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Rolling Out SAP® Faster, Simpler & Safer Saving $100 Million
Technology Category
- Analytics & Modeling - Real Time Analytics
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - API Integration & Management
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Exchange & Integration
- Functional Applications - Enterprise Resource Planning Systems (ERP)
Applicable Industries
- Consumer Goods
Applicable Functions
- Discrete Manufacturing
- Procurement
Use Cases
- Manufacturing System Automation
- Predictive Maintenance
- Supply Chain Visibility
Services
- Software Design & Engineering Services
- System Integration
The Challenge
The multinational conglomerate corporation, a multibillion-dollar global manufacturer producing industrial, safety and consumer products, faced several challenges. The company decided to globally deploy SAP in 2010. However, the complexity of local legacy configurations strangled the SAP initiative. Millions of dollars were spent monthly on consultants to make changes at the plants and their legacy Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES). Four years into a five-year project, the company’s global SAP deployment was only 10 percent complete. The company needed a solution to accelerate SAP integrations at plants across the enterprise—making SAP deployment faster, simpler and safer while leveraging and extending legacy investments.
About The Customer
The customer is a long-established multinational conglomerate corporation. This corporation is a multibillion-dollar global manufacturer producing industrial, safety and consumer products. The company consistently ranks high on Forbes and Fortune magazine lists. It has numerous technology platforms and makes everything from household goods to medical devices and communication materials. In its long history, the company has amassed dozens of plants across the Americas, Asia and Europe— each plant investing in a unique set of legacy systems, applications and configurations to manufacture different products.
The Solution
The company turned to webMethods, a solution they had been using since 2001 for order-to-cash processing through SAP and webMethods Optimize to monitor intercompany and customer orders. webMethods was selected because of its unique ability to quickly incorporate both modern and legacy MES applications, other supply-chain execution applications, such as warehouse management systems and transportation management systems, as well as central ERP systems. After a 1 1⁄2-year intensive collaboration with the company, including 17 architectural refinements, a new concept was born: the Manufacturing Integration Layer (MIL) based on the webMethods Integration Platform. The solution is expected to save $100 million in deployment costs. The MIL makes SAP deployment effortless across all plants. Reusable services—not restrictive, custom point-to-point integrations—are used to integrate legacy systems with SAP.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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