Charting our Course for the Future
Charting our Course for the Future
Matt LoPiccolo, vice president and chief information officer at Swagelok, reflects on the four-year journey to a successful, corporate-wide implementation of SAP, “At the very beginning when we said, ‘are we an ERP company or not’, we could have said ‘you know what, our systems are ok,’ they were functioning. The question was, should we squeeze another 10 years out of that and maybe push this decision off a little bit and in true Swagelok fashion to our culture and our values, we weren’t going to do that."
Leaving a Legacy
The legacy systems pre-dating SAP were answering Swagelok’s week-to-week questions. These multiple information systems required reconciliation and manual intervention to ensure data integrity which became a normal, but laborious practice. There was a better way – an enterprise resource planning system that would allow all business units to communicate under one universal language.
Matt LoPiccolo, vice president and CIO, Swagelok Company, diagrams the depth and breadth of the company’s ERP implementation, which puts every function of the company on one planning system and ultimately helps Swagelok better serve customers.
With one source of truth for its data, Swagelok is now able to keep pace with customers’ expectations for made-to-stock product availability and also made-to-order product delivery deadlines – you get the products you need, when you need them.
In his post-implementation message to company leaders, Art Anton, CEO Swagelok Company, wrote: “Perhaps the most collaborative and successful project the company has undertaken is the successful implementation of SAP. Not only by our own standards but by PricewaterhouseCoopers and SAP, who assisted with the implementation. The men and women who dedicated approximately four years to lead us through this transformation are nothing short of exceptional. I am so proud of each and every one of them."
Click on the infographic to the right to read the full story.