Philips Lighting Streamlines SAP® Material Master Data Creation with Automate Studio

As the global leader in lighting and LED technologies, Philips Lighting is dedicated to innovation and continued growth. In a competitive market revolutionized by digital technology and sustainable development, the company sought to become the leader in connected lighting systems. Philips Lighting offers over 25,000 products, and has been managing their product lines with SAP since 2011.

IT was responsible for managing this database, and any mass data changes were a resource-intensive tasks in ERP. “We had to call our India-based technical support team whenever we needed changes, which involved time-consuming management of support tickets,” said Sylvain Darve, SAP Data Manager MM LO/VC, at Philips Lighting. This process became unmanageable very quickly. “With over 40 people managing between 150 and 500 materials, requests were never-ending,” said Darve. “The risk of errors, time involved, and energy expended stifled our efficiency and, by extension, the productivity of our teams.”

Automate Studio makes life easier Philips implemented Automate Studio to create and update data en masse in SAP, simplifying and streamlining their processes. Using Automate Studio has now become second nature for business users. “It changed our life,” said Darve. “Implementing a scenario even for twenty or so records is so simple now that we have Automate Studio.” Philips has gradually rolled out the solution across most of their European sites. Data managers are now using Automate Studio’s Query module to create ad-hoc reports from SAP data in real time, using Excel.

“Thanks to Query, we’ve been able to determine the exact number of active references, and clean up our data efficiently,” said Darve. Automate Studio Manager has allowed Darve’s team to easily synchronize documents created in SAP in a secure server environment.

Read more about how the Philips Lighting data management team focused on maintaining data quality in SAP to provide departments with detailed reports in real-time.