For hundreds of years, metals companies have been innovating to improve material composition and production methods. The goal of this ongoing optimization process is to make metal materials lighter and stronger. Thus, leading metals 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, metals businesses will shift their focus from pure production to a more collaborative model, by using their expertise to guide an industry network 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 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 to 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.

Run Smart Factories and Digital Networks

To perform the main function of a paper and packaging firm, supply chains and manufacturing networks must be strong, and they must also be entirely modular and adaptable in order to respond to short-term changes. Real-time data insights, such as asset status, allow for quick and intelligent responses to last-minute changes, are frequently generated by urgent customer requests or machine breakdowns. As a result, businesses require a virtual and real-time depiction of their operations in an intelligent system.

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:

• Disconnected departments and limited connectivity to the company network makes it difficult for businesses to respond quickly.
• Information cannot flow swiftly if plans are not regularly established and communicated.
• R&D, sourcing, sales, manufacturing, and planning are all out of sync, which results in waste of time and money.
• Visibility is limited, collaboration is tough, delays are unavoidable, and the danger of error is considerable when firms rely on a few external partners and interact manually.

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:

• To ensure visibility, agility, and responsiveness, one plan can be shared with all important resources and partners.
• To accelerate time to market, efficient collaboration with consumers on product design is a must.
• Insight into future production and procurement needs, as well as inventory optimization.
• Customer satisfaction is improved through aligning sales, manufacturing and delivery.
• Through the simultaneous participation of all essential parties, linear supply chains convert into digital supply networks.

Overall, Company B’s Intelligent ERP [RISE with SAP Package] system provides real-time and remote monitoring of internal assets as well as the entire supply chain across company boundaries.

Top Value Drivers

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

• Time to market is reduced.
• Customer satisfaction has improved.
• Inventory management is optimised.
• Costs of asset service and maintenance are reduced.
• Efforts to create and maintain asset master data are reduced.

(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:

• Transform the linear supply chain into digital supply networks by bringing together all relevant stakeholders at the same time.
• Getting real-time insights into operations enables agile reactions to last-minute modifications.

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!