One way-of-working and unique data management for all sites

Industry: Manufacturing
Products: Bathroom furniture, showers and baths
Locaties: Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary
Medewerkers: 170 employees across locations
Website: www.riho.com

A smooth go-live for all entities

“We now have real-time insight into things we couldn’t possibly see before,” says group CEO Guy Claesen about the benefits of the SAP S/4HANA system that went live in May 2022. And that was exactly what RIHO wanted: more insight and a single view of all entities. All six locations of the group switched to the new system during the go-live. Simultaneously. And that went “generally pretty smooth”, says Claesen.

Processes are already running more efficiently

Control and insight: from finance to production and from stock management to logistics. That’s what RIHO got. The group’s various branches previously worked with their own software system and their own master data. If you wanted to know whether production planning was on schedule or how stock levels of warehouses compared to each other, you first had to collect, consolidate, and manually analyze the data from different points.

Claesen: “And our way of working was prone to errors this way. That is why we wanted to move towards a single system for all entities. Now we are looking at uniform data and work is done in the same way at all locations. And we are already seeing that our processes are becoming faster and more efficient.”

The ability to act upon insights directly

Conjuring up the status of your production planning on your screen in 10 seconds? That’s now possible. “And in doing so, we save valuable time and reduce the number of mistakes. For example, we can now monitor production schedules much better. Will there be a bottleneck or are we expecting one? Then we can intervene proactively now,” says Claesen. Bardo Govaarts, R&D manager at RIHO adds: “With the click of a button, we can instantly see what we have sold that day or week. We now know when to produce and when to stop producing. We now have a much better grip on production, stock and delivery times, allowing us to serve our customers even better.”

One system to store all data

Besides the quick insights into the overall operation, the new system also brings a unified form of data management. Which also makes Govaarts contented: “All product data, pricing, and product names (also in different languages), and more, are now kept in one place. This way, everyone works with the same set of data. When you enter a new product in the system, you make it immediately available to all locations. That also saves a lot of time and reduces the risk of errors.”

Instant insight and cost savings? Choose cloud

The choice for both SAP S/4HANA and us as an implementation partner was simple. On the implementation of a SaaS solution, Claesen says: “We are not a small company, but we’re neither a mastodon. If you opt for an on-premise ERP, your IT department becomes very large. Since we wanted both real-time insight into all locations and save costs on IT and maintenance, we quickly opted for a cloud solution.”

A conscious choice for SAP

Claesen explains their choice for SAP: “If you’re prepared to adapt to the system – and not the other way round – implementations go faster. We made that choice consciously. Our sites in Eastern Europe were already working with SAP ECC and therefore the learning curve would be lower for staff to get acquainted with the system. In addition, we were satisfied with our previous partnership with Czech colleagues from NTT DATA Business Solutions.”

Claesen is also satisfied with the working methods of its Dutch counterpart: “The consultants delivered a team effort together with our key-users. They were flexible, the interaction was great, and they are not at all bureaucratic. To set up the system successfully, we chose to define domains together and assign an expert to them. We also appointed an owner per business process and worked per country with a dedicated key-user who was involved in the process early on. The latter trained colleagues in the system.”

A sustainable partnership

Our joint approach proved successful. During implementation we used predefined processes that have already proven themselves at other companies, so that users quickly got an impression of the possibilities for their daily work. We enriched the quality of data several times, to create a solid advantage point to start with. And after that, it was a matter of practicing with the system and a lot of testing before the final go-live.

Claesen: “Although there’s always room for improvement, the final go-live went quite smoothly as a result of our careful approach. We put our processes for production, logistics, sales, and finance live without any hurdles. As far as I’m concerned, the relationship between RIHO and NTT DATA Business Solutions is one that I hope to continue for years to come.”