Situation

A global supplier of paints, coatings, optical products, specialty materials, glass, and fiber glass acquired and integrated a competitor, more than doubling its footprint in North America. As a result, the company entered the process of implementing SAP company-wide, a significant investment and multi-faceted undertaking. An important component of the SAP initiative involved repositioning the Data Management Organization (DMO), as a driver of the company’s strategic goals to ensure customer satisfaction through data integrity and speed-to-market. To succeed in the eyes of the business, it was necessary to eliminate the DMO team’s near term capacity constraints which were causing multiple challenges: missing and unclear data, routing issues, lack of standardization around data rules, errors in manual entry and lack of visibility, all of which were at the root of an unusually slow speed-to-market.

Solution

The competitive global market for architectural coatings requires constant product innovation, strong customer relationships, excellence in manufacturing, and purchasing scale to drive profitable growth. To align with these requirements, BusinessForward provided a master data management solution to the customer. By highlighting inefficiencies like waste, rework, duplication and handoff issues, we were able to identify the root cause of their unusually long speed to market. The BusinessForward team worked with the DMO team to understand and ensure consistent standards are in place to provide continuous high quality service to IT customers, to ensure success is measured consistently and decisions are made based on easy to use Management Operating Reports and to ensure clarity around the services that were provided to customers as well as the expectations on services provided. This involved:

1. Finding solutions for opportunities that would improve speed-to-market by more than 50% for a finished good
2. A new Service Level Guideline (SLG) program that would help set more realistic and accurate expectations with Business Partners and a way forward for continual improvement
3. Defining Productivity Reporting that helped ensure that SLGs were met and performance was continually improved
4. Quick and non-technology improvements slated to be implemented during the first month of our engagement
5. Working closely with their technology provider to make sure that their solution would meet our process needs and company’s strategic direction

Results

From discovery to design and the future state process, everything focuses on teamwork, collaboration and working together. Solutions are designed to be scalable, sustainable and focused on continual improvement. Specifically, an end-to-end, solution focused on enabling the DMO customer base to better serve customers while improving speed to market for a finished good by more than 50%. Additionally, Service Level Guideline benchmarks will now improve service to customers and drive productivity.