SAP will provide its SAP for Automotive industry software suite as a base for Iveco’s vehicle configuration portal, with the aim of enabling importers and distributors worldwide to custom-order vehicles online. SAP claims that this has started an end-to-end process chain that has shortened Iveco’s worldwide financial closing cycle to one week and reduced purchase-order errors by more than 50%.
Iveco said that its go-live implementation of SAP software in January 2004 allowed the company to further its initiative to unify a global business network spanning 23 production sites, 250 dealers and more than 5,000 suppliers.
The new technology will intend to integrate all information and processes from the front-end to the back-office, validating each order for a buildable vehicle. Iveco dealers hope to access the web portal and vehicle configuration applications in order to personalize a vehicle that is fully supported and able to be built within Iveco’s plant systems.
The integrated program is also expected to provide users across sales, production and financial departments with comprehensive visibility into the vehicle pipeline and help reduce sales costs, optimize warehouse stock and improve delivery times.
Our portal solution from SAP is truly a first in the automotive sector; it puts the vehicle at the center of our ordering processes, the customer in the driver’s seat and our revenue cycle in the fast lane, said Mario Leone, CIO of Iveco. With the end-to-end SAP system, we have greatly improved the way we serve our global dealer network while achieving faster financial reporting and fewer purchase order errors.
To enable further enhancements in customer service, the company said it is building on its dealer portal by deploying applications from mySAP Customer Relationship Management including the SAP Interaction Center and SAP Warranty Management applications.
