Large Industrial Company: SAP Solutions

This industrial company’s Asian operations, along with its locations throughout the rest of the world, are achieving better performance from its new global operations that have standardized on an SAP-based system. The Asian rollout played a major role in Accenture’s successful engagement to implement SAP for the company in more than 40 countries. In fact, the project received a prestigious role model honor within Accenture.

After implementing an SAP-based platform across Europe and the Americas, this industrial company wanted to bring its operations in Asia Pacific onto the same enterprise resource planning application. With a single, flexible and strong ERP platform seamlessly integrated with the company’s other locations around the world, the Asian operations would be positioned for future growth and enhanced profitability.

The move also would allow the company to continue realizing the benefits it had seen in other parts of world by improving its ability to share information globally, harmonize work procedures across its locations and improve the efficiency of its information technology.

Accenture had helped this company successfully deploy SAP technology at its European and Americas operations. Because of Accenture’s track record with helping the company achieve high performance, as well as the firm’s expertise and experience throughout Asia and ability to draw on experts from its delivery centers in India to deliver key skills as necessary, the company teamed with Accenture to roll out SAP to its Asian operations in 12 countries.

The implementation, conducted in four phases over two years, involved more than 10 SAP modules. Accenture provided development and management of the SAP applications as well as other global and local applications used by the industrial company’s Asia Pacific operations.

With co-program leaders from the industrial company and Accenture, the team began implementation in two Asian countries at a time, then increased the work to four countries because of its early successes. The organization then expanded Accenture’s responsibilities to deploy and support SAP-based solutions outside Asia Pacific.

For the Asian deployment, Accenture’s 30-person team developed a legacy migration model to move the industrial company from a proprietary system, which required designing unique upload and download programs from materials and prices to value-added taxes and customers. The team also integrated a vast number of global and country-specific legal and business requirements into the migration model.

In addition, Accenture worked with the industrial company to adapt its European SAP template, which incorporated many of Accenture’s recommended-practices delivery methods, to Asia.

This industrial company’s Asian operations, along with its locations throughout the rest of the world, are achieving higher performance from its new global operations that have been standardized on an SAP-based system. The Asian rollout played a major role in Accenture’s successful engagement to implement SAP for the company in more than 40 countries.

As part of the company’s global, standardized platform, the Asian SAP-based system is more accurate and cost-effective, with a lower total cost of ownership. It better integrates all pieces of the industrial company’s business, including logistics, finance, sales and factories.

In India alone, automating certain supply chain processes has eliminated the need to manually process several hundred thousand documents a year. This has reduced the time spent on this task by 50 percent.

The platform provides better supply chain visibility so the Asian operations can quickly locate necessary stock. For example, it significantly improved the performance of its centralized distribution function and regional distribution center which, together with enhanced stock information, allows the industrial company to better meet customer requirements such as fast delivery or lower costs.

Overall, the SAP-based system gives the Asian operations a solid yet flexible foundation for greater growth and profitability.