With over 1,000 patented offerings, LEOCH International Technology Ltd. has developed a reputation for battery products that meet different specifications, configurations and technologies, effectively meeting the diverse needs of various users.
But in an era of rapid innovation and international expansion, the Singapore-based company has had to weigh lifestyle constraints, billing inefficiencies, high costs, safety concerns and environmental impacts before launching each product.
For example, with regulations changing around the world, LEOCH was forced to consider new ways to dispose of battery waste.
While constant innovation was moving the industry forward, it also presented challenges, as new technologies and processes rendered everything that came before obsolete. This required employees to change skill sets and LEOCH to make expensive investments in research and development.
Material requirements planning (MRP), the system that calculates the components needed to manufacture an effective product, often lacked reliability, requiring planners to communicate offline and use manual scheduling methods.
In addition, manual tasks were required to adapt to international accounting approaches and generate income statements and operational analysis reports.
Even the software used to alleviate these problems has become antiquated. Although enterprise resource planning (ERP) has been around for three decades, its architecture and implementations were designed in a different era, before the globalization of the economy and supply chains, and advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud computing.
In LEOCH’s case, its ERP system, SAP ERP Central Component (ECC), was implemented in 2014. Almost a decade later, the software was outdated and did not align with the business functionality of the company’s other tools.
If the company hopes to progress, more than a simple upgrade would be essential.
LEOCH would have to develop a comprehensive AI-powered enterprise automation solution to uncover efficiencies, integrate applications and automate processes using software from different vendors.
Climbing to the cloud
Previously, companies moving to the cloud could only do so through multiple contracts with multiple vendors.
The situation led SAP, the world’s leading ERP software company, to create RISE with SAP, a complete solution that brings together the various offerings in a single package containing embedded intelligence, advanced technologies and real-time insights.
By the time LEOCH was ready to develop its new platform, the company had already been working with SAP for nine years. LEOCH and SAP leveraged this long-standing relationship to ensure a smooth migration of its online ERP to the cloud.
The transition would be seamless, moving from SAP S/4HANA, the ERP software for large enterprises, to SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition, a solution tailored to each organization’s unique transformation. This shift would optimize material master data and evaluate processes based on social impacts, such as hazardous waste disposal, improving production planning and improving cost allocations.
AI-powered SAP Service and Support would provide crucial assistance, while SAP Build Process Automation, incorporating Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and embedded AI, would streamline change and help LEOCH set a modern standard for operational efficiency.
Ideal flow
After implementing the solution in March 2023, LEOCH’s operations have been standardized, resulting in improved business and financial process flow and increased environmental compliance, which has laid a solid foundation for future growth.
“We have granular data” – information that has been broken down into its most detailed parts – “for in-depth analysis, gaining insights into the optimal flow of processes,” Dr. Tao noted.
Chen, Chief Process and Information Officer at LEOCH, member of the executive management team and Managing Director for Europe, Middle East and Asia.
The implementation also led to a notable 30% reduction in manual workload, while project implementation time decreased from 120 hours per month to less than 18, representing a tenfold increase in efficiency.
Additionally, the company’s MRP became 60% faster, resulting in a doubling of warehouse inventory efficiency.
Suppliers have noticed that their interactions with the front office are now smoother, as authorizations for transactions are accelerated due to a six-fold increase in validation of payment information.
Furthermore, in terms of international accounting, the period required to maintain the exchange rate has been drastically reduced from 48 hours to less than ten minutes, representing an impressive pace, 288 times faster than before.
For its powerful enterprise automation journey, LEOCH International Technology Ltd. has been recognized as a winner in the 2024 SAP Innovation Awards, a global program designed to honor and celebrate organizations that are pushing the boundaries of innovation. To learn how they accomplished this feat, you can read their pitch deck here.
