Barloworld Industrial goes mobile with SAP

The company selected SAP xApp Mobile Asset Management (SAP xMAM), one of the SAP composite applications for mobile business, to give its technicians instant mobile access to work orders and equipment information from various back-end applications. Robert Tennant, CIO of Barloworld Industrial Distribution, says that the company is already seeing an increase in worker productivity and customer service, and a decrease in overhead costs. “SAP has helped us to implement our vision of a ‘mobile engineer’ as part of our quest to deliver world-class service to our customers,” says Tennant. “Before the system was implemented, our field employees communicated travel and work time, parts requests, work requests, subcontracted work and damages either verbally using cellular phones or with handwritten forms. “By extending SAP software access to our mobile engineers, we now have paperless, real-time data entry, immediate parts lookup and availability checks with overnight delivery, timesheets completed as work progresses, and automatic dispatch of work orders. Barloworld has been able to significantly reduce overhead and improve productivity – and we expect the annual benefits will exceed the project cost.”