In recent times, the urban population is expanding and our living standards are also rising. As a result, there is a huge demand for building products in the developing countries. Whereas in the developed countries, low interest rates and migration are reviving renovation and home construction. Significant changes in behaviour, attitudes and technologies are also having an impact on the building products market.

By focusing on vision 2025, Building Products Intelligent Firms will be strongly connected to the construction industry and the end customer. They will also place a greater emphasis on developing sustainable products, providing excellent customer service, and making a positive contribution to society. But have you ever wondered how these needs can be accomplished with an Intelligent ERP system? If you’re curious to know about the answer, keep reading the blog until the end.

Strategic Priorities for Building Products Companies

The importance and values of Digital Transformation have been recognized by leading building product companies. Thus, they are concentrating on four strategic priorities outlined below in order to transform their organization into an intelligent enterprise.

  • Delivering a superior customer experience
  • Connecting and automating the enterprise
  • Supporting enhanced business models and value-added services
  • Building a responsible and sustainable business

In order to achieve this, Intelligent technologies embedded in RISE with SAP framework acts as a key-value contributor in enabling building products companies to become intelligent enterprises.  Adapting to this enables your organization to redesign entire business models, processes, and products by driving enterprise digitalization through product development.

Delivering a superior customer experience

To be able to deliver value all the way to the end user, companies must play a vital role in understanding how their customers make purchasing decisions and their usage of products. Knowing your customer’s business objectives and priorities enables you to provide them with unique products and experiences.

To better understand this, let’s consider there are two businesses where:

  1. Company A uses a non-SAP ERP system
  2. Company B uses an SAP-ERP system

As Company A’s entire business structure is governed by a non-ERP system, these were the pain points faced by them:

  • The ability to have a clear picture of their customer orders and order status were hindered by disparate information and data silos.
  • Consistent product configuration required significant manual efforts.
  • Customer order changes impacted many levels and departments within their organization.
  • Also, different products had to be ordered through different channels.
  • Production, costing structures, pricing, and delivery dates had to be calculated manually.
  • As order fulfillment and delivery are separate processes, product tracking was difficult.
  • When a claim was filed, many departments had to be consulted in order to comprehend the situation and provide appropriate assistance to their customer.

As a result, insufficient integration of their traditional system resulted in a high involvement of manual processes.

Now let’s see about Company B, which uses an SAP-ERP system where:

  • All dependent processes were tailored to meet the needs of their customer.
  • The machine learning feature supports them with product configuration when a customer requests unique product features.
  • Order changes were updated immediately and all decisions were communicated to the customer in regular intervals.
  • The customer history and activity transparency improved their decision-making. Here the Machine Learning feature automatically determined the appropriate response for a quick claim resolution.
  • Individually configured products delivered at the exact time resulted in high customer satisfaction.
  • A high level of integration throughout sales order processing enabled total visibility of cost drivers at all stages.
  • All customers were benefitted from value-added services such as installation services or supplemental products which in turn made them fully satisfied.
  • Across all material levels, product status and origin were tracked.
  • Claims and warranty cases were handled more easily than handling it manually.
  • Understanding transportation details made them avoid delays and find alternatives.

Overall, Company B’s Intelligent ERP [RISE with SAP Package] system provides a 360-degree view of past and current customer activities, allowing better decisions to be made. It acts as a one-stop shop for all requested products or services, which are gathered in a single location.

Top Value Drivers

The major value drivers in the building products industry post successful deployment of SAP S/4HANA are:

  • Increase in revenue growth from new products & customer satisfaction
  • Reduced R&D expenses and faster time to market
  • Total manufacturing costs are reduced up to 10%
  • Total logistics costs are reduced by 10% to 12%
  • Increase in on-time delivery performance from 5%–20%
  • Reduction in order fulfilment lead time by 10%–50% 

(Note: Data was taken from SAP’s statistics)

Now you may be asking, “How can RISE with SAP help us?”. Here are the primary business capabilities they offer to assist you in reaching your objectives:

  • Using real-time data, streamline the order-to-customer cycle, including after-sales service.
  • Get a 360-degree view of past and current customer activities to make better decisions.

Conclusion

To conclude, SAP software for building materials can help you gain competitive insights into your operations, increasing efficiency and agility while simplifying operations from procurement to manufacturing, order administration, distribution and transportation.

Own your tomorrow with a guided journey and outcome driven practices of RISE with SAP. To know more about the industry-specific solution, do get in touch with us!