Like many other global companies, Barcelona-based Roca Group has faced supply chain and other challenges in recent years, including the COVID-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine, and volatile energy prices. Founded in 1917, the company designs, produces, and distributes products in the bathroom space and has a commercial network in 170 countries, 21,000 employees, and 79 production sites – making it a truly global company.
The company has expanded its international operations in recent years through organic growth and acquisitions, says Roca Group Digital Transformation Director Jacques Nieuwland. “We have had the challenges of most industries in the last years,” he says. “My job is to help Roca leverage technology to support the different strategic objectives of the company, which are growth, innovation, operational excellence, and sustainability.”
Global Supply Chain
“We have a global supply chain for some of our components, so we need to plan in a more agile way,” Nieuwland says. “We need to update our planning and we need to be able to put in some buffers to have a resilient supply chain.”
Nieuwland says technology helps by giving Roca greater visibility into its supply chain. “Everybody collaborates against the same processes with the same data. We include our own value chain and also the value chain of our suppliers and customers,” he says. “And this enhanced visibility allows us to optimize the whole value chain and to take the right decisions.”
SAP is the backbone of the company’s application landscape, he says: “We perform our core processes, which include order processing, reordering planning, and many others via SAP solutions. It helps us because it gives us a structure of processes, of data, and of reports that allow us to understand our business, to replicate it, to scale it, and to continuously improve it.”
Roca uses the SAP Integrated Business Planning for Supply Chain solution to help it anticipate the demand for specific products and adjust production accordingly. That way, Nieuwland says, “we are able to give an excellent service and to optimize stocks.”
Long-Term Partnership
Nieuwland says Roca Group chose SAP to be its technology partner because of its long-term relationship with SAP and because SAP is a leader in many of the solutions Roca needed. “We have a long history of collaboration and have been successful. […] We trust the technology, the digital supply chain solution, [and] the business network solution. We like to work with leading solutions – we trust them.”
Earlier this year Roca selected RISE with SAP and is preparing to go live with SAP S/4HANA Cloud at the beginning of 2025 for the next phase of its digital transformation – a move that Nieuwland believes will enable even more innovation. “We have chosen the cloud-based solution because SAP innovates first on the cloud-based solution and we want to leverage that innovation,” he says.
He adds that the integration of SAP’s generative AI copilot Joule into SAP’s cloud ERP will also fuel innovation and productivity. “We think there is huge potential to increase our productivity,” he says. More generally, he says SAP’s cutting-edge technology will help Roca improve its service to customers and interact better with them, as well as help the company achieve operational excellence including, for example, reducing waste and improving sustainability.
Sustainability
On sustainability, Nieuwland says Roca Group is studying scope 1, scope 2, and scope 3 emissions. It has already set yearly targets for the reduction of CO2 and wants to be carbon neutral by 2045. More generally, he says Roca’s goal is to deliver “the best bathroom experience for customers worldwide.”
Asked what other manufacturers can learn from Roca’s experience, he says: “It’s very important to start with a business problem, a business challenge, and put technology at the service of generating business value. Then it’s very important to work in cross-functional teams. So, this is not about buying hundreds of solutions to solve isolated problems. We need to think on a bigger scale and to work together to find the best solution to our challenges and use few solutions and have an enterprise architecture that support our goals.”