As a multi-entity chemical distributor dealing with increasingly complex customer, supplier and regulatory requirements, Alfa Chemicals turned to SAP to simplify its operations.
Alfa Chemicals offers an invaluable service to the chemicals industry. It provides distribution services and technical support to formulators and manufacturers in the industrial, pharmaceutical and cosmetic chemical sectors, across the UK, Ireland and Europe. With a growing line of its own products, Alfa outsources all of its warehousing and production, with its 40 employees focused on technical sales and product development.
One of these is David, who’s worked at Alfa for a number of years, in a number of roles. His current position is Business Analyst and Regulatory Compliance Manager, which sees him working closely with the Finance team, the Customer Service team, the Supply Chain Manager and more. His responsibilities include quality management of Alfa’s third-party providers and ensuring compliance with chemical regulations across its various markets.
As the lead for the company’s ERP system, David has been well placed to see what works and what doesn’t for Alfa.
As a company with multiple divisions, including a subsidiary in Denmark, Alfa needed a clearer, more consistent picture of its business. Multiple solutions were in use, making consistent reporting, collaboration and documentation a challenge. The existing ERP system was approaching end of life, so it was important that the new ERP solution and implementation would be successful. A decision was made to bring the entities onto one ERP system.
Alfa set out its requirements for what it needed from a solution. The team knew they needed to improve business reporting and their budgeting and forecasting capability, and for the solution to be scalable in line with the growing needs of the company.
With the existing ERP, there were a lot of important tasks that had to be done outside of the system – such as VAT returns and managing order processes – which potentially opened up processes to duplication and errors.
These manual workarounds were also required for managing some of the compliance issues that chemical companies require. Alfa’s customers have very specific requirements about what information they want to appear on dispatch notes and invoices, all of which needed to be managed manually, or outside of the system, rather than being done automatically. The ideal for Alfa was that all document distribution, from delivery notes to invoices, could be automated.
With multiple divisions, Alfa needed a solution that would make it easy to report by cost centre and product group, without having to manually do this in Excel. It also wanted a real-time view of what’s happening in the business.
The solution would also have to serve the needs of users – Alfa wanted the ability to manipulate the user interface so that people could see the information that was most relevant to them, stripping out irrelevant noise.
Alongside the functionality requirements, it was also critical to Alfa that the technology partner they chose worked well with its growing, yet still compact, business. “As well as choosing the right system, choosing the right partner to implement and support it is absolutely crucial,” explains David. “It’s probably as important as the system itself.”
After reviewing potential solutions, the team settled on SAP Business One – and once they’d chosen SAP, they selected Thinc from a shortlist of SAP partners.
SAP Business One was the best choice for Alfa as it provided the functionality that was required, and the potential to be tailored to the company’s particular needs.
For David, it was important that the chosen solution should be about simplicity of use rather than how flashy it might appear. “The appearance of an interface, from experience, is not the top priority. SAP makes it easy to access the information you need,” he notes.
Another big advantage over their previous solution has been the availability of a manufacturing module, which is helping Alfa to manage materials and processes. This will become ever more important as the company increases its number of own-label products.
Thinc worked with the Alfa team to capture and prioritise requirements through a discovery and blueprinting project. A phased approach was taken to allow Alfa to achieve the essentials and allow each department to see the benefits of the change, with enhancements to come once the team was comfortable with the system. Thinc guided them on the rhythm of this, advising on what was achievable, what could be done with more consultancy, and what would be more complex.
A key factor in the successful work together between the Alfa and Thinc teams has been the open, collaborative nature of both sides. As phase 1 was completed, the teams met to review what had been achieved and what lessons could be learned for future projects.
“We’re very happy with the choice that we made. There’s enough give and take on either side to get us over the line successfully with a system that works as we need it to,” David reflects. “There is a benefit to having a partner that’s a similar size to your own – we know we’re treated as important”.
“We liked the way Thinc approached it – it wasn’t a hard sell; not too corporate. Thinc tried to understand what our need was and were honest about what was possible.
“It was reassuring to speak to a partner that was honest about what can and can’t be done out of the box, but still has the knowledge to know how the system can do what you need to do but perhaps in a different way”.
Even in the early stages of its adoption of SAP Business One, Alfa has been able to see tangible benefits. It has reduced the number of manual workarounds it needs for tasks such as customs compliance, VAT returns, order progress and analysis.
The ability to map out relationships in the system has enabled far more productive levels of collaboration – and the customisable dashboards have made reporting much more immediate than what they had before. Alfa has a framework within the system for capturing regulatory information – such as material hazards, transport categories and compliant packaging information – and reporting on this is now much easier.
For David – who spends so much of his time troubleshooting – the solution has made it far simpler to pinpoint at what point in a transaction something has gone awry and how he can put it right. With greater automation of documentation such as dispatches and invoices, Alfa has already achieved some of the general streamlining of processes they wanted, and hope that this will improve even more as they look to their next projects.
So what does Alfa hope to achieve next? David is looking to sync up the company’s bank payments to SAP, further automate document distribution such as data sheets and certificates of analysis, and produce packaging return information in the system.
The biggest next step will be bringing of the rest of the business onto SAP Business One. After working so long across multiple systems, it seems that a single view of the business, which Alfa hoped for all those years ago, could be just around the corner.
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