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THE STORY
Greene Tweed Co., is aiming to double revenues in the next 7 years. In addition to growth, there is a focus on improving customer experience, operational efficiency, and optimizing working capital. With this plan in mind, there was recognition of the need to transform people, process, and technology to enable this growth. One of the starting points was better utilization of SAP capabilities through improved data integrity, improved planning and scheduling, and improved integration across their supply chain, all with an eye toward a migration to SAP S/4HANA.
THE CHALLENGE
In the aftermath of COVID-19 supply disruptions, Greene Tweed, Co. faced challenges returning their supply chain to balance. Many suppliers struggled to consistently fulfill their component requirements and on-going capacity challenges in the business led to late orders and growing inventory. With no automated Available to Promise (ATP) in SAP, and significant manual intervention in planning, it was difficult to provide customers with realistic delivery dates. Additionally, while production planning was performed in SAP, it was highly manual, and there was no use of the scheduling board or dispatching. Silos were evident leading to a lack of agility. Finally, the existing SAP ECC was heavily customized over a 20-year period, presenting challenges for their upcoming S/4HANA migration.
THE SOLUTION
Partnering with Reveal, Greene Tweed, Co. undertook a supply chain transformation to address gaps in understanding of standard SAP functionality, align master data with business rules, improve data quality, and empower business teams through education and knowledge application. Team members were educated on how to utilize standard functionality to optimize material performance, manage exceptions, and to work collaboratively across functional boundaries to achieve better outcomes. ATP was implemented, which included eliminating customizations that were preventing ATP from working in the past. With this new insight into SAP’s full capabilities, Planners and Buyers were empowered to manage key master data elements. Finite scheduling was implemented in production planning and significant automation was introduced to reduce the human struggle hours involved in planning and scheduling. New Procurement techniques such as consumption-based planning and outline agreements were introduced to reduce manual effort in the buying process, and a consistent daily cadence put in place to better control the release of PO’s and prevent premature ordering. Finally, optimization efforts in the warehouse, both in SAP and with physical processes, as well as education in SAP WM functionality led to improved efficiencies through reduced travel times and manual effort in picking and put-away. All of this left the organization in a much stronger position to begin their S/4HANA migration journey, improved financial performance.
THE RESULTS
Inventory Reduction
- Inventory is down 10% from the starting point, but more than 20% from peak
- Dead stock is down 20% from its peak and continues to drop
Efficiency Improvements
- Time savings of 50-60 hours per week across Production Planning team
- Reduced Buyer effort by moving low-value, high-mover items to consumption-based planning, and introducing outline agreements to replace blanket PO’s, allowing MRP to drive buys
- Improved warehouse efficiency and flow
Improved Data Integrity
- 71% reduction in negative days of supply
- 85% reduction in overdue MRP supply elements
- 51% reduction in overdue MRP demand elements
- 70% reduction in MRP exceptions
S/4HANA Readiness
Improved data and leveraging more SAP features like ATP and Production Planning will help streamline the move to S/4 and realize value once they migrate to their new system.
ABOUT GREENE TWEED, Co.
Greene Tweed, Co. has been pushing the boundaries of material science for more than 160 years. The company designs and manufactures thermoplastics, elastomers, composites, sealing solutions, and engineered components for the most demanding applications across aerospace and defense, chemical processing, energy, life sciences, semiconductor, or other advanced industries.
