Many organizations are considering cloud-based business solutions as a means to reduce maintenance costs and total cost of ownership across the company. In fact, according to a recent article in Wired Magazine, nearly 80% of all companies in a survey of IT professionals use some sort of cloud applications.
There are clouds solutions from SAP that can help companies turn a collection of disparate processes into a structured business model that creates efficiencies across all operations. As an example, many manufacturing companies – and in particular, organizations in the automotive industry – are using these solutions in sales and human resource management.
Streamlining processes for greater efficiencies
In the automotive industry, it’s been a long and hard road since the outset of the Great Recession of 2008. Since that time, global automotive suppliers have worked hard at top-line growth while executing bottom-line cost restructuring. This has led to organic and innovative growth, as well as expansion through deeper partnerships with manufacturing OEMs through selective acquisitions that complete a full manufacturing program offering or technology.
Cloud solutions from SAP have helped automotive suppliers like these, especially those with a number of disparate operations across multiple international geographies. In these organizations, it’s not unusual to see 20 or more benefit and payroll systems from acquisitions over a period of several years. A cloud-based Human Capital Management (HCM) solution can often bring these systems together and create enormous efficiencies for thousands of staff members that contribute to the HR processes either directly or indirectly. With a high percentage of costs directly or indirectly attributed to products, a consolidated cloud-based approach can be the right move.
Additionally, when a global manufacturing supplier has a number of on-premise and cloud-based sales management and marketing solutions to manage OEM customer programs, a move to the cloud can be a good one. This is especially true when suppliers are diversified across a number of industry segments. A single, consolidated view can give account teams the transparency and direction needed to be competitive on multiple program acquisitions.
The cloud to the rescue
A decision to move to a cloud-based solution is not an easy one, as there are multiple options from several providers. For manufacturing companies, the key characteristics to look for in a robust cloud-based solution include:
- The ability to have one view of customer programs across multiple acquisitions and proposals, leading to greater sales and marketing effectiveness for the manufacturing supplier.
- The ability to provide companies that have regional plant and logistics operations a consistent, secure, and compliant way to pay employees across multiple product lines and country boundaries.
- The insight to give management the cost of human capital needed to justify the expense.
There are many potential benefits of using the cloud in this manner. One is that companies can expect to see greater win conversions across OEM customer portfolios, which in turn will lead to reduced product costs and improved operational efficiency.
Cloud solutions from SAP can easily be transitioned into organizations, so companies will have valuable on-premises assets freed up for other mission-critical applications. Since there will be fewer direct employees managing the processes, SAP customers find that there is a reduction in process execution errors, making the execution of both sales and HR processes more efficient. In addition, these processes will be more effective as there will be a reduction in transaction errors over a higher number of transactions.
To learn more about how the SAP Cloud portfolio can help your company create efficiencies like these, visit the SAP Marketplace.
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