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.

Building a Responsible and Sustainable Business

Globally, we are heading toward a purpose-driven economy. Consumers, employees, suppliers, and investors are all changing their minds about the importance of firms delivering on their mission and acting ethically in the face of climate change. Thus, an intelligent ERP system keeps employees safer and mitigates risks.

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:

• Analysis of event data using out-of-the-box software is a tedious process.
• Had issues with analytics that aren’t linked to real-time incident data.
• Required multiple reports to track and analyse environmental compliance across the company.
• There is no simple way to identify or quantify dangers for a location.
• Reporting an incident was difficult.

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:

• Advanced analytics, simplified EHS processes, and dedicated software helps health and safety administrators act quickly.
• Had advanced analytics for analysing accidents, near misses and other safety data such as asset, geographic, weather and other IoT data.
• Environmental data records are graphically monitored at regular intervals for various compliance situations with the applicable compliance limitations.
• Approval, replacement or invalidation of the recorded values of environmental data records were possible.
• Had insights into chemical management applications with all the required information needed by them.
• The process for identifying risks and assigning applicable safety measures for risk mitigation is simplified.
• Using IoT technology, issuing proactive alerts to workers in order to avoid mishaps was found effective.

Overall, Company B’s Intelligent ERP system [RISE with SAP Package] assisted them in keeping their employees safe and mitigating EHS risks.

Top Value Drivers

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

• Enhanced security
• Time and money are saved
• Employee satisfaction and engagement have improved

(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:

• Address rising customer, investor, employee, and societal expectations.
• Ensure the health and well-being of employees and suppliers by providing a safe working environment.

Conclusion

To conclude, using SAP 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!