Case
Extraction industry - SAP-based ERM implementation
Many of our projects address critical and strategic issues for our customers who, therefore, choose to not disclose their name”.
Environment
Gralex, subsidiary of CBR and Holcim, is a leading specialist in boulder extraction, transformation and recycling into sand, screenings and granules upon strict requests. Certain extraction sites do transform, weigh and evacuate more than 10.000 tons per day. The company decided to migrate towards a completely new IT system to replace the current one dating from the 80’s and, by doing so, integrating new functionalities in terms of order management, billing, delivery, process workflow and commercial management.
Solution
Trasys has developed the ‘New Sarah’, an application aimed at registering customers and generating related weighing directly from the weighbridge, a major step in Gralex’ industrial process. Bilingual in order to comply with the geographical locations of Gralex extraction sites across Belgium, New Sarah was also interfaced with SAP R/3 modules for finance, accounting and procurement in order to ensure real-time exchange of data and information (e.g. customer reference, contract number, order description, carrier, etc.) between the company’s headquarter and the extraction sites. In addition, information from sites databases are automatically gathered and consolidated within a central database. As part of the project, a new SAP SD module has been implemented in order to improve the commercial processes of the company and improve the service towards customers.
First tested on 6 extraction sites, New Sarah entered in full production across all sites without any disruption of the production cycle.
Benefits
The development and implementation of New Sarah provides a serious improvement in the whole production process by delivering critical data in real time through a secured network and upon a sophisticated queuing system that ensures orders are handled timely and accurately. The interface with the different SAP modules allows for informing the sales department of customers orders and deliveries also in real-time, thus making the sales force more proactive and customer-focused. Finally, New Sarah is also used by Gralex’ sub-contractors and industrial partners with consolidation of their production data within Gralex’ central system.