SPATCO IMPLEMENTS A mySAP™ ALL-IN-ONE SOLUTION IN 16 WEEKS TO BEAT THE COMPETITION IN CUSTOMER SERVICE
Southern Pump & Tank Company (SPATCO), headquartered in Charlotte, N.C., is a $60 million value-added distributor specializing in liquid handling equipment for the petroleum and industrial marketplaces. The company implemented a mySAP™ All-in-One solution quickly, in only 16 weeks, to support a customer-driven culture at the company.
“Our main business is distribution – buying from manufacturers and reselling to end users – but we also install and service all the equipment we sell,” says Charlie Tew, CEO of SPATCO. “If their equipment is down, customers are not generating revenue. The biggest difference between us and our competitors is the service that we give our customers. We use mySAP All-in-One to take care of our customers at a higher level of service than our competitors do.”
As a small and midsize business (SMB), SPATCO licensed the solution from SAP business partner Osprey, the SAP division of NIIT Technologies. Osprey drove the solution rollout, leveraging a rapid implementation methodology and its SMB solutions expertise to achieve the 16-week implementation.
“It was very important to be able to license mySAP All-in-One, and get implementation assistance, from a company focused on our size business,” Tew says. “We have all the same business processes as a large corporation, but we don’t have the same resources. The Osprey implementation team had breadth of knowledge about mySAP All-in-One and was able to implement quickly. This allowed us to limit the internal business and IT resources we had to dedicate to the project.”
That meant SPATCO could get applications like SAP® Service Management up and running quickly, to keep it ahead of the competition. SPATCO uses SAP Service Management to track equipment at the customer site, receive incoming service calls, dispatch and complete jobs, and track labor and materials for billing. SPATCO also uses SAP Service Management to review site and equipment histories, as well as track the profitability of individual service vans.
“mySAP All-in-One closed any holes that we had from a serviceissue perspective,” Tew says. “We have always been customer-driven, but this has given us the tools we need to improve.”
That improvement extends to overall operations, where SPATCO uses their mySAP All-in-One solution to integrate equipmentinstallation project quoting and sales through component purchasing, installation execution, progress and final billing, and follow-on equipment tracking for 5,000 customers across seven states, placing 4,500 orders per month.
“We lowered inventory by 28%, and reduced slow and nonmoving items by 70%,” says John Force, vice president of technology at SPATCO. “On the service side, we reduced the days from job completion to invoice generation from 8 to 3, increasing cash flow. And we compressed the monthly financial close from 20- plus days to 5.”
CUSTOMERS GET WEB ACCESS
SPATCO runs their mySAP All-in-One solution on the IBM AS/400 platform, OS/400 operating system, and IBM DB2 database. Approximately 130 users access the system across 11 locations, connected by a wide-area frame relay network.
SPATCO customers have access, too.
“We’re using SAP Internet Transaction Server to allow customers to enter service calls over the Internet,” Force says. “Customers can view service-call history information online to check status. They can also place sales orders and view the status of these orders online.”
SPATCO plans to implement mySAP Customer Relationship Management (mySAP CRM) to enable service technicians to update and close orders on site, instead of calling in the information for follow-up paperwork. The company also wants to use the solution to support its mobile sales force and to provide an interaction center for customers.
“Our number-one issue is exceptional customer service,” Tew says. “Everything that we do within this company starts with the customer. mySAP All-in-One offers us complete information concerning all aspects of the business relationship to better serve the customer. SAP gives us a competitive advantage that we could not get anywhere else.”
