Economic globalization continues to gather steam, making businesses from different industries, countries, and continents increasingly dependent on each other. It is giving rise to highly complex and extensive supply chains across the world, connected by widely distributed logistics networks. This growth is poised to continue well into the next decade, with reports estimating a CAGR of 5.8% for the third-party logistics industry alone, taking its total market size to over USD 100 billion by 2025. Add to this the fact that the largest supply chains are also incrementally investing in in-house logistics, and you know that the global logistics industry will continue to gain importance in the foreseeable future.
Why transforming supply chains is necessary like never before
With the continued proliferation of global supply chains and logistics operations, businesses are increasingly facing challenges like supply chain integration and low supply chain responsiveness. And to help them overcome these challenges, these businesses are rapidly undergoing digital transformation. The use of software like ERPs and technologies like analytics is helping supply chains gain a competitive edge over their peers. The adoption of ERP solutions has become the standard across the global supply chain and logistics industry. And the investment in supply chain software is only going to increase in the coming period — the supply chain management (SCM) software industry is expected to grow to USD 24.5 billion at a CAGR of 9.7% by 2025.
These ERP solutions — despite being highly advantageous to their users — are still underutilized by businesses. While organizations continue to invest millions of dollars in their supply chain transformation initiatives, they face the challenge of low user adoption. Not every employee in the supply chain network uses the tools that his company invests in. As a result, businesses fail to gain the maximum benefit from their investments. To solve this problem, SAP, the world’s number one provider of supply chain management ERPs, has come up with an innovative solution — SAP Fiori.
How SAP Fiori is transforming supply chains one UX at a time
SAP Fiori is a new user experience that is built to make SAP applications more accessible, usable, and mobile. SAP Fiori offers a collection of role-based and transaction-based applications that can be accessed by enterprise users from a variety of devices such as computers, tablets, and smartphones. The enhanced responsiveness of SAP Fiori, its cross-device support, and ease-of-use is enabling all SAP supply chain participants — from top-level managers to warehouse executives — to perform their tasks with greater convenience and efficiency. And as a result, Fiori enablement is transforming supply chain management from the ground up, leading to unprecedented results such as:
- Enhanced visibility across supply chains: With the help of Location and Transportation Lane apps on SAP Fiori, scm and logistics managers can monitor all the facilities and transport routes in real-time.
- Optimized resource utilization: Using SAP Fiori’s apps, production planners can analyze the utilization of their resources and assets to identify areas that are overloaded and those that are underutilized. Doing so enables them to plan their operations in a way that ensures optimal resource utilization.
- Maximized customer satisfaction: SAP Fiori enables warehouse executives to ensure they pick orders from storage facilities with greater speed and accuracy, thereby maximizing process efficiency and eliminating errors. As a result, supply chains achieve unprecedented levels of customer satisfaction.
The early mover advantage
SAP Fiori enablement can deliver many more benefits to supply chains by impacting almost every aspect of supply chain and logistics operations. Since SAP Fiori is a state-of-the-art user experience, only a fraction of the SAP user base has adopted it. These early movers, guided by their long-term vision, are positioning themselves to establish an insurmountable advantage over their competitors in the coming years — the kind of advantage that Walmart gained over Kmart by being the first to adopt emerging technologies like barcode scanners and computers, which have become the industry standard today. And today, while Kmart continues to scale down its operations, Walmart rises and expands globally.
You can start your own history-defining growth journey by adopting tools and solutions that have a largely unexplored potential like SAP Fiori. However, it is important to implement these technologies with the guidance of experts who know them inside-out. Hence, to ensure that your SAP enablement process is hassle-free and effective, you can get in touch with Crave InfoTech — global leaders in SAP enablement and experienced partners for digital transformation.