For over a century, Whirlpool Corporation has created purposeful innovations designed to meet consumer needs and help keep homes all over the world running smoothly. Today, the business is innovating in the area of smart appliances and creating a connected home. Whirlpool also has a strong focus on increasing energy efficiency and reducing the environmental impact of its products throughout their life cycle. Since 2012, the business has held certifications for sustainability standards for refrigerators, washing machines, cooking appliances, and most recently, clothes dryers. Whirlpool has a long data history in making these appliances and other home solutions and marketing them across 170 countries. It manufactures several different brands across 14 facilities in North America and another 56 spread across the globe. And the business is still growing. A recent acquisition of American Dryer Corporation in 2015 gave the Whirlpool commercial laundry business a platform to reach even more countries and channels. The newly acquired company also gave Whirlpool a manufacturing facility, as well as an engineering and design center that Whirlpool needed to integrate into its existing environment. This involved a heavy data-entry effort for loading all the new supply chain’s asset data and financial data, such as the different accounts receivable (AR) and accounts payable (AP) information the acquired company had in its systems. Fortunately for the data entry folks, Whirlpool has been undergoing an executive-driven, overarching continuous improvement (CI) initiative over the past few years aimed at transforming the business and finding faster and more cost-effective ways of getting things done.

Striving for Continuous Improvement

In general, the CI initiative at Whirlpool came about due to a culture shift toward adopting leaner processes. With executive support, employees at all levels of the organization have been challenged with finding better ways to perform their day-to-day tasks.  As part of the initiative, Global Information Systems (GIS) began leading courses, such as CI Fundamentals, where people from different areas of the company worked together as a group to find better ways to perform work. For example, Whirlpool employees in manufacturing might collaborate with people from finance, HR, and sales — where certain practices might not be as prevalent — to improve a supply chain process. “When you sit a bunch of different people down in a room who probably wouldn’t have been there otherwise, it’s interesting to see how they start thinking about things in a much different light,” says Steven Houser, Financial Accountant, Subjective Reserves, at Whirlpool. “Through this, we are pushing for standardizing all our processes and moving in the right direction — and this is extremely important because you have to know where you’ve been before you can improve on that.” Where Whirlpool has been, from a technology and process standpoint, is in a long-time partnership with SAP. Currently running one global instance of SAP ERP with a data storage center located in Michigan, which is maintained by Whirlpool, the business upgraded to the SAP NetWeaver platform in the late 2000s and is looking to transition to SAP HANA very soon. Over a period of time, the business migrated its legacy systems to SAP software and consolidated the system landscape, discontinuing the use of the disjointed systems. As of 2015, all of Whirlpool Corporation’s manufacturing plants have been fully integrated with and are operating on SAP ERP (with the exception of those in China). Additionally, the organization runs a broad spectrum of SAP solutions, including SAP Business Warehouse, SAP Enterprise Portal, SAP Process Integration, SAP Customer Relationship Management, and SAP NetWeaver Master Data Management. In the finance department specifically, SAP software helped to standardize a lot of unwieldy financial processes and to consolidate reporting. “Some of our factories had been using an old accounts payable database, which we have now transitioned off of,” says Houser. “And it has been extremely helpful now that all that data is being processed through the SAP system.” However, because Whirlpool is such a large company with massive amounts of transactional data coming through every day — even more so now with the addition of American Dryer Corporation’s system data — the SAP system was starting to get overloaded at times, and its performance was suffering. “Having all of those records run through SAP ERP can bog down the SAP system for certain transactions, and we wanted to get rid of that wait time,” Houser says. “We didn’t want users to start running transactions and then have to stop and do something else while the transaction runs because then there are multiple touch points in the process where users are coming in and out — and the more manual touchpoints you have, the more you start to question the quality of the data.” To combat the system performance lag, the GIS team originally had customized an upload tool where, for certain transactions, users could upload a text file to mass upload. But that tool had a lot of limitations. “Some transactions would allow users to only update 2,500 records before it would time out,” says Houser. “One accounting process that involved creating order numbers in the SAP system required 38,000 lines to be updated, so if you can imagine having to split that up into 2,500 lines for every load, that’s a time-consuming nightmare of a process.” That custom tool, while still better than running the transactions manually, was not up to the lean process standards Whirlpool was headed toward. Furthermore, this involved getting help from GIS or consultants, which incurred associated fees that could be costly. The finance group needed a cost-effective solution that would get SAP users data quicker and without multiple touch points.

Discovering Process Runner

As part of the CI Fundamentals course, the shared services department became aware of an SAP partner solution — Process Runner by Innowera. This solution acts as a bridge between Microsoft Excel and the SAP system so users can upload data right from a spreadsheet into the SAP system or vice versa. The shared services department, which encompasses AP, AR, and cash applications, had been inundated with manual processes for inputting invoices, creating orders and credits, and processing claims. “We wanted to streamline the whole value stream from development to customer — improving efficiency, reducing the risk of errors, and ensuring data accuracy,” says Houser. “Being able to trust the integrity of data is very important to Whirlpool.” After watching a demo of the application and realizing it was a good fit for Whirlpool’s finance-related needs, shared services began a test of Process Runner in the fourth quarter of 2013, opting for a floating license — effectively a dry-run implementation — to see if the solution would be the right fit for the business. “We saw a lot of efficiency wins across the board when we first started using the application, finding different ways to leverage the tool and marking down all the time savings," says Houser. "For any process that we put in Process Runner, we were saving about 80% in processing hours.” Proving the tool’s value to upper-level management was rather simple, according to Houser. “We presented our forward-looking research of where this could go, what projects were lined up, how many people would be using the application, and where the need is,” he says. “The business case for Process Runner was ultimately about reducing effort hours because the more efficient we can make our data-entry uploading and downloading, the better and faster we can support our customers.” After receiving approval to ramp up use of the application, and considering the company directive to become leaner, opportunities to apply Process Runner in different process areas outside of shared services began to grow and expand fairly quickly. “We began meeting with different departmental managers to see if there were other uses for it around the organization and held training sessions,” Houser says. During these trainings, Houser or one of the other four members of the Process Runner project team would sit down with a process partner and visually map out an entire process. Then they would show the process partner how the process worked in Process Runner. “The tool is extremely easy to use, and it’s simple and fast to explain how to use it,” he says. “Once users see it, they get it.” After these steps, they would perform time studies to demonstrate the dramatic time savings to the process partner. “We did a lot of show and tell with everybody, which was very useful during training, because then they were on board with wanting to learn how to do it,” he says. “A lot of these process partners had created the original process, and they just wanted to know that we weren’t changing the way we do it; we are simply enhancing that original process by doing it the same way — just faster.” (For more information about Innowera and Process Runner, refer to the sidebar at the end of the article.)

Spinoff Results

Users of Process Runner span across all levels of the organization. For example, there are data-entry employees who primarily enter materials management data into the SAP system on a daily basis. And then there are also analyst-level people who mainly pull data to perform ad-hoc reporting and analysis. The test case for Process Runner started out primarily for SAP data entry in shared services, but over time, the company began finding more use cases for analysts using it to more efficiently extract the data they need. With the multiple touchpoints and manual processes eliminated, users have more trust in the quality of the data. The application offers assurance that information is correct through quality checkpoints as the data is going into the SAP system, which means the reports are going to be more accurate. “The validation capabilities of Process Runner give us more confidence in the data we input and extract from the SAP system,” says Houser. “Now we can see problems immediately as they happen so we can stop and fix them before errors can flow through the process and have potential downstream effects.” Process Runner has created so much operational efficiency, especially in the AP and AR spaces, that it has allowed senior managers to scale to more analytical and strategic processes. The initial test case for the application looked at five major shared services processes, and the results showed 80% time savings across the board. “Right now, the total annual hours saved, which we calculated based on 2015 numbers, have been upward of 20,000 hours,” says Houser. “And since then, we’ve expanded the use of the software a lot more so that number is not indicative of what the true impact is.” According to Houser, there are a hundred examples where Whirlpool found that Process Runner created efficiencies within certain processes due to the sheer size of data put through the SAP system. For example, one accounting process, which involved creating several hundred internal orders, was automated so that accountants can now book invoices as they come in to a specific order number. Not only does this allow for much better reporting on those orders, but the benefits can also be measured in time savings and return on investment. “The amount of time that we saved and all the overtime we avoided — just from that one process — paid for my license right there,” Houser says. Another AP process improvement that occurs quite frequently is one where Process Runner automatically grabs invoices from a certain file folder on a desktop and inputs the invoice data into the SAP system. “We get that data quickly, without having to wait, and without having multiple touch points,” Houser says. Getting data quickly is a common request for shared services, especially in instances where auditors have asked for specific information to be furnished. For example, auditors requested that Whirlpool pull sales agreements from a certain time, which amounted to several hundred thousand lines of data. Instead of having eight people spending an entire weekend taking screenshots of the SAP screens to pull the information together, Process Runner ran for about 18 hours and automatically pulled all the necessary data. The application has also improved a previously manual AP process for applying notations in the SAP system against certain line items when clearing checks. “Previously, we could only do mass text changes to records, which were applied all at once. We couldn’t change them line by line,” says Houser. “Now, Process Runner extracts all the account data, we make our changes or notations there and then upload it back in, and the whole account is changed based on the notes we added.”

Sharing the Savings

A big win for Whirlpool is that other departments outside of shared services are benefitting from Process Runner. Currently, the application is being used in the Benton Harbor corporate location, as well as across the manufacturing plants in the US and Canada. Random requests for automating processes are coming in from several different areas of the business. “Lately, I’ve been getting a lot of emails from different departments with specific needs asking about the application’s capabilities,” says Houser. For instance, the sales group now runs the application regularly to update sales order information, and it’s also being used to consolidate customer master data. Operationally, interest in the application has been growing at the Whirlpool manufacturing and distribution facilities with regards to the way different types of material data is entered and uploaded. For example, data-entry employees at different manufacturing plants had been using a time-consuming manual process to input data. These employees were keying in virtually the same data all day for a handful of materials creation transactions and entering data for the same parts, which could be several hundred parts in any given month. With Process Runner, the process is now standardized so that one manufacturing plant inputs all the data for the plants that use that process. And they’re able to do it very quickly, cutting enormous amounts of time. As the company grows, there are more opportunities for the application’s use to continue to expand as well, integrating new uses and new systems. The acquisition of American Dryer Corporation meant that data-entry workers across the organization had a host of new assets and different data sets to input into the system. “With Process Runner, we have the capability to get the acquired data up and running in the SAP system a lot more easily and quickly than we previously could have,” says Houser. “And we see a lot of potential and opportunities still to expand its use in Whirlpool. This solution was a big win for the individual challenges of changing the culture and improving processes company-wide because now we can see these massive amounts of savings on a daily basis.”