SAP RISE offering, a comprehensive Business Transformation as a Service (BTaaS) solution, has further reinforced the German software multinational’s pivot to becoming a cloud company since its launch in January 2021. RISE with SAP enables enterprises to accelerate business innovation and move to the cloud with SAP taking care of end-to-end service level agreement (SLA), cloud operations, and technical support.
Nippon Gases Europe, one of the leading providers of industrial and medical gases in Europe, has recently embarked on an enterprise resource planning (ERP) transformation leveraging RISE with SAP, a concierge, subscription-based offering that allows customers access to a comprehensive bundle of software, tools and cloud services.
The industrial gas company is an affiliate of Tokyo-headquartered multinational Nippon Sanso Holdings Corporation (NSHC), which has been operating for over a century with a strong market presence in Japan, Southeast Asia, Australia, the United States, and Canada. As NSHC’s European Gas segment, Nippon Gases is a key player in industrial gases manufacturing and distribution across 13 countries in the region including France, Italy, Spain, Germany, and Italy. The manufacturer also plays an essential role in the supply chain and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines providing liquid nitrogen and dry ice to maintain the vaccines’ required cooling temperature.
Along with the gas manufacturer’s massive operation in Europe plus its intensifying contribution during the pandemic comes the pressing challenge of having disparate ERP systems. The tedious upkeep of large interfaces to ensure seamless data exchange between several business groups within the organisation impelled Nippon Gases to partner with SAP to design a strategy that would unify various ERP solutions in Northern Europe.
Driving Innovation with SAP RISE Offering
Nippon Gases Europe designed a modernisation strategy in 2020 to scale business and achieve a unified ERP platform powered by SAP S/4HANA across multiple subsidiaries. The holistic digitalisation project is centred on accelerating business processes, deepening collaboration, and driving business innovation.
The SAP ERP consolidation project kicked off in 2021 in the UK leveraging RISE with SAP, which provided Nippon Gases with several software components that helped the industrial gas company achieve the following:
- Standardised, transparent ERP processes
- Enhanced visibility on gas deliveries, enabling better compliance with requirements
- Delivered cost-efficiency
- Improved productivity, allowing the IT team to focus on more significant tasks and less on administrative
Commenting on the successful ERP implementation, Cesar Callejo, Chief Information Officer, Nippon Gases Europe, said:
“We work much more efficiently with RISE with SAP and can tackle future issues. The standardisation in the new SAP S/4HANA suite will allow us to optimise capacity, focusing on other innovation initiatives as part of our ongoing digital transformation strategy.”
“This gives us great scope. Even away from the core ERP system, we can try out a lot of new things. For example, we can use SAP Ariba solutions to optimise procurement processes or robotic process automation to automate our business processes intelligently,” added Jens Wiechmann, SAP IT Manager Europe, Nippon Gases Europe.
Since RISE with SAP’s launch in 2021, the BTaaS offering has supported over 1,000 organisations worldwide across industries– from sports to automative and energy companies– to drive industry innovation and propel business process improvements. The comprehensive solution that harnesses the cloud ERP also offers analytics, business process intelligence and SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) to help businesses transform holistically into intelligent enterprises with a fast time to value and in the way that best suits them.
Nippon Gases Europe will be implementing RISE with SAP to six more markets this year.
