Newell Rubbermaid looks to SAP for global business insight

Matt Stultz, vice president of IT at Newell Rubbermaid, says that, by working with SAP, the firm has been able to corral its information into a single dashboard with consistent information for business users. And that has led to better decisions that contribute directly to company performance. "With the global insight SAP provides, we've been able to more strategically identify best business practices, as well as find areas for improvement," says Stultz. "Whether it's analysing our spend data or more efficiently managing our inventory, we have both the historical and up-to-date information we need to move our business forward. Because the analytics and GRC solutions are so intuitive to use, this journey toward continuous improvement has been engaging people in every area of the company – regardless of their technical skill." That improvement extends all the way from procurement to – including standardisation of spend management – to managing inventory, stabilising growth and increasing customer satisfaction. Stultz says that by implementing business intelligence, Newell Rubbermaid can now take data from all regions and business units and give executives and line-of-business heads a holistic view of global inventory and its impact on corporate performance. A key new capability is more accurate demand forecasting. Excess inventory, he says, is one of the biggest challenges for consumer products companies. But analytics, reports and data visualisation solutions from SAP now enable employees to more accurately forecast the sales of products in specific regions and help customers maintain the appropriate amount of inventory, without overproducing or under-producing and losing revenue. Newell Rubbermaid now plans to use SAP mobile capabilities designed for the BlackBerry to make reports on service-level satisfaction immediately available so business users can be even more responsive to customer needs.