Maybe … especially if we (the industry, not your specific company) want profitability.
You may remember SAP’s marketing theme of a couple of years ago that basically of “The best-run businesses run SAP”. With a multitude of electrical manufacturers turning to SAP, and many already having it, perhaps for the electrical industry to gain the productivity, process improvement and innovation it needs to compete in a more competitive, lower margin, business, perhaps the electrical industry should “run” on SAP?
No, we’re not suggesting that distributors and small / mid-sized manufacturers go to SAP, but, here’s an off the wall idea … perhaps industry ERP companies should more seamlessly interface with SAP systems?
Consider what the benefits could be if distributor systems could “talk” right into an SAP system! Makes order placement easier. Same for price updates. Product forecasting based upon today’s sales. Shipping acknowledgements from system to system. Aggregating marketing data. And who knows what else. Or think of it this way – do you think Border States, which runs on SAP, has found innovative, time saving ways, to interface with some of their manufacturers who run SAP (we know they had discussions with Sylvania about this a few years ago) – or for that matter, Graybar?
What is in it for the ERP companies? Probably nothing, which probably means it won’t be explored. What could be in it for distributors and manufacturers? Don’t know, but could be a lot of money.
Consider the manufacturers who run on SAP – Sylvania, Philips, Rockwell, Philips Lighting Electronics, Littelfuse, Hubbell, ABB, Siemens, Schneider Electric, Molex, Cooper, (with Allied Tube & Conduit (Tyco) and others reportedly moving this way) let alone more that we can’t remember
Perhaps Infor (NxTrend), Activant (Eclipse) and SAP could together benefit their customers?
And smaller distributors can now get involved with SAP through ProSoft Business Solutions Group, which specializes in SAP distribution software for smaller companies.
We know … a pipe dream! And distributors would need to increase their inventory initially with the inevitable “software delay and challenges”! Or perhaps this could be a worthy IDEA initiative?
6 Comments
Very interesting article guys. Prosoft (an SAP Business Partner)and DTG are currently working together. We have discussed a forum for manufacturers and distributors that currently use SAP to meet and share ideas. Interested other parties will be invited as well. Feel free to contact me for more information.
Stacey Pandeloglou
I guess the question is What files do these Vendors maintain in SAP that could be propagated to the distributor, and from distributor to vendor?
contract pricing, Rebates, POS data, not to mention PO’s. Maybe in a way other than EDI?
If these vendors could agree on a best practice, that helped to set a standard for all of these doc’s. The doc’s could be imported and exported, for easy update, emailed or even uploaded via web front ends.
Anything that makes conducting transactions, faster, cheaper and more accurate across vendors and distributors should find wide acceptance.
This is a topic worth exploring for the distributors and manufacturers running SAP today. There are breaks in the supply chain today that don’t need to be there. The data that’s in manufacturers’ SAP systems is mostly the same data that distributors need in their SAP system. The data structures in SAP are universal; whether you’re a manufacturer, distributor, retailer, service provider, etc… This shared platform should be exploited for the benefit of the industry. ProSoft can help spearhead the discussion and bring in the right subject matter experts from SAP.
The electrical industry needs to take a new look at what SAP has done in the last 5 years to bring their product to the Small, Medium Enterprise market (SME). There is now a significant opportunity to have a Tier 1 solution partner at a Tier 3 price. With a full product offering, SAP can bring an end to end solution to distributors with as few as 1 user to as large as you need. SAP is no longer just for the Fortune 500 but now is a clear choice for the Fortune 500,000.
You can now have a clear vision to the future and no longer be a slave to your software publisher with SAP’s openness.
“Best Run Businesses Do Run SAP, not just great big businesses”.
Biggest challenge would be getting people like Activant and Infor to talk to SAP to help us distributors. Seems to take forever when we distributors ask them for something. They give lip service to users groups and don’t seem too responsive to their customers. If they don’t talk to us, they probably wouldn’t talk to SAP – even if it helped their customers!
Infor for years has sold and installed an ERP system for manufacturing companies. Many would be suprised at where their products now reside.
While Infor is best known for their SXe distributor product, it should be pointed out that Infor has addressed many of the issues that SAP now is addressing.
Just a passing thought.
Leave a Reply
Trending Now
Pulse of Switchgear
