SAP : Congratulations to the Winners of the First Annual SAP Excellence Awards in Automotive

On September 13, SAP announced the winners of the first annual automotive SAP Excellence Awards at the Best Practices for Automotive conference in Detroit, Michigan.

The three awards - Breaking the Mold, Digital Disruptor, and Excellence in Operational Performance - were hotly contested. Each nomination was evaluated by a panel of industry experts on how they meet and exceed the predefined standards listed in each category, as well as ranked against their competitors.

The awards were judged by a panel of the three industry experts: Uli Muench, global vice president for the Automotive Business Unit at SAP; Aly Pinder, program director for Service Innovation and Connected Products at IDC; and Thomas Madonna, lead partner for SAP Retail, Consumer Products, and Manufacturing at Infosys. These three industry experts worked together to review the nominations and make the selection for each of the categories listed below.

The winners for this year's competition were:

Breaking the Mold

Volkswagen Group of America, having identified a challenge in the dealer ecosystem with rising inbound call and email volumes, needed a solution to improve its ability to respond to dealer inquiries faster. To address this challenge, Volkswagen turned to technology and added a live chat feature to its dealer response team's abilities, allowing them to responded faster and improve dealer satisfaction.

Since kicking off this initiative, Volkswagen has begun working on standing up a chat response team to expand on the success of the program.

Digital Disruptor

General Motors (GM), being a large global company, is looking to automate its financial systems and processes to allow for real-time information to support critical business decisions. The company is currently in the final stages of implementing the SAP S/4HANA central finance solution. GM is in a simulation phase of the solution and plans to go live in January. This solution will coordinate - i.e. digitize - financial (GL) information from multiple sources to support accounting processes and real-time information. The digitization and harmonization of financial data will be a corporate asset leveraged globally.

Excellence in Operational Performance

BorgWarner's Business Unit was experiencing heavy growth around the world and was struggling to manage the output in an economic manner. They had challenges like inventory growth, special freights, low-quality planning for suppliers, demand/capacity planning, SAP system utilization, and data quality was low.

The company executed an Excellence Program, a full education of employees using MM and PP modules over six to eight months per plant, in order to fully utilize the standard planning functionality within SAP ERP. As a result, they had significant reduction of inventory and dead stock, continuously improved inventory turns, less overtime and premium freight, much higher data quality overall, and smoother production flows - and a great documentation of the successes of the work force and management teams.

These award-winning customers are leveraging SAP technology solutions to improve performance, increase customer satisfaction, and drive user adoption. They have raised their game so their organizations run simple, because the best-run businesses make the world run better.