Embracing digitization and gaining value in a digitally transformed economy is a question of mindset, not size

With this blog post we will continue the series and give you some more examples of how customers have realized measurable value from the implementation of our ERP Cloud solution. 

Most IT projects strive for faster execution, more guidance, adopting standardization, simplification, and a higher level of business process integration. Our ERP Cloud customers have a chance to get this out of the box when they follow the SAP Activate methodology. By choosing to activate both our solution and methodology, customers have repeatedly demonstrated how they went above and beyond former best practice. 

Long regarded as the world’s pioneers of efficiency and productivity, some Japanese companies have embarked on a significant transformation journey, shifting from highly customized software solutions to running IT workloads in the cloud and adopting our ERP solution with best practices content. To understand why companies are making this shift, it is worth to revisit Kaizen (改=change, 善=better). The philosophy of “continuous improvement” involves all employees from the executive to the field worker and incorporates their improvement ideas into the process. These ideas have accumulated over the years and sometimes created locally optimized, but overall heavy and complex (software) solutions. These locally optimized but highly customized software solutions have become a barrier for fast change and innovation. Given the unprecedented pace of change we experience these days, the local best practices of today tend to become the bottlenecks of tomorrow. Companies need to change more fundamentally due to digitization, market disruptions, supply-chain challenges (e.g. global pandemics) and ever-increasing regulatory requirements. In the light of these global changes we see more and nowadays also larger companies that consider standardization of processes an acceptable and welcome accelerator. More efficiency and flexibility for the company as an Intelligent Enterprise is perceived as an advantage over the traditional approach of local optimisation. 

Founded in 1964 in Osaka, Japan Trusco Nakayama is a leading wholesaler of machine tools, distribution equipment, environmental safety equipment, and manufactures machine tools under the Trusco brand. Committed to serve customers with fast and reliable delivery, the organization operates its distribution centers 24 hours a day. Using the inventory and supply chain management applications of our solution, Trusco handles 2.3 million products, keeps its inventory stocked with 390,000 items, and has achieved an inventory hit rate of 90 percent. By automating the quotation process based on the history of sales results and other data, Trusco can now automatically process 50,000 quote requests each day. This has led to increased order rates. And by leveraging advanced analytics and reporting across core business processes, the company has gained real-time business insights, allowing it to make data-driven decisions. 

Mitsui and Co. Ltd., part of the vast Japanese conglomerate Mitsui Group, sells products and services for diverse sectors. Mitsui is pursuing a strategy of digitization, connectivity, mobility and is driving a move to cloud-based solutions within the organization. Mitsui has migrated all 40 countries which were using the old system to our ERP Cloud Solution. 

But leveraging the capabilities of our solution as their backbone for managing backend processes across the globe was just the start of Mitsui’s journey to becoming an intelligent enterprise. As the next subsequent step, Mitsui is now fully leveraging the simplified data model, in-memory analytics and machine learning capabilities within our ERP system to reduce the manual matching load in accounts receivable. Mitsui has automated up to 90% of invoice and payment matching processes for high-frequency company codes and significantly lowered the effort required for matching one payment to multiple invoices. 

Toyota Motor Corporation would not be a global leader in automotive manufacturing without a “state-of-the-art” IT-environment supporting their business operations and manufacturing processes. With the move to our ERP Cloud Solution, Toyota is following a global trend among automotive companies transforming their organizations in the wake of the intelligent enterprise era. One of the key challenges which Toyota wanted to tackle was improving operational and financial performance across the group. In addition, there was a business need to regulate the group’s accounting system in line with global standards, like the IFRS. Since implementing our ERP solution, Toyota has addressed both challenges and added business value by improving visibility and speed of financial management reporting and analytics through group-wide simplified business processes, efficient data acquisition and technologies management. Toyota is also taking advantage of the high-speed bill of materials (BoM) explosion and is planning to develop new applications leveraging the build-in extensibility of our ERP solution.

We keep the end-users in focus from the very beginning and direct their attention to the new business value of our ERP Cloud solution, such as embedded analytics, and streamlined processes such as Lean Services. 

Read more here as part of the value blog series on our community page.

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