Merino

The opportunity: Transformation to SAP S/4HANA Cloud

Merino Industries Limited is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of decorative laminates. The company operates in more than 80 countries and has diverse business interests that focus primarily on interior architectural products.

Merino knew it needed to make some changes to remain competitive in the global market. Multiple customizations had made their systems complicated, resulting in non-standard practices that no longer met Merino’s long-term business vision. Manual data reconciliation with numerous third-party systems led to increased human intervention, making them vulnerable to errors.

Merino needed modernized technology to improve both their back-office and front-office deliverables by way of robust and reliable data; that could provide superior visibility across the supply chain, to better meet customer expectations.

Our response: KPMG digital transformation suite wrapped in a trusted relationship

As Merino considered an SAP implementation leveraging SAP S/4HANA Cloud, KPMG in India presented a credible proof of concept demonstrating the power of SAP technology by working through some of Merino’s most complicated business processes. This enabled the client to witness activities in action – executed with efficiency, agility and authenticity. The prototype, in combination with an experienced KPMG SAP team, the KPMG digital transformation suite, and consultants’ commitment to Merino’s digital transformation success, showed Merino that KPMG in India was the ideal implementation provider.

The KPMG in India team worked with the following SAP products to help Merino: SAP S/4HANA Private Cloud Edition, SAP Treasury, Production Planning & Detailed Scheduling (PPDS), SAP BTP/ Business Technology Platform, SAP Cloud Integration/ SI, SAP Advanced Business Application Programming/ ABAP, SAP Fiori and RISE with SAP.

In addition to implementing a future-ready technology suite, another critical factor to the success of the project was the high-level people-focused approach, from the top down. Merino wanted to build a good working relationship with the KPMG in India engagement team to gather insights and industry perspectives. Using his mechanical engineering background, the KPMG lead Partner held several technical discussions between the client team and the KPMG delivery team, bringing the right subject matter specialists in to offer additional insights and tactics, identify and mitigate risks, and share lessons learned from similar transformation projects. With a hands-on approach, the KPMG in India team built trust with the client.

Since implementing SAP S/4HANA Cloud, Merino has recorded improvements in a range of processes and services across the business. The single source of truth brought by the SAP suite of products has enabled Merino to standardize processes across departments, as well as provide clearer guiding principles to meet the company’s growing needs.

‘Mastering’ the master data was an expected challenge that required thoughtful change management to encourage technological fluency and coordination amongst all business functions. Now, with SAP, relying on data has become a new (and much-welcomed) way of working.

At a glance

• Improved turnaround time (TAT) for activities such as production/ dispatch planning, data preparation and reporting
• Improved OTIF performance (on time, in full)
• Increased productivity via automation of recurring activities
• Digitization of processes and automation of human-dependent activities

KPMG in India delivered the 15-month project on time and budget. Notable achievements included developing SAP solutions to help Merino digitize their entire shop floor from the perspective of material movement, with handheld devices; calculating estimated delivery dates, and performing product and profitability analysis – essential services Merino needed to respond to customer needs more effectively and efficiently.