W. Atelier enhances digitalisation with SAP Business One
About W. Atelier Pte Ltd
W. Atelier is one of the pioneers in sanitary products industry; established in 1979. W. Atelier is the sole agent of the TOTO brand in Singapore, providing complete bathroom solutions. Recently, the company has diversified into new lines of business and now offers the Italian brand called “Novamobili” for kitchen and furniture products. It also has a considerable presence in Indonesia, making it not just a Singapore mainstay, but a regional player.
Motives for Change
Due to business expansion, W. Atelier required a new integrated ERP system to provide real time information, automate processes and improve productivity. The previous system operated on a IBM AS/400 platform. W. Atelier increasingly found that there were significant data inaccuracies occurring, particularly concerning their stock data. In the main this was due to their previous software being a batch processing system, posting transactions only at scheduled times and not accounting for inventory movements on real time basis;
Post-implementation benefits
There are a number of measures which define whether an ERP project is successful, but by far the most important is the return a company sees on their investment (ROI) and how quickly they receive that return. This can be difficult to measure and quantify, however in the case of W. Atelier there were a number of features that provided significant benefit:
- Sales price list – The price of items can change from month to month. Previously W. Atelier would manually input these changes into the system from an excel worksheet, a time consuming process. With SAP Business One, they can easily import the data from the excel spreadsheet using the Data Transfer Workbench feature.
- Pick list function – Staff were required to manually print out the pick list document and fax it back and forth between departments. Now, using the Pick and Pack function of SAP Business One, everything is integrated. Once the data is keyed-in, other departments can access it and easily print directly from the system.
- Financial closing – Closing time was shortened from the 18th to the 10th of each month, a saving of 8 days.
“SAP Business One has given us the core that we want to build on, after we became accustomed with the system we embarked on projects such as warehouse management, scanning and barcoding, e-commerce and internal web-portals for staff to use on iPads in our showrooms. Some of those projects are on-going and we are optimistic that they will take us to the next stage.”
– Gani Atmadiredja, Managing Director