meeting started with a interesting discussion regarding music and artists. We were off course very envious of this strategically excellent position worthy the defense industry.

Large SAP Installation

The SAP solution is used all over for the defense. The administration of SAP is split in four parts, material, Human Resource, Accounting(=FRA) and Steering&control which reflected the usage of SAP were Human Resource, Accounting, Vendor payments, Customer invoices and Material Master was in use. In MM parts with storages etc is were on the way to be implemented and the near plans for the future contained maintenance, material configurations and reporting systems.
The manager of FRA Ståle Eriksen, had agreed to our visit. We were nice welcomed by his departmental managers at the office in Bergen.

Øyvind Hannisdal was manager of vendor invoices and customer invoicing and John Erik Fiske the manager of the accounting department and they made their best to explain the very special parts of the public solutions and the defense business.

Industry Solution - Accounting upon pay

The industry solution used by the defense had a very specific and big difference “from normal” in the accounting functionality. There is no vendor dept at a month end, only the actual paid vendor invoices are part of the month/year end reports. This cash principle influences a lot more then you would believe at the first thought. The implementation was tuff and a lot of work was invested. There is a tuff demand for control of every step in all processes which is very demanding for any IT system but as I understood the control was implemented in a satisfying way. The common accounting department was established in 2003 and the process, organization and SAP solution was implemented in 2004. The IT system (SAP) implementation was forced by legal requirements from the Norwegian government.

The vendor payments

The departments for vendor payments do handle 300.000 incoming invoices per year and 15.000 outgoing invoices. The vendor payments are controlled in every step during the process and there is also a very tight control afterwards to ensure the correctness of documents, accounts and attachments.

The invoices and attachments are scanned and OCR (optical character recognition) is performed on the invoice image, which means they are read automatically as much as possible.

I asked if there were any areas which caused manual work and was told International Payments is one of the areas which cause a lot of manual work. Bank data is very different in different parts of the world and its therefore difficult to get an easy process in this area.

Salaries payment

The vendor payment department does perform the payment of salaries. The salary calculation and other human resource related work is made in other Norwegian location. In the area of FI-HR reporting some home developments are made to control the integration. Responsibility of the integration and corrections is located at site of the Human Resource department. This was a difficult area at implementation time but works fine today.

Travel payments

A home developed portal is used for travel. The line management approves before the travel. This process works fine.

Experience exchange

In the beginning of the project our hosts made visits to StatoilHydro and they still have contact and exchange experiences. They regard StatoilHydro as being in the technical frontline and eager to share experience with others.

Happy with the system

They are all over happy with the SAP system. There is a reporting project planned as they feel they still miss the really the good reports which can give the overview, especially in the integration areas of the system. We hope to see the FRA manager Ståle Eriksen and maybe our nice hosts as speakers at one of the Bergen conferences in 21 October 2009. Knowledge sharing is always appreciated.
Written by EM Fahrer, em@adfahrer.com, Adfahrer AB.

OUR HOSTS:
John Erik Fiske lives in Åsane. He is married with two children (5 and 10). His children play football and football training and games do fill in most of his spear time. He said with a smile “sometimes it’s almost lovely to be at work” .
Øyvind Hannisdal, he lives in Osterøy. He is married with two children. He has almost no spear time, but if there is, hunting and fishing are the preferred activities.