How Fluor transformed their SAP reporting processes using Compleo from Symtrax

The Story of Carol Fletcher: Ending the SAP Reporting Nightmare at Fluor

In the engineering and construction giant, Fluor, data was the lifeblood of every project, but its processing was the source of daily agony for accounting and project teams. Carol Fletcher, an IT veteran at Fluor, managed the production support arena and was determined to solve the chaos.

The teams battled a relentless enemy: the SAP Report Time-Out. Critical, large-scale reports, tracking massive amounts of data from project budgets to multi-currency transactions, would frequently fail after just 20 minutes in the foreground, resulting in nothing but a frustrating ABAP error.

The Manual Nightmare and the High Cost of Error

To bypass the time-out, users were forced to run reports in the background. This solved the time-out problem but initiated a brutal, manual nightmare of post-processing just to make the data usable in Excel:

• The Printout Problem: The raw data came out like an old mainframe printout, filled with useless headers and column headings repeated on every single page of the spool file. For reports that reached 1,500 pages in length, this meant a massive, repetitive task of locating and deleting non-data rows across thousands of lines.
• The Negative Sign Trap: Every negative amount appeared as a text character (-) instead of a true numerical negative sign. The analyst had to spend significant time running complex macros or manually manipulating the fields to convert the data so it could be summed or used in calculations.
• The Risk of Starting Over: While cleaning these immense data sets, there was a high risk of accidentally deleting a data line along with the headers. If a mistake was made, the entire reconciliation was ruined, forcing the analyst to start all over and compounding the time wasted.

As Carol pointed out, her highly paid analysts were being paid to analyze, but they were spending their days on low-value tasks like data typing and manual formatting. This manual cleanup consumed between 50 to 75 hours a week of her team’s time.

The Discovery of Compleo

Carol received an email from Symtrax about their product, Compleo. The promise of getting clean, formatted data from SAP directly into Excel was enough to make her attend the webinar, and the solution to their years of reporting misery began.

Compleo was deployed to automate the entire, broken process:

1. The user initiates the report in the SAP background.
2. Compleo intercepts the raw spool output.
3. It automatically removes all headers and column headings.
4. It corrects the negative signs into usable numbers.
5. It delivers the data as a perfectly formatted Excel file (or email) to a shared drive.

The results were transformative:

• In one case, where a single report had to be sliced across 300 company codes, Compleo automated the entire “One-to-Many” process, saving Fluor analysts 50 to 75 hours of manual work.
• The ultimate measure of success was the employee experience: Analysts who used to spend days struggling with cleanup were now able to launch the report, go get a cup of coffee, and return to find their work done, reconciled, and ready for true analysis.

Eliminating Manual Document Creation

The Compleo solution also fixed the tedious process of custom document generation, specifically billing cover sheets. The standard SAP sheets were “ugly” and useless, forcing users into a highly involved manual process:

• Users had to run the report, download it, and manually copy and paste fragments of data into an existing Excel worksheet to begin formatting.
• They then spent time performing a manual reconciliation back to SAP to ensure accuracy.
• Crucially, the raw SAP report lacked critical descriptive fields (like vendor names or contact information). The analyst had to spend extra time manually looking up and adding this missing descriptive data.

Using Compleo’s modules, the team automated this entire workflow. The system not only formatted the final document with branding but used query variables to automatically look up and populate all the missing descriptive data from external databases based on the project’s Work Breakdown Structure (WBS).

Carol Fletcher had successfully eliminated the need to pay highly skilled Fluor staff to do low-value formatting work, allowing them to finally focus on what they were hired for: analysis.

Part II – From One SAP Report to Multiple Reports to Multiple Locations