Table of Contents
Highlights
Industry: Industrial Manufacturing (Climate Control)
Geography (Global): HQ in North America, Plants/Sales Regions in Canada, Mexico, Asia-Pacific
Scope: NPI Materials Request, Finished Goods, Service Materials, Raw Materials
Cross-functional Teams: Sourcing, Purchasing, Finance, Inventory Management, Customer Service, Sales, and Master Data Management
Systems Supported: SAP ECC, TIBCO EBX, Custom Application based on Oracle DB
Total number of stakeholders involved in Master Data workflows: 200+ globally
Key Master Data Issues before ZMDM adoption
- Unsupported Infopath forms to request and manual coordination for asking and getting approvals for creating different material types
- Manual approach for creating relevant master data in SAP and extending it to different plants and organizational levels
- Master data errors
- Long cycle times and requests not getting completed at all
- A large team manually supporting master data related activities
Results
| Before ZMDM | After ZMDM |
|---|---|
| Hard to use Infopath forms and manual coordination | Simple and intuitive forms and workflow-based coordination |
| Master data is created manually – time-consuming and expensive | Workflow automatically creates all the relevant master data in SAP and TIBCO EBX – zero cost and instantaneous |
| No master data governance in the process | Governance, validations, and error-proofing built into the process |
| Dedicated and large master data team in the IT department | Smaller master data team embedded into and supports business operations |
Case Study Details
The organization is a world leader in climate control solutions and has an extensive operational footprint, including many design/engineering centers, manufacturing plants, warehouses, a Retail channel, and a growing and large B2B customer channel. The business model leads to the introduction of many different types of parts (Finished Goods, Service Materials, spare parts, Raw Materials).
Given the difference in the business process, the master data and business team found that it is more effective and flexible to have a different workflow for different material types, as shown below.
