As COVID-19 impacted supply chains, Border States needed to optimize and streamline their purchase and sales order management to manage delayed and escalated orders. A new Integrated Order Management Cockpit on SAP Business Technology Platform provides end-to-end visibility into sales and purchase orders in real-time. The new solution is expected to increase customer experience and save buyer and customer service roles an estimated 16,000 hours annually.
Challenge
As COVID-19 impacted supply chains, Border States needed to optimize and streamline their purchase and sales order management to specifically manage delayed and escalated orders. It was critical to consolidate disjointed systems and tools, increase cross team visibility, and reduce the duplication of work.
Solution
The Integrated Order Management Cockpit on SAP Business Technology Platform provides end-to-end and real-time visibility into sales and purchase orders and enables colleagues from procurement, customer service, and application engineering to collaborate in order to handle material delays, escalations, and other issues.
Outcome
The expected outcome of the solution is an improved customer experience (e.g. on-time delivery), an optimized and streamlined order management with clear line of sight for all stakeholders, a reduction of duplicate work, the facilitation of hand-offs and material escalations, and increased visibility and accountability.
Border States is the seventh largest electrical distributor in the United States, providing innovative supply chain products and services to the construction, industrial and utility markets.
Border States is 100 percent employee-owned and has more than 2,300 employee-owners and 98 branch locations in 22 states. Employee-ownership drives Border States` commitment to deliver total satisfaction. Border States was founded in 1952, when two entrepreneurs wanted to serve the electric utility industry. During nearly 70 years in business, the company’s mission and values haven’t changed: Border States remains a trusted advisor and problem solver, providing value to tens of thousands of customers in the construction, industrial and utility markets. The company does this by delivering quality products, material management solutions and industry expertise.
The Integrated Order Management Cockpit provides a centralized space for all stakeholders to have visibility into order statuses, collaborate and resolve escalations in a timely manner.
I am very excited about the collaboration piece. It is an immediate way of communication and will make the life of a buyer much easier.
– Christa Lavey, Purchasing Supervisor Border States
The Flag feature allows CSR (customer service representatives) teams to request specific actions from the procurement teams. They are also able to post comments on order status updates.
With an escalation toggle, the subject matter experts can proactively help resolve escalated orders. The stakeholders can provide material level updates, too.
The solution will improve collaboration and speed of information within our company, resulting in an improved experience and service for our customers.
– Tony Serati, VP Procurement Border States
Technological foundation
The Integrated Order Management Cockpit is built on SAP Business Technology Platform, leveraging the SAP Integration and Extension Suite, SAP HANA Cloud and the SAPUI5 / SAP Fiori design framework. It provides colleagues from procurement, customer service, and application engineering with a central place to manage escalated purchase and sales orders. The teams will not have to work in multiple disjointed systems and unsynchronized tools anymore and will be able to have real time visibility across teams. This allows for instant communication and direct feedback between stakeholders improving process efficiency and eliminating the duplication of work. In addition, new team members can be onboarded quickly and raise and manage issues immediately as they occur. The semantic data models on SAP HANA Cloud make the solution SAP Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) data agnostic allowing for seamless integration with SAP ERP Central Component (ECC) now and SAP S/4HANA in the future. The SAP Integration Suite helps integrate the solution directly with data from backend solutions. The SAPUI5 / SAP Fiori design framework provides a simplified user experience enabling users to manage escalations quicker and more effectively.
This tool allows us to escalate and collaborate on orders to find alternatives and work with customers and suppliers to prevent impacts. It will enable us to better manage and communicate as challenges arise.
– Lex Silbernagel, VP Alliances Border States