How Automation Can Set SAP Users for Continuous Growth

⇨ In manufacturing industry, manual recording of inventory movements can cause delays and discrepancies, creating inaccurate consumption and inventory reporting.

⇨ By deploying automation through tools like mobile barcoding software, companies can increase their speed-to-market and significantly reduce production costs.

⇨ SAP users should note that not only can automation help accelerate vital businesses' functions, but it can also achieve required SAP updates, such as S/4HANA, paving the way for the further digital transformation.

Within the demands of the global economic competition, companies know how important it is to achieve efficiency and productivity while maintaining accuracy and consistency. With that goal in mind, many turn to solutions designed for SAP integration and development. Among them stands automation – a revolutionary concept that is already redesigning hundreds of companies’ functional processes and adapting their systems to digitalization.

Those businesses that specialize in manufacturing know how difficult it can be to monitor inventory operations. This is especially the case when inventory movements are manually recorded by hand: that often causes discrepancies between what mechanics wrote down and what was entered into the system, creating inaccurate consumption and inventory reporting.

Grupo Cementos de Chihuahua (GCC), a global leader in the manufacturing of cement and concrete for the construction industry, experienced that issue exactly. Due to manual handling of inventory operations, the company faced major challenges in managing spare parts inventory for MRO. To compensate discrepancies, the warehouse was forced to stock more parts to prevent shortages.

After researching various types of solutions, GCC discovered RFgen’s Mobile Foundations for SAP. Mobile Foundations is a mobile barcoding software featuring suites of pre-built, pre-validated mobile apps. Deployment of such software can allow businesses to gain real-time mobile inventory tracking and visibility with accuracy for every part of the warehouse. Thus, by turning to RFgen, GCC developed automation of 95% of their warehouse transactions and eliminated paper processes with transformative benefits.

Among those benefits was the ability for workers to overview all inventory operations from mobile devices at the point-of-work, reduction of stock levels by 15% and safety stock by 50% and increase of cycle count accuracy by 20%. Importantly, automation achieved through the mobile barcoding software also allowed GCC to launch seamless upgrade to S/4HANA, setting it for the potential of further expansion with Extended Warehouse Management (EWM) in the future.

An example of GCC’ s collaboration with RFgen goes to show that automation can help accelerate businesses’ processes and reduce production costs while also paving the way towards consistent growth in their digital transformation journey. With digitalization being a number one priority for most SAP users, automation is a vital tool that can help organizations achieve their goals.