The Loudoun Water inventory team conducted an internal review if its inventory management and warehouse administrative processes. Two main areas were identified that required immediate attention: Better utilization of SAP Material Management software and enhancement of material management and EAM business processes.

The inventory team receiving, transferring, returning, tagging, and counting processes—approximately 27,000 transactions per year—for materials were being done manually. The manual processes created duplication of effort, less transparency, and inefficient use of staff’s time.

Senior staff, in coordination with the inventory team, determined that bar coding would be the best solution with the goal of streamlining work processes, improving accessibility, and increasing timeliness and accuracy of the material master data. With a bar code solution in play, the system would support complete material tracking and provide Loudoun Water with the ability to increase productivity and quality management. In addition, material entry would be more accurate and material flow would be automated, tracked, and controlled.

Key Business Benefits:

• 30 percent acceleration in goods receipt process time and higher data capture accuracy


• 60 percent decrease in truck count times and cycle count times


• Real-time physical inventory movement visibility in SAP accelerates operational clock speed

In this session, Ford Motor Company’s business and IT global EWM implementation managers will share best practices, implementation challenges, lessons learned, and their future global implementation vision for Ford’s EWM implementation.

Key topics that will be presented in this session include Ford’s implementation strategy and timeline, integration with service parts planning, implementation challenges, supporting an EWM network, and an overview of Ford’s future plans for a global implementation of the SAP Service Parts Management suite, global process template, and migration to SAP S/4HANA®.

There will be time for Q&A with the presenters.

Materials management processes at Hess Corporation relied on manual entry of material information, which increased the possibility of human error and caused bottlenecks across several processes.  Incomplete and manual entries also often resulted in inventory inaccuracies, leading to additional material orders, needlessly increasing inventory and needed storage space, and unexpected unavailability of materials that interfere with operations and production.

Hess implemented the mobile warehouse solution that provides a real-time, role-based, and intuitive user interface into SAP to transform how warehouse operators create value for the business. The mobile solution gets paired with rugged barcode scanning peripherals and portable label printers to drive speed and accuracy in data capture and labeling. The digital transformation aimed to enable the workforce to perform its tasks better and easier than before and increase employee satisfaction.

Key Business Benefits:

• Over 100 percent acceleration in goods receipt process time and higher data capture accuracy


• Real-time physical inventory movement visibility in SAP accelerates operational clock speed


• Improvements in employee satisfaction and reduction in change management costs

Upon selecting SAP to be our new ERP, we decided after careful review to stay with the SAP Warehouse Management versus Extended Warehouse Management platform. Throughout our conversion, we kept our WM customization to a minimum by printing all sales orders for a distribution specialist to pick, pack, and complete. Eighteen months after our implementation, we decided to investigate the EWM functionality to see if it would allow us to eliminate the manual reliance of people and paper within our warehouse. While the EMW would definitely allow for this, it would also complicate other behind-the-scenes data tables and process compliance we were not able to comply with. Instead, we decided to push our WM platform to the “likeness” of an EWM without the “handcuffs” of an EWM.

We spent the next six to 12 months designing and implementing functionality in SAP WM to automatically have our batch system release sales orders to our various customer-demanded business rules. Before this, we had to execute over 20 different variants, multiple times per day through t-codes such as VL10C, VT04, and VL06P. Once the orders were released in the system, rather than printing all outputs, we designed two new t-codes to electronically organize, prioritize, and assign dock placement. The final piece of the customization would then allow us to place distribution specialists (pickers) into a queue where we would send the orders to. We can split the orders into multiple people picking, a single person picking, etc. These two customized enhancements allowed us to improve the following areas:

1. Indirect clerical labor


2. Quality on the orders and reduction in picking errors and missing errors


3. Downtime and waiting on work


4. Lead time to the customers


5. Paper and label savings

The five-year savings of this project is over $5 million net of the investment along with improving quality from four sigma to five sigma and reducing overall lead time of a sales order. It also allows Dorman to grow as a company without having to add back labor as the volume of orders increases.

Find out how BP’s Upstream organization extracted value across the global supply chain by using SAP and implementing it across BP’s regional assets. Focusing on working in SAP to drive value in the business, BP leveraged the tool with deep organizational and process integration to achieve a mindset shift in its end-to-end supply chain processes while driving a standardized approach to global performance management.

BP has witnessed how improving knowledge of the end-to-end supply chain process, using SAP, has led to the elimination of organizational silos via a collaborative, process-aligned team utilizing real-time data and a defined governance structure. Shifting the focus to an exception management process redirected efforts to proactive supplier management versus reactive chasing of late materials. With standard indicators developed across the organization, it achieved consistency in measuring performance across the regional business units with better identification of continuous improvement opportunities.

Key Business Benefits:

• Reviewed and updated MRP settings for 80 percent of materials in the deployed regions


• Reduced past due elements by 50 percent, pushing the adoption of exception management mindset


• Reduced negative days of supply by 15 percent, resulting in better overall business performance


• Reduced process inefficiency (MRP exceptions) by 42 percent, transitioning from manual MRP execution to automated


• Improved budget performance as a result of changes in material demand due to the exception management process

Learn how Puget Sound Energy (PSE) modernized the warehouse operations supporting its gas and electric transmission and distribution business by implementing SAP EWM to enable better fulfillment processes. Running SAP for nearly 20 years, managing storeroom inventory was a labor-intensive, paper-based process. With space constraints being a constant challenge, new regulations for tracking materials emerging, and a migration to Amazon Machine Images opportunities for process innovation were limited with the existing tools. By partnering with Ernst & Young to implement leading warehouse practices enabled by SAP EWM, quality management, batch management, and employ barcoding, PSE was able improve space utilization, increase inventory accuracy, empower its workforce to be more efficient, and service its field technicians more effectively.

Key Business Benefits:

• Improve management and utilization of limited warehouse space to support a complex array of maintenance parts, tools, construction materials, and operating supplies.


• Increase inventory accuracy through bin-level management of the warehouse, and barcode scan verification and data entry vs. paper.


• Accelerate business benefit realization through the use of an SAP Rapid Deployment solution/pre-configured approach and adoption of SAP Best Practices.

Learn how Belimo Americas, a global market leader in the development, production, and marketing of actuator solutions for controlling heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems, overcame significant inefficiencies and excessive financial resources with their deployment of warehouse artificial intelligence (AI) and SAP shipping integration.

Belimo executed order processing logistics with robotic arms that pull products using warehouse totes and deliver them to the correct packing stations for comprehensive packing and shipping functionality.

Complete state-of-the-art automation combined ingenious business rules for selecting optimal packaging materials and shipping carriers, along with real-time shipment processing and updating of information in SAP. The fully configurable solution eliminated unnecessary interfaces with third-party solutions while automating warehouse processes and improving freight cost analysis.

Key Business Benefits:

• Warehouse automation increased the number of orders processed per day by over 40 percent.

• Real-time integration with shipping carriers streamlined shipping processes, reduced shipping costs, and provided real-time visibility.

• Belimo increased revenue by $500,000 per day using warehouse automation.

Business expectations of IT solutions continue to grow with business stakeholders demanding modern, user-friendly applications, dashboards, and other tools to enable business processes and access to data without being tethered to their PC. These types of requests and initiatives always seem to be accompanied by a dizzying array of new products to buy, frameworks to adopt, and skills to learn.

Johns Manville has developed a shipping and logistics toolset, known internally as JMShip, to deliver mobile functionality and visual dashboards to position us a supplier and shipper of choice. This application serves as a case study for taking advantage of existing IT skill sets and leveraging existing software investments to deliver new and exciting solutions to our operations. By utilizing Agile project management, rapid development, and a “minimum-viable-product” mindset, we’ve been able to quickly go from idea to reality.

Key Business Benefits:

• Improved process adherence at facilities once metrics and data were in place


• Provide common "view of the world" that can be shared between warehouse operations, management, and sales groups


• Eliminate need for manual collection of data and email distribution of several reports (i.e., loaded trailers report, overdue customer pickup list, etc.)