Like many different world firms, Barcelona-based Roca Group has confronted provide chain and different challenges lately, together with the COVID-19 pandemic, the conflict in Ukraine, and risky power costs. Based in 1917, the corporate designs, produces, and distributes merchandise within the lavatory house and has a business community in 170 international locations, 21,000 staff, and 79 manufacturing websites – making it a very world firm.
The corporate has expanded its worldwide operations lately by natural progress and acquisitions, says Roca Group Digital Transformation Director Jacques Nieuwland. “We’ve had the challenges of most industries within the final years,” he says. “My job is to assist Roca leverage know-how to assist the totally different strategic aims of the corporate, that are progress, innovation, operational excellence, and sustainability.”
International Provide Chain
“We’ve a worldwide provide chain for a few of our elements, so we have to plan in a extra agile means,” Nieuwland says. “We have to replace our planning and we’d like to have the ability to put in some buffers to have a resilient provide chain.”
Nieuwland says know-how helps by giving Roca better visibility into its provide chain. “Everyone collaborates towards the identical processes with the identical information. We embody our personal worth chain and in addition the worth chain of our suppliers and prospects,” he says. “And this enhanced visibility permits us to optimize the entire worth chain and to take the fitting choices.”
SAP is the spine of the corporate’s utility panorama, he says: “We carry out our core processes, which embody order processing, reordering planning, and lots of others through SAP options. It helps us as a result of it provides us a construction of processes, of knowledge, and of stories that enable us to know our enterprise, to copy it, to scale it, and to repeatedly enhance it.”
Roca makes use of the SAP Built-in Enterprise Planning for Provide Chain answer to assist it anticipate the demand for particular merchandise and regulate manufacturing accordingly. That means, Nieuwland says, “we’re capable of give a wonderful service and to optimize shares.”
Lengthy-Time period Partnership
Nieuwland says Roca Group selected SAP to be its know-how associate due to its long-term relationship with SAP and since SAP is a frontrunner in most of the options Roca wanted. “We’ve an extended historical past of collaboration and have been profitable. […] We belief the know-how, the digital provide chain answer, [and] the enterprise community answer. We prefer to work with main options – we belief them.”
Earlier this 12 months Roca chosen RISE with SAP and is making ready to go stay with SAP S/4HANA Cloud at the start of 2025 for the following part of its digital transformation – a transfer that Nieuwland believes will allow much more innovation. “We’ve chosen the cloud-based answer as a result of SAP innovates first on the cloud-based answer and we need to leverage that innovation,” he says.
He provides that the combination of SAP’s generative AI copilot Joule into SAP’s cloud ERP may even gas innovation and productiveness. “We expect there’s large potential to extend our productiveness,” he says. Extra usually, he says SAP’s cutting-edge know-how will assist Roca enhance its service to prospects and work together higher with them, in addition to assist the corporate obtain operational excellence together with, for instance, decreasing waste and enhancing sustainability.
Sustainability
On sustainability, Nieuwland says Roca Group is learning scope 1, scope 2, and scope 3 emissions. It has already set yearly targets for the discount of CO2 and desires to be carbon impartial by 2045. Extra usually, he says Roca’s objective is to ship “the very best lavatory expertise for patrons worldwide.”
Requested what different producers can study from Roca’s expertise, he says: “It’s essential to begin with a enterprise downside, a enterprise problem, and put know-how on the service of producing enterprise worth. Then it’s essential to work in cross-functional groups. So, this isn’t about shopping for tons of of options to resolve remoted issues. We have to assume on an even bigger scale and to work collectively to seek out the very best answer to our challenges and use few options and have an enterprise structure that assist our objectives.”