The automotive industry relies heavily on a just-in-time delivery model with orders often on the production line within a half-hour of delivery. To be successful in this competitive industry, Piolax USA developed an effective manual data entry strategy for their SAP environment. While reliable, they realized they needed to automate their system to stay competitive, and there were no “out of the box” solutions that served their needs.
The Solution
After talking with several consultants, Piolax engaged with Optima ECM Consulting to assess the company’s SAP environment and formulate a solution to address their needs including:
- Complex Order Forecasting
- Agreement scheduling and tracking
- Validation of completeness and accuracy of Order Data
- Duplicate Order Detection
- Alignment of order schedule to lead-time SLA
- Order lifecycle management
- Audit trail creation, archiving, and retrieval
- Customer credit checks
The Results
Working together, Piolax and Optima were able to design a solution that combined current best practices with custom solutions necessary in such a complex environment: OpenText Business Center, Sales Order accelerator, and Business Capture Center are tried and true solutions that Optima has deployed for years.
The Optima ECM solution drove dramatic business benefits tied to across many departments and functions including:
- 4-5 times faster sales order processing
- 36% increase in efficiency resulting in $200,000 savings
- Increased order accuracy reduced corrective costs i.e. Premium freight, returns, unplanned schedule changes
- Repurposed team –2 CSRs now do the same volume of sales orders as 8
- $350,000 savings from 64% labor reduction for
- All data available in SAP for viewing, storage, and retrieval
Next Steps
Following the results of the initial engagement, Piolax decided to explore improving the efficiency of their invoice management process. The company is eager to understand how integrating the SAP Invoice Management solution can streamline and automate their invoice and document intake workflows more, and will be continuing their investments in digital transformation to increase their capacity and shift team focus to more value-generating work.
About Piolax USA
Established in 1988, Piolax USA has grown into a leading provider of plastics and metal fastening products. Operating in the automotive industry and serving clients around the globe, Piolax USA has earned a reputation for high-quality fastening products and an ability to keep up with the just-in-time supply chain requirements of the highly competitive automotive industry. For years, the company leveraged best-in-class technology and cutting-edge, in-house manufacturing into a business advantage. With technology moving to the center of every competitor in the automotive industry, Piolax USA decided to evaluate and improve the very practices that made it an industry leader throughout the company’s history.
To learn how Optima and solutions from SAP and OpenText enabled Piolax USA to achieve new levels of operational excellence, download the full case study today.
