At Hasbro Inc., it's all fun and games until somebody loses the toys. A $3 billion maker of some of the most recognized brand name toys, including Playskool, Tonka, Mr. Potato Head, G.I. Joe and Star Wars action figures, Hasbro is serious about ensuring that it will always meet retail requirements based on consumer demand.

Typically, sales are predictable. For instance, the company knows how many Mr. Potato Heads it will sell to Wal-Mart each year, which makes forecasting easy. But there are sales spikes associated with the holiday season, and Hasbro needs to know where its Darth Vader toy is being produced, for example, what the manufacturing capacity is and whether or not the deadline will be met.

Hasbro, like many other U.S.-based companies, outsources its manufacturing. Not surprisingly, the majority of toy production takes place in China. Managing the growing number of vendors, manufacturers and freight carriers that Hasbro uses in the region can be a time-consuming task that is often unstructured. That was the problem facing Hasbro's Hong Kong office -- known as Hasbro Far East (HFE) -- which has responsibility for all the procurement, customer requirements and logistics of getting products to the U.S. and around the world. HFE deals with about 80 vendors in China, and for many years all coordination with business partners in South China -- up to 50,000 contacts annually -- was done via fax and phone.

GROWING EFFICIENCY

"Eighty percent of the time we know when we give the vendors a schedule that they'll [meet] it because we know their capacity," says David Adams, business integration manager at Hasbro's headquarters in Pawtucket, RI. But someone has to look at every fax generated in the chain of communication, which becomes tedious. "We wanted to have collaboration with the vendors and only have to manage by exception," he says.

That's why, in the last few years, the company has invested in a worldwide deployment of SAP AG's ERP, which is working in combination with business process management (BPM) tools from Lombardi Software Inc. (Austin, TX) that help Hasbro track the entire backend of the supply chain -- from the time a customer order is taken to the time the product is shipped.

SAP was deployed in the U.S., Europe and Hong Kong offices in 2001. Quickly, however, Hasbro realized that it needed to automate processes that fell outside of ERP's purview. "SAP was utilized as a transactional engine -- we needed to be able to manage the business process that surrounds the transaction," Adams explains.

CONNECTING WITH CONTRACTORS

So Adams went searching for a way to automate integration, collaboration and content management. Lombardi's software, called TeamWorks (Hasbro has internally dubbed it e-Connect), layers on top of SAP and pushes out documents -- such as requests for quotations or purchase orders -- to Hasbro's contract manufacturers. The tasks generated are based on business rules that Adams applied to the TeamWorks engine. SAP Business Connectors employ remote function calls that push documents from SAP to TeamWorks.

If, for example, a delivery is running late, the system will generate an e-mail alert and send it to the individuals involved. The vendor might come back with an alternative schedule, but all of the information related to who is responsible for what materials is tracked within TeamWorks, giving Hasbro officials the big picture of what's happening behind the scenes.