With a commitment to sustainability, Weir Minerals, a part of The Weir Group plc, has more than 11,000 employees across 60 countries. The mining equipment manufacturer helps customers work to their fullest, most sustainable potential.
The company develops engineering solutions for mineral and mining technology markets. Servicing a regionally distributed clientele across geographies, Weir Minerals depends on a synchronized web of data processing and analysis systems that give it the right balance of foresight and agility to sustainably manage customer data. Operating through an integrated system of tech hubs, manufacturing operations, and local service centers, the company creates sustainability solutions that help track the lifecycle of mining equipment, predict part deterioration, and minimize detrimental environmental impacts.
However, Weir Minerals had been using isolated, offline sources, like spreadsheets, to store records and data. “Our paper-based methods and siloed process put us at a disadvantage,” said Karun Naidoo, global process owner service at Weir Minerals.
The reliance on siloed data sources left the company – and ultimately its customers – vulnerable to risks. This inefficient approach to collecting and processing data and inventory planning was time-consuming, error-prone, and difficult to adapt to changing circumstances. Often, technicians had to travel from location to location to collect necessary customer audit data. By the time that data was properly categorized, it was largely outdated, preventing the company from making agile supply chain decisions, like having the foresight to order specific spare parts for aging machines. Additionally, employees had to focus on completing paperwork and other low-value tasks, which was time-consuming and prevented them from focusing on giving customers the desired service level. This inefficiency and a lack of central digitalization left customers wanting more.
“To remediate our relationships with customers and continue our sustainability mission, we needed to digitalize our core infrastructure to match modern technology and data analysis standards,” Naidoo remarked.
Revitalizing Data Processing Environments to Enhance Agility
As a long-standing SAP customer, Weir Minerals, conducted an internal evaluation to find a solution within SAP’s portfolio that could meet its unique inventory planning and data processing needs. The team found that SAP Field Service Management was ideal for the widespread remote workforce due to its centralized and digitalized hubs, which could help prevent manual errors, reduce silos, and improve transparency.
“Besides SAP Field Service Management we also use the customer service functionality of the SAP ERP application,” Naidoo said. With that, customer recommendations can be included much faster and more precisely with an improved view of relevant service information.
The integration of SAP Field Service Management and SAP ERP helped Weir Minerals create digital customer service history reports and improve communication between the back office and field technicians, facilitating the collection and analysis of real-time, centralized data. The company also established a change management framework for internal project ownership.
With both solutions, the company enhanced its internal data collection infrastructure with a digitalized channel that provides real-time insights without excess, time-consuming, manual processes. The solutions allow technicians to make vital service notes in a digital environment instead of on paper, which improves data availability for both personnel and customers. Through a greater level of communication in terms of audits, supply, and demand, the company saw that SAP Field Service Management could meet the needs of its widespread remote workforce.
Weir Minerals can better forecast demand by monitoring machine lifespan and inventory data, allowing it to swiftly provide customers with solutions instead of relying on outdated information. Once the company could establish real-time visibility in multiple environments, including on mobile devices in the field, it could improve efficiency and satisfy its customers more effectively.
Creating Agile Analysis Environments to Forecast Supply and Demand
Weir Minerals has seen significant business improvements since implementing SAP Field Service Management integrated with SAP ERP.
Data veracity and visibility are critical; the solutions let the business digitally collect and analyze customer data, helping to create predictive models to outline product demand, maintenance, and quality and generate service history reports. SAP Field Service Management also enables the company to use a built-in digital data integration that facilitates smoother analysis on the backend.
Technicians can upload daily digital reports from both mobile and site-based devices, leading to increased data richness. These reports make data analysis and collection much faster, improve communication between technicians and the backend, and eliminate time-consuming, error-prone paper processes.
The readily available reports and digitalized channels of data recording help both field employees and customers better understand how customers use equipment. This informs sustainability measures and allows personnel to better predict trends in customer spare part demand. Through sophisticated, digitalized data insights, the company can determine that proper part inventory is available at the right warehouse, allowing it to quickly meet customer needs.
The solution setup and mobile integration capabilities further empower Weir Minerals employees to drive change and digital adoption in the field. This improves customer satisfaction with enhanced data analytics and digitalized ability to implement smoother and more relevant sustainability measures into customers’ operations.
Overall, data availability and agility are appealing to customers that demand transparency and clear service history reports. This led to:
- 40% greater satisfaction with better-quality data and service
- 70% time saved when generating customer service reports
- 50% more timely reports with real-time timesheets and parts records
Broadening SAP Portfolio to Further Optimize Planning Processes
After the successful implementation of SAP Field Service Management integrated with SAP ERP, Weir Minerals now plans to utilize more data management, available-to-promise, and inventory planning solutions from SAP to help increase digitalization, product availability, and data accuracy.
It’s also looking at SAP Transportation Management for enhanced logistics planning and transportation processes across its global enterprise. No matter how its technological framework evolves in a modern industry, Weir Minerals is dedicated to its sustainability efforts and aims to use the improved infrastructure for eco-friendly mining operations.
“Through the adoption of SAP Field Service Management along with SAP ERP, we successfully digitalized manual processes and improved availability of real-time data as well as enterprise-wide communication,” Naidoo concluded. “Our technicians can now focus on value-adding activities and raising service levels, ultimately leading to greater customer satisfaction and operational efficiency.”
Karin Fent is senior director for Global Customer Success Digital Supply Chain at SAP.
Photo courtesy of Weir Minerals