Industry Overview
OPERATIONAL EFFICIENCY: DEFINING SUCCESS IN MILL PRODUCTS
Whether you manufacture metals or building materials, paper or plastics, sustaining growth in an uncertain economy is probably top of mind. To manage your company's growth, you need to ship differentiated products and services cost-effectively, focusing on innovation and customer demands.
By integrating and streamlining business processes with SAP solutions, mill products companies can achieve the operational efficiencies they need to sustain growth in an uncertain market. In fact, more than 3,700 successful mill products companies run SAP solutions. And did you know that 65% of SAP customers are small and midsize companies?
Learn about our industry focus:
| Building Materials |
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If you're in the business of producing cement, concrete, aggregates, roofing, or plasterboard, you're in a commodity business dominated price and margin pressure, consolidation, and high order-change rates. And that means you're probably juggling requirements for cost control, differentiation in customer service, and growth.
Business objectives like these underscore the need to streamline processes – from production and sales, to distribution, transportation, financials, and human resources – so you can:
- Improve supply chain efficiency and decrease costs
- Quickly and reliably react on customer needs, while staying profitable
- Build long-term relationships with your profitable customers by making it easy for them to do business with you
- Provide the visibility and transparency needed for sound decision making and compliance
SAP can help you:
- Decrease sales and distribution costs
- Conduct smart maintenance forecasting, planning, and execution
- Centralize and organize sales activities
- Plan and execute cost-effective transportation of bulky and heavy products
- Centralize customer contacts and create a single point of communication
- Enable customer self-service via the Internet or automated terminals
- Get visibility into your investments to make the right decisions
- Improve analytics for sales figures, costs, and margins, and other key performance indicators
- Respond quickly to changing customer needs
- Enable reliable checks of availabilities and deliveries
Read about our customers:
Learn more about how SAP solutions have made a real difference to midsize companies in your industry. Read some of our customer references.
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| Fabricated Metals |
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Whether you make to stock, make to order, or do a little of both, you deliver a quality product on time, at a reasonable price. That's why your customers choose you over the competition. But are you as profitable as you can be? Can you innovate to drive sales growth? And keep operations lean?
Support profitable growth now and into the future, you need to:
- Control operational costs and provide visibility into your operation network
- Make the most of your supplier capacity, production materials, and distribution network
- Deliver the right products at the right time, whether making to specification or shipping from stock
- View demand across your supply chain in real time
- Build customer satisfaction and loyalty
- Assess customer demands and market trends to maximize your portfolio performance
- Reduce time to market
- Respond quickly to dynamic market conditions
- Support your company's growth strategies
- Comply with regulatory mandates to ensure quality standards
SAP can help you:
- Embed mix and volume flexibility into the supply network without sacrificing time to market and time to volume
- Estimate the impact of fluctuations in the supply chain – and respond accordingly
- Enable collaboration by quickly and efficiently exchanging operational information with key business partners
- Gain visibility into schedules, materials, works in progress, finished goods inventories
- Accurately project demand and inventory levels
- Analyze manufacturing reports across geographies or product attributes
- Track order requirements and capacity, so you can keep commitments to customers
- Enforce corporate policies and comply with regional and international finance and environment, health, and safety regulations
- Offer value-added services such as collaborative product design or automatic inventory replenishment
- Align growth initiatives with capital flow, expanding your system capabilities in step with business opportunities
Read about our customers:
Learn more about how SAP solutions have made a real difference to midsize companies in your industry. Read some of our customer references.
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| Furniture |
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Faced with the pressure to maintain margins and profitability, furniture manufacturers must look for efficiencies across their operations:
- In managing both commodity and highly customized product lines
- In responding to changing customer demands and increased competition from low-cost markets
- In the customer service and sales effectiveness that creates brand differentiation
- In understanding customer needs and providing the products and services to meet them
Vital to success in this environment is the ability to control costs and optimize processes. e To drive efficiency, control costs, optimize processes, and address customer needs, many furniture companies are focusing on improving supply chain management – streamlining operations and optimizing their ability to adapt to a changing business environment:
SAP can help you:
- Gain visibility and control through integrated supply chain management
- Improve efficiency and costs in enterprise asset management and operations management
- Coordinate manufacturing and scheduling to manage cyclic consumer spending and the high cost of inventory
- Integrate legacy systems, manufacturing execution systems, and an custom applications for improved visibility at minimal cost
- Keep current with fashion and design – while always pursuing less expensive design alternatives – to ensure market growth in a global industry
Read about our customers:
Learn more about how SAP solutions have made a real difference to midsize companies in your industry. Read some of our customer references.
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| Packaging |
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From corrugated containerboard to bubble wrap, packaging products are hardly common. But as every packaging producer knows, commodity-driven businesses all face the pressures of aggressive production deadlines and increasing demand for quality products at reasonable prices.
Success in this environment takes controlling costs and increasing efficiencies in the way you make and move your products. And that takes the visibility and control you get when your sales, manufacturing, and accounting systems completely connected. When your business is integrated, end to end.
SAP can help you:
- Monitor and control sales, manufacturing, warehouse, and transportation activities using a consistent set of finance-based performance indicators
- Develop accurate quotes with reasonable margins, based on real-time production schedules
- Get a comprehensive view of standing orders - including turn times, product specifications, and mix options
- Track orders as they move through the plant, so you can address production issues before they become concerns
- Give your customers Internet access to orders-in-progress, account information, and inventory levels
- Automate product configuration and construction
- Model the most optimal production method for each product
- Respond easily to current and future requirements for radio frequency identification (RFID)
- Comply with environmental and waste management regulations
- Improve timeliness and agility, so you can respond to requests for quotation or to deliver off stock
- Increase visibility into operational costs to ensure profitability in a low-margin industry
Read about our customers:
Learn more about how SAP solutions have made a real difference to midsize companies in your industry. Read some of our customer references.
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| Plastics |
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Your product may be unmatched in versatility and indispensability. And your industry may be seeing above-average growth. Yet despite these advantages, your plastics company remains subject to the complexities of doing business in the modern marketplace.
Success in this business environment takes:
- Innovative technologies
- Expansion into new markets
- Controlled costs, margins, and profitability
- Internationalization of all aspects of the business
- Increased efficiencies in manufacturing and shipping
- Business process improvement
- More efficient supply chain management, supporting sophisticated equipment and specialized manufacturing processes, including compounding, injection molding, and extrusion
SAP can help you:
- Manage intercompany processes, including cross-plant planning and international sales
- Manage subcontractors
- Automate batch management and tracing
- Address sequencing issues and optimization
- Reuse and trim optimization
- Improve tools management
Read about our customers:
Learn more about how SAP solutions have made a real difference to midsize companies in your industry. Read some of our customer references.
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| Primary Metals |
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In a market dominated by globalization, higher costs of raw materials and energy, and increasing complex supply chains, yesterday's business models no longer apply. To maximize margins and sustain revenue growth, you need to adapt your business to today's realities. Realities that underscore the need for:
- Collaborative product design through manufacturing and sales
- Internal financial and success controls
- The stability to respond to change without disruption of sensitive business processes
SAP can help you:
- Apply multiple dimensions and characteristics of industry-specific modeling to your products – from inception to production
- Track materials and satisfy customer demand more efficiently by running a single integrated supply chain
- Manufacture products through common processes that allow extensive material tracing of single units and the ability to react to unplanned events
- Synchronize your manufacturing process with quality management, plant maintenance, and other related business processes
- Optimize planning with processes integrated at all planning stages – from forecasting through production scheduling
- Integrate your business at all levels – from the production floor to executive offices
- Process sales orders by checking product availability on multilevel material and capacity
- Track products from suppliers to your company using radio frequency identification (RFID) technology
Read about our customers:
Learn more about how SAP solutions have made a real difference to midsize companies in your industry. Read some of our customer references.
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| Pulp & Paper |
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Constantly changing demand. Increased market competition. Higher costs for raw materials, equipment, and transportation. Maintaining margins and profitability. These are just a few in a growing number of business complexities facing today's pulp and paper companies.
Success in this environment – where product quality alone isn't enough to ensure success – is no easy task. It takes adapting to customer demand, enhancing service, and lowering costs. And it takes differentiating your company from the competition on two fronts:
- How you make and move your product
- How you run your supply chain
SAP can help you:
- Tighten cost controls
- Improve flexibility and efficiency in procurement and production
- Respond quickly to changing customer needs through tight integration of suppliers
- Shorten procurement cycles and lower inventory levels
- Improve maintenance planning and execution
- Centralize and organizing sales activities
- Obtain analytics for sales figures, costs and margins, and other key performance indicators
Read about our customers:
Learn more about how SAP solutions have made a real difference to midsize companies in your industry. Read some of our customer references.
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| Textiles |
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Whether you turn high-tech synthetic yarns into wool fabrics or cotton linen into diapers, you face pressures stemming from increased globalization, intensive supplier and sales markets, and outsourcing.
To address these challenges, textile companies are focused on:
- Meeting global performance specifications, quality standards, and delivery schedules without driving up costs
- Improving control of the operational environment to increase efficiency and profitability
- Collaborating in new logistic structures – working with partners, suppliers, and customers to create adaptive supply chain networks
- Making more efficient use of capital and resources
- Standardizing business processes across the enterprise to achieve higher performance
- Anticipating, understanding, and responding to customers and market trends
SAP can help you:
- Gain operational efficiencies by streamlining processes end to end across your value chain
- Support extensive collaboration to facilitate efficient execution of your business processes and reduce production and procurement costs
- Increase product mix by staying current on building trends and fashion
- Keep operational costs under strict control
- Integrate flexible supply chains to meet changing customer needs
- Increase visibility and control of your supply chain
- Reduce the risk of non-compliance
- Align customer and customer and supplier processes to improve sales, purchasing, shipping, and inventory management
- Understand and consistently satisfy customer needs at low cost
- Respond rapidly to production issues or changes in demand – and get to market faster with new products.
Read about our customers:
Learn more about how SAP solutions have made a real difference to midsize companies in your industry. Read some of our customer references.
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| Timberlands & Solid Wood |
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Keeping customers satisfied is critical to making and keeping business profitable in a true global market. And it's no secret that key to achieving high-level customer satisfaction is to supply what your customers need when they need it.
For timberlands and solid wood companies, this means having the ability to effectively manage every aspect of the supply chain – from fiber supply through manufacturing to customer delivery. Although optimizing supply chain management isn't a unique concept in any industry, the unique requirements of your customers make it especially challenging.
SAP can help you:
- Capture end-use demand for various forms of fiber relative to available supply, while addressing the best time to cut a specific section of forest to meet that demand
- Include advanced planning and modeling functions that can help you improve forecast requirements for appropriate log species, size, and grade
- Support geographic information system (GIS) integration to provide you with graphical views of the forest status that reflect harvesting as well as replanting and maintenance activities
Read about our customers:
Learn more about how SAP solutions have made a real difference to midsize companies in your industry. Read some of our customer references.
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