SAPinsider Issue 3 2020

they best reduce the severity of head impacts . In fact, Riddell SpeedFlex models held the top three spots of the 35 models evaluated, and eight other Riddell helmet models made the list of helmets recommended for use by NFL players. Currently, Riddell has partnerships with the NFL to be the exclusive provider of licensed collectibles and an authorized supplier of helmets to the NFL, and with USA Football, the sport’s governing body, to be its official protective equipment partner. With its dedication to minimizing injuries, Rid- dell has a massive job to accomplish, which includes manufacturing and distributing its equipment in time for each football season, continually manu- facturing top-quality product, and meeting and exceeding customer expectations. Keeping Up with Demand To fulfill orders from sports organizations, schools, sporting goods retail stores, and parents, Riddell, which is headquartered in Des Plaines, Illinois, has 10 facilities and offices with 1,400 employees worldwide dedicated to marketing, selling, and manufacturing its product. With its manufacturing crews squarely focused on creating equipment that is optimally safe, the IT department, which is based in Irving, Texas, is tasked with ensuring that all the company’s jobs — from creating accurate invoices to producing the correct number of shoulder pads to developing personalized helmets for student or professional athletes — are performed efficiently and on time. For its back-end systems, Riddell runs SAP ERP and SAP HANA in addition to other SAP and non- SAP applications. While the organization intends to eventually migrate to SAP S/4HANA, due to its many years of heavily customized code, it antici- pates a lengthy preparation process for the conver- sion, and so the project plan for that move is not yet ironed out, according to Alan Buckner, Basis administrator and SAP HANA database adminis- trator for Riddell. Throughout its years of operating the standard SAP ERP functionality for process scheduling, Rid- dell identified some limitations for running jobs, which at a basic level means executing a program that accomplishes a task. For example, a job could be producing invoices so that accounts payable knows who to ask for payment or creating a bill of materials so the manufacturing floor knows what parts to pull to create a helmet. “When we receive an order, that has to be broken out into steps, and programs complete those steps,” says Buckner. “In SAP ERP, calls to ABAP programs in batch jobs are single-threaded, which means jobs can only contain one program execution per step. There’s no way to run programs in parallel.” Additionally, the built-in SAP scheduling system had no mechanism to report job failures, which had a significant impact on operations when an impor- tant job failed silently and led to late nights for IT personally “babysitting” the entire batch of jobs to ensure each completed successfully, according to Buckner. “As you can imagine, that got old really fast,” he says, describing an urgent need for auto- mated notifications whenever a job failed. Notifica- tions would eliminate tiresome manual supervision and directly notify the individuals responsible for the job so they could address the problem before it affected operations. To get automated notifications and increase pro- ductivity, Riddell looked to SAP partner Redwood Software and implemented its on-premise solution Cronacle. This workload automation and job sched- uling application runs jobs automatically and moni- tors the progress and the status of what happens as the job runs and concludes. Among other capabili- ties, the application allowed Riddell to run more than one process at the same time and to start the next step as soon as all processes in the current step completed, instead of waiting for a scheduled time. After running this application for many years with great results, Riddell was intrigued by Riddell’s InSite smart helmet technology collects and analyzes on-field head impacts to give coaches and staff members a deeper understanding of the head-impact landscape during practice and game competition. 8 SAPinsiderOnline.com