For hundreds of years, metals companies have been constantly innovating to improve material composition and production methods. The goal of this ongoing optimization process is to make materials lighter and stronger. Thus, leading metal companies have recently announced plans to anticipate and balance real-time demand and supply, reduce energy use, maintain robust supply chains, and improve customer experience. 

By focusing on vision 2025, metal businesses will shift their focus from pure production to a more collaborative model, by using their expertise to guide industry networks and provide services. These services will be built on highly customised items that are enhanced with digital data. But have you ever wondered how these services 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 Metal Companies

The importance and values of Digital Transformation have been recognised by leading metal companies. Thus, they are concentrating on five strategic priorities outlined below to transform their organization into an intelligent enterprise.  

  • Achieve Customer Centricity 
  • Connect and Automate Enterprises 
  • Run Smart Factories and Digital Networks 
  • Support Value-Added Services and New Business Models 
  • Build 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 metals 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. 

Achieve Customer Centricity

To be able to deliver value all the way to the end user, B2B companies must first understand how their customers make purchasing decisions and how they use 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 fulfilment 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 and services, which is gathered in a single location. 

Top Value Drivers 

The major value drivers in the metal companies post successful deployment of SAP S/4HANA are: 

  • 10-20% Improved customer satisfaction  
  • 10-20% Improved revenue growth from new products 
  • Reduction in sales and service cost 

(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: 

  • Increase client satisfaction by ensuring that orders are delivered on time. 
  • By having access to relevant information, real-time insights into difficulties, and efficient internal cooperation, you can provide customised products and services. 

Conclusion

To conclude, using SAP software for metal companies helps 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!