For decades, energy-intensive commodities sectors such as paper and packaging have been working to improve process control, resulting in superior product quality while using less energy. This would allow them to save money while also maintaining a better atmosphere. Thus, to manage production and verify or anticipate product quality, a variety of concepts and instruments were developed. Though this strategy worked to some extent, it had its limitations.

By focusing on vision 2025, Services will account for a significant portion of the value, reputation, and distinctiveness of the paper and packaging industries. These services will be built around highly customizable items that are enhanced with digital information. Larger lot sizes, process integration, and automation will all be required as a result.

Strategic Priorities for Paper and Packaging Companies

The importance and values of Digital Transformation have been recognised by leading paper and packing companies. Thus, they are concentrating on five strategic priorities outlined below in order 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 paper and packing 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, 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 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 or services, which is gathered in a single location.

Top Value Drivers

The major value drivers in the paper and packing 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 helps us?”. Here are the primary business capabilities they offer to assist you in reaching your objectives:

• Obtain a 360-degree perspective of past and current client behaviours, which will enable you to make smarter decisions.
• Using real-time data, streamline the order-to-customer cycle, including after-sales assistance.

Conclusion

To conclude, using SAP software for paper and packing 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!