“Beyond simply selling, we want to offer a great experience to our customers,” says Mauricio Urrea Ospina, chief technology officer at Grupo UMA, which assembles, distributes, and sells Bajaj motorcycles in Colombia and Central America.
“Every motorcycle we sell comes with an experience,” he explains. “Customers come back to us for service, for spare parts, and for workshop support, so we truly connect each customer to a different kind of user experience, starting from the moment of purchase.”
Many people in Colombia get around every day on motorcycles—often on ‘Boxer’ motorcycles made by UMA, which aims to ensure riders feel safe on the road, Urrea Ospina says. To help achieve that, UMA has implemented rigorous quality processes that run on SAP Cloud ERP Private. “Every motorcycle leaving our factories follows best quality practices,” he says. “And we pass that value onto our customers.”
In addition to Colombia, UMA operates in five countries in Central America: Guatemala, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Honduras, and Nicaragua. “We’re also in Venezuela, as well as Spain and Portugal,” Urrea Ospina says. “Across all these regions, we aim to make a positive impact on our customers with each of our brands and motorcycles.”
“For us, our ‘Adventure’ project—the name we gave the SAP project—was crucial to our expansion and growth,” he says. “We needed global models so we could expand faster and run more efficient, automated operations.”
Working with SAP, UMA established global models and automated operations across finance, production, and logistics, says Victor Bedoya Aristizabal, corporate solutions manager at Grupo UMA. “We defined global models, starting in finance with global charts of accounts that let us analyze information and make financial decisions much more efficiently. From there, we extended the approach through production and plant operations and into logistics.”
“Today, SAP is a fundamental pillar for our processes from the start of the value chain to the end,” Bedoya Aristizabal says. “We utilize the full suite for production, pricing, finance, and warehouse management to deliver a superior product.”
“Taken together, these cross-cutting global modules have helped us evolve, save time, shorten implementations, and expand across regions,” Urrea Ospina says. “For example, in Colombia we’re implementing our spare parts warehouse with SAP Extended Warehouse Management, SAP’s supply chain management application. What we’re learning in Colombia can be replicated in Central America. Standardizing these logistics modules makes operations much more efficient while still accounting for each country’s specific needs.”
He adds: “I believe that if we hadn’t prepared with SAP and the technologies we have today, the strong growth we’ve had in Colombia would have been far more difficult. For example, we went from assembling 11,000 motorcycles in January of last year to around 17,000 motorcycles per month today—nearly doubling our output. Without SAP’s well-defined structures, process controls, and automations that replaced a lot of manual work, it would be much harder to reach the 20,000 motorcycles per month we expect to achieve soon.”
“That ability to scale—both assembly volume and sales volume—has been driven by the Adventure project and everything we implemented with SAP,” he says. “I think it has significantly improved employees’ day-to-day work. And that’s where we need to take the organization: toward a data-driven company that makes better decisions. Before we implemented Adventure, a person’s day-to-day was mostly operational work.”
Urrea Ospina emphasizes that one of the main motivations UMA had for adopting SAP Cloud ERP Private was to have concrete, real-time information—for example, knowing exactly the assembly cost of a motorcycle. “That is key for an organization,” he says. “Beyond that, another need was to remove the manual work that all the company’s areas had, working and operating completely by hand.”
Luis Orrego, production supervisor at Grupo UMA, agrees: “Instead of having many Excel files open with multiple sheets and trying to reconcile everything, we now consolidate the data in one place. With SAP, all the sheets and reports I used to present are now available in a single view. I don’t have to run multiple steps, and I can see all my indicators: capacity, materials, and line resources.”
Another motivation was UMA’s expansion plans to enter other regions and countries efficiently. “We wanted defined global models that we could replicate quickly with SAP in the regions where we operate,” Urrea Ospina explains. “Those factors led us to undertake the SAP project, which has been a highly strategic and very successful initiative.”
Implementing SAP Cloud ERP Private has also had a profound impact on Urrea Ospina’s technology team. “It completely changed our roles and what we focused on,” he says. “We used to be a technology team focused on operations, not one that added value. Today, the technology team plays a strategic role. We have time to analyze where we’re going and what we can implement next for the business. Culturally, SAP gave us confidence through information traceability, and it also gave us time to think. It opened the door to innovation—especially around analytics.”
David Aguirre is a media production specialist on the Multimedia Team for SAP News.
Rana Hamzakadi is deputy head of the Multimedia Team for SAP News.
