Since using Magnitude Angles for SAP, HELLA has Transferred the Responsibility of Checking its Warehouse Performance to Each individual Sales Company.

HELLA is a globally positioned, independent, family owned company with a history spanning more than 100 years. HELLA develops and manufactures lighting technology and electronic products for the automobile industry and has one of the largest retail organizations for vehicle parts and accessories in Europe. The company also has one of the largest aftermarket organizations in Europe for automotive parts and accessories. HELLA has its own sales companies and partners in more than 100 countries.

Challenges

HELLA management was looking for answers to questions such as:

• Can we measure warehouse performance on decentralized levels?
• Do we achieve Clean Every Day?
• Are we increasing efficiency in our warehouses?
• How can we motivate decentralized warehouses to perform better?

Solution

The aftermarket division of HELLA has sales companies all over the world to stay close to their market and customers. In the automotive spare parts business, speed of delivery is essential. Orders have to be shipped to customers as soon as possible and, within the Netherlands, HELLA even provides same-day delivery. HELLA uses SAP WMS (Warehousing Management System) to manage its warehouses efficiently. HELLA added Magnitude Angles for SAP to its SAP BI landscape that already included SAP Business Warehouse (BW). SAP BW takes care of strategic reporting and – since Angles for SAP is not a replacement for SAP BW, but an additional analytical tool for SAP – the Angles for SAP software was added to SAP for daily analytics and operational improvements.

HELLA’s SAP landscape is complex, which makes it a challenge to retrieve data from the system for daily operational activities. Angles for SAP links data across all business processes, enabling users to quickly see the status of their orders, which is critical to HELLA, as speed of delivery is one of the company’s most important and unique selling points.

Warehouse Improvement Project

During a Proof of Concept, Angles for SAP was able to demonstrate its power – including how easily it connected to SAP. HELLA started the warehouse improvement project to improve logistics for every warehouse and for every sales and marketing company in the HELLA group. HELLA implemented Pick by Voice in the warehouse to deliver goods to customers faster. The organization also reorganized the warehouse for logic picking of orders. The ultimate goal was “Clean Every Day”: goods come in, are put away; orders come in, orders are picked and are shipped the same day. HELLA uses Angles for SAP on a daily basis to monitor and prove whether the different divisions achieve these warehousing goals.

Results

Centralized control over warehouse performance

In the past, the centralized head office calculated the warehouse performance of each individual sales company. Since using Angles for SAP, HELLA has transferred the responsibility of checking its own warehouse performance to the individual sales company. By having this control, the sales companies are able to see their own performance and if not satisfactory, they can take immediate action to correct it.

Standardization

HELLA has created Angles that can be used by every sales company, ensuring that the information in SAP is uniform. One set of Angles can be used on 15 different SAP systems across 15 different countries.

Achieving goals

HELLA uses Angles for SAP to check Clean Every Day. As speed is so important in the automotive industry, business users can quickly research whether all goods received today are put away properly, and whether all orders received today are picked and shipped today. Using the proper Angles, business users can develop a plan and take corrective action, as well as the following:

• Delegate monitoring of warehouse performances to decentralized levels
• Have decentralized levels measure their own achievements
• Harmonize global warehouse data
• Improve master data quality