SAP Digital Transformation Case Study: Driving digital transformation at Morse Hydraulics with Pythian and SAP S/4HANA

Manufacturing

United States

A sustainable technology platform is essential for any business to support rapid growth and innovation. Eventually, however, most companies outgrow their on-premises enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, leaving them unable to meet business demand or innovate effectively. 

That was the case at Morse Hydraulics, a global organization founded more than 20 years ago that focuses on high-pressure applications and solutions such as hydraulic hoses and connectors, along with related field engineering, on-site assembly, crimping, and cutting services. 

The company had evolved past the limitations of its legacy SAP ECC system, which still used Classic GL accounting and couldn’t keep up with the firm’s growth or support much future innovation. The SAP ECC system was also holding back business processes, business operations, and customer experience.  Morse Hydraulics needed a new ERP, and turned to the database experts at Pythian for their database migration project.

Near-real-time analytics and performance improvements on a sustainable platform 

SAP S/4HANA’s unique architecture, which runs in-memory with data stored in columns, now provides Morse Hydraulics with fast, near-real-time analytics and compute capabilities. Instead of merely recording data, SAP S/4HANA provides active, data-driven decision support in real-time. 

The Morse Hydraulics team immediately experienced several performance improvements and efficiencies, including: 

• SAP report execution time shrank dramatically, from nearly two hours to less than five minutes, thanks in part to a data model change and the way relevant data is selected
• Decision-making improvements of around 30 percent thanks to activation of Fiori business app creation features for non-technical business users
• Credit management control improvements of around 20 percent
• Improved customer interactions and satisfaction thanks to performance improvements in the sales team’s 360-degree customer dashboard
• Reduced time spent closing relevant activities by approximately one full day, thanks in part to performance improvements around month-end transactions and processes
   

 "We realized that to achieve our goal, we needed an expert migration partner that was able to blueprint the entire project, walk us through each potential challenge, and who had the bandwidth and expertise to invest a significant amount of preparation time in our project."

IT Manager, Morse Hydraulics