With this blog post we will continue the series and give you some more examples of how customers have realized measurable value from their SAP S/4HANA activations.
Most IT projects strive for faster execution, more guidance, adopting standardization, simplification, and a higher level of business process integration. SAP S/4HANA 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 SAP S/4HANA 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. As an SAP customer, the migration to SAP S/4HANA Cloud marked the beginning of Trusco’s digital transformation journey. Using the inventory and supply chain management applications in SAP S/4HANA, 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. But Trusco did not stop there: To achieve new levels of customer convenience across the entire supply chain, they have extended S/4HANA with custom applications leveraging the SAP Business Technology Platform. And with its business transformation centered on Intelligent ERP, Trusco Nakayama is in a strong position for further innovation using intelligent technologies.
Mitsui and Co. Ltd., part of the vast Japanese conglomerate Mitsui Group, sells products and services for sectors as diverse as industrial machinery and components, mining, agriculture, energy, healthcare, and consumer goods. Mitsui is pursuing a strategy of digitization, connectivity, mobility and is driving a move to cloud-based solutions within the organization. The goal is to streamline operations and find better ways of working. Having worked with its legacy ERP software since 2000, Mitsui has migrated all 40 countries which were using the old system to SAP S/4HANA in a cloud environment.
But leveraging SAP S/4HANA 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 in SAP S/4HANA 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 SAP S/4HANA, 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 using SAP S/4HANA, 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 SAP S/4HANA.
Through our Product Success organization and our Customer Care program, we have supported 6000+ live customers and more than 700 projects globally hands on. This has helped tremendously to train our muscles for a focussed support and advisory service for customers of all sizes and industries. A lot of our experience from these projects went into our free openSAP course Guide Your SAP S/4HANA Project to Success to help make your project a success. We consider the highest possible degree of automation and an end-user workload on exception-based handling as the most desirable outcome in a digitally transformed economy with a much higher transactional volume for organization (see also Gaining resilience in a digitally transformed economy).
We keep the end-users in focus from the very beginning and direct their attention to the new business value of SAP S/4HANA, such as embedded analytics, and streamlined processes such as Lean Services.
Inside SAP S/4HANA Podcast
As always, I would like to encourage you to subscribe to our podcast “Inside SAP S/4HANA”. This podcast leverages the unique knowledge and expertise of SAP S/4HANA product experts, partners, and customers to address your needs by sharing product insights and project best practice. There is no customer success without product success and project success; we help you get to the next level and make your SAP S/4HANA projects a success. Subscribe now and benefit from the shared knowledge.
openSAP microlearnings for SAP S/4HANA
Just a couple of months ago, we launched openSAP microlearnings for SAP S/4HANA as an exciting new learning opportunity. What began with a small batch of 20 videos, has now become a channel with more than 50 microlearnings that have generated over 20,000 views since then. Today we cover multiple lines of business, like Finance and Manufacturing & Supply Chain, and key technology topics like Master Data Management, Extensibility, User Experience, and Upgrade Management. We are continuously adding new microlearnings to the SAP S/4HANA channel, so make sure you check them out.
Your voice matters!
If you want to learn more and actively engage with SAP subject matter experts on SAP S/4HANA Cloud, join our SAP S/4HANA Cloud Community – now fully integrated with SAP Community. The community brings together SAP S/4HANA Cloud customers, partners and SAP experts and has a clear mission: deliver an interactive community to engage with one another about best practices and product solutions. We invite you to explore the new SAP S/4HANA Cloud Community ‘one-stop shop’ as the central place for all resources, tools, content questions, answers and connect with experts to guide you through your SAP S/4HANA Cloud journey.
For more information on SAP S/4HANA Cloud, check out the following links:
- The power of best-in-class and Next Practices business content for a modern ERP blog post
- SAP S/4HANA Cloud: The Intelligent ERP blog post
- Latest SAP S/4HANA Cloud Release blog posts here
- SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation Content here
- SAP S/4HANA Cloud release info: http://www.sap.com/s4-cloudrelease
- SAP S/4HANA PSCC Digital Enablement Wheel here
- Inside SAP S/4HANA Podcast here
- SAP S/4HANA Cloud Community here
- SAP Activate Community here
- Best practices for SAP S/4HANA Cloud here
- Help Portal Product Page here
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