Graybar increases process efficiency for SD by 85% and WM by 66% by Automating and Mobilizing SAP using Liquid UI

Products: Liquid UI for Android | Liquid UI for iOS | Liquid UI Server
Processes: Efficient SAP SD | Efficient SAP WM

Background

Challenge

• Intricate method for creating counter orders
  • Cause: CSRs would receive the order at the counter and initiate the process of creating a sales order in SAP GUI. Then, they would search for the location of the material. At times, when the material was unavailable at a specific location, a CSR would walk back to their desktop and again search for the matching material. This process continued till all the material were found. The CSR would complete the sales order process and then hand the merchandise to the customer.
  • Effect: All the back and forth walk to gather material information made the task laborious and dropped CSRs productivity. Furthermore, CSRs were unable to perform multiple tasks at the same time which hindered operational efficiency.
• Error-prone entries of cycle count
  • Cause: The warehouse personnel would count materials according to inventory orders. Personnel would go through the entire warehouse to locate the materials which were stored on various shelves or might have different batch numbers. On top of this, they would have to individually confirm the location and batch numbers for each material and manually sum up the total. For instance, if there were 15 materials, the same process had to be done 15 times.
  • Effect: These redundant steps of locating and confirming material along with all the manual computations made each task overwhelming and tedious for the warehouse staff.
• An inefficient system of checking blocked sales orders
  • Cause: Some of the sales orders required special permission and were blocked until a manager could review them. Managers used to periodically refresh their SAP screens to check for such blocked sales orders. After reviewing the blocked sales order, their manager would either approve or disapprove their sales order.
  • Effect: This manual method of checking for blocked sales orders added delays to the process and it took hours instead of minutes to release a single blocked sales order.

Solution

• Liquid UI for Android/iOS simplified and automated the SAP WM and SAP SD processes for Graybar.
• Now the warehouse personnel can carry out their tasks for counter orders, cycle counts and blocked sales orders on-the-fly right from their mobile device with total ease.
• The barcode scanning feature has further enhanced and boosted the productivity of Graybar´s users as they are now able to enter counter order details by scanning the material´s UPC code.
• The added notification feature for blocked sales orders has enabled managers to easily review and release blocked sales order with just a few clicks thereby making the process fast and accurate.

• Liquid UI introduced a shopping cart concept for Graybar´s counter order process. It replicated shopping cart process flow involving searching the material, adding material to the cart, entering customer details and creating sales order.
• Now warehouse personnel gets alerts upfront for unavailable material while searching. Furthermore, they can now perform advanced searches based on their customers´ number and material number. Also, now they can enter additional details like order priority, special notes, customer contact information, and more on-the-go while picking material for the customer.

• Liquid UI enhanced Graybar´s cycle count process, presenting warehouse staff members with three concise views – bin view, summary view, and material view.
• In bin view, different materials are categorized based on the bin and batch number. The warehouse personnel now know upfront the number of bins they have to visit for an inventory order and also, in each bin, the number of materials they are required to count.
• The summary view shows the total number for the same material on various bins. Personnel just needs to review and confirm the actual material count.
• In material view, the personnel can see upfront all the different bin locations for the same material. For instance, material X can be store at bin A, B, and C. With this view; the user can effortlessly check all the locations for any given material.

• Graybar loved Liquid UI´s notification feature to manage any blocked sales orders. Managers are now notified on their Android/iOS device whenever there is a blocked sales order.
• The notification contains all the required context and intelligence, the manager now just needed to click on the notification. On-clicked directly drives the manager to the transaction screen inside SAP for reviewing the information. Thus making the process almost immediate from 3 hours to 30 minutes.
• Furthermore, Liquid UI introduced FTE, a headless server to monitor and send out notifications to Graybar´s users on their iOS/Android device. This sophisticated server will now check for blocked sales orders every 10 mins. It only sends out notifications for newly created sales orders to avoid redundant multiple alerts.

Results