Manufacturer accelerates supply chain processing time with automation

Company Overview

Daikin Europe N.V. is a fully owned subsidiary of Daikin Industries Ltd. The air conditioning sales and manufacturing company has a presence in more than 150 counties worldwide, including Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Russia, America, Japan, and China. Its 80,000 employees worldwide are responsible for more than €2.1 billion in sales.

Business Challenge

Daikin sought to ensure end-to-end delivery of its mission-critical supply, production, distribution, and logistics related business processes. To address its needs, Daikin developed an IT environment that interfaced with its business partners and IBM System i5 based applications.

However, Daikin’s native component content management system (CCMS) scheduling tool did not provide alert notification or enable SAP processes to run in parallel. Because the solution lacked automated recovery for failed tasks, processing required extensive manual intervention. This took up valuable time administrators could have spent on more strategic tasks. Moreover, overnight processing was supposed to occur between 10pm and 9am. But these processes often overran, which meant some key applications were unavailable during the early morning, negatively impacting end-user productivity.

With Daikin running 4,500 tasks every day, of which 33 percent interfaced with legacy systems and partners, automation and coordination were crucial. The company needed an automation solution that could more effectively manage its SAP ERP environment.

Solution

Daikin now uses RunMyJobs by Redwood to orchestrate and automate all of its mission-critical business and IT processes. The solution connects applications across all environments and locations, supporting processes, recovery actions, and failover.

Results

By implementing RunMyJobs by Redwood alongside SAP application servers, Daikin immediately reduced overnight processing time from 11 to 6 hours. This meant overnight processing was finished by 4 am and no longer encroached on the next business day’s activities.

Automation minimized human error and freed administrators to work on higher-value tasks. Additionally, customer service improved as staff could get straight to fulfilling customer product orders and other logistics requirements rather than having to deal with issues caused by process failures.

Daikin also automated and coordinated operations between the field and company headquarters. Because Redwood is system-agnostic, integrating data from both legacy and EDI systems, data in one system can now be used to trigger events in another. The company no longer struggles to manage the mission-critical sales, financial, and tracking data from suppliers and partners.

Daikin was also able to streamline how new automation was built, and halved the effort required to migrate from one environment to another, such as from test to production.

Redwood features allowed Daikin to manage tasks in near real-time and build in escalation procedures should a task hang or fail. Users are now notified of problems automatically, either by email or SMS. With enterprise-wide automation, business operations are now connected with partners and across platforms and applications.

Thanks to Redwood, Daikin has better control of its supply chain processes.