Client Industry: Discrete Automotive Components Manufacturing 
Annual Revenue: $4.5 Billion 
ROI Attainment Timeline: 11 Months 
Benefits Realized: 30% improvement in inventory accuracy, 18% reduction in machine downtime, $8.4M YoY OpEx savings 

Background 

A globally dispersed manufacturing titan with 12 production plants across North America, Europe, and Southeast Asia sought to unify its fractured ERP systems under a centralized, cloud-first architecture. Historically reliant on siloed instances of SAP ECC and custom integrations, the enterprise faced delays in forecasting, batch-level inefficiencies, and mounting infrastructure costs. 

Challenges 

• Lack of a unified global MRP system led to supply chain disruptions and production bottlenecks. 
• ECC batch jobs regularly failed during peak cycles, particularly during month-end closings. 
• Disaster recovery setups were non-standardized and prone to downtime, breaching SLA agreements. 
• Data visibility across plants was delayed by 24–48 hours due to ETL lag and disparate systems. 

Solution Architecture (Google Cloud Tech Stack) 

• SAP RISE with S/4HANA Centralized Instance hosted on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) 
• Cloud Interconnect linked GCP regions to legacy plant data centers with hybrid latency control. 
• BigQuery aggregated manufacturing KPIs and MRP run logs across plants, updated in near real-time. 
• Google Cloud VMware Engine enabled lift-and-shift of legacy apps that interfaced with SAP (MES, SCADA). 
• Cloud Spanner hosted the global product master and vendor metadata with zero downtime. 

Results 

• Material planning lead time decreased by 43%, enabling just-in-time procurement. 
• Inventory accuracy improved from 71% to 92% within 6 months. 
• MRP run cycles completed in 2 hours instead of 5.5 hours. 
• Disaster recovery RTO reduced from 16 hours to under 1 hour. 
• $8.4M in OpEx savings realized in Year 1 through infra decommissioning and streamlined operations. 
• Workforce productivity improved by 24% in supply planning functions. 

This post-industrial Goliath, entangled in its own labyrinthine supply chains, emerged with newfound agility through a judicious blend of Teutonic ERP discipline and Silicon Valley scalability—a veritable rebirth under the aegis of GCP’s computational might.