SAP SE announced that with the RISE with SAP solution, Nippon Gases Europe is taking its ERP landscape in Europe to the next level.
By integrating several ERP systems, the company is driving holistic digital transformation across multiple subsidiaries with SAP S/4HANA. Key objectives of the ERP consolidation are to accelerate business processes, strengthen collaboration and enable innovation.
As part of the Japanese Nippon Sanso Holdings Corporation, Nippon Gases Europe is one of the leading industrial and medical gases companies in Europe. More than 3,000 employees supply more than 150,000 customers with gas-based solutions in the metal production and metallurgy, chemical, electronics or food and beverage industries.
Nippon Gases solutions are also essential in the medical and pharmaceutical sectors. Both its liquid nitrogen and dry ice make it possible to maintain the required cooling temperatures of COVID-19 vaccines in the logistics chain and during storage. They have been put to use in response to the unprecedented COVID-19 crisis, which has been critical for public and private entities in societies around the globe.
In Europe, Nippon Gases is represented in 13 countries with more than 100 production sites. Historically, the sites worked with a set of different ERP solutions, which involved considerable effort for maintenance, updates and servicing.
There was a large number of interfaces to keep up-to-date in order to continue to be able to exchange data smoothly between individual group divisions. Therefore, in 2020, Nippon Gases began a journey to set up a unified ERP strategy in Northern Europe based on SAP S/4HANA. The first site went live in the United Kingdom in October 2021, with half a dozen more countries to follow starting from 2022.
The new, standardized ERP processes based on SAP S/4HANA ensure faster and more transparent processes at Nippon Gases. This enables a better overview when tracking gas deliveries so that compliance requirements can be met more easily. At the same time, costs are reduced because IT has to manage only one ERP system and requires less time for administrative tasks.
“We work much more efficiently with RISE with SAP and can tackle future issues. The standardization in the new SAP S/4HANA suite will allow us to optimize capacity, focusing on other innovation initiatives as part of our ongoing digital transformation strategy,” said Cesar Callejo, Chief Information Officer, Nippon Gases Europe. From the start of the project, the RISE with SAP solution provided the company with numerous software components.
“This gives us great scope. Even away from the core ERP system, we can try out a lot of new things. For example, we can use SAP Ariba solutions to optimize procurement processes or robotic process automation to automate our business processes intelligently,” said Jens Wiechmann, SAP IT Manager Europe, Nippon Gases Europe.
Picture Courtesy: Pixabay.com
