QUICKFACTS

THE SUCCESS STORY

About Nipon

Nipon Repuestos LTD, is an automotive aftermarket distributor and retailer.  Nipon is a one-stop-shop to buy motor vehicle parts and accessories for businesses as well as end automotive enthusiasts. The Chilean company operates seven stores across the country, supplied by a distribution center, and servicing other companies’ retail centers as well.

Reaching Top Speed

Despite the fact that Nipon had acquired  SAP Business One in 2007, something was still missing. The ERP implementation brought significant improvements in many aspects, but the warehouse was not running as efficiently as it could… It was simply not enough to reach top speed. Nipon’s management team realized that an optimized omni-channel distribution process could only be accomplished with a fully and seamlessly integrated warehouse management system solution.

A Real-life Puzzle

Nipons’ growth was good news for the company as more orders were coming in across multiple channels. However, operating 7 stores, a wholesale center, and managing a growing number of orders across an omni-channel operations with a disconnected warehouse system quickly became a big puzzle. Ironically as sales were booming, Nipon was loosing more and more opportunities due to back orders caused by inaccurate stocks level. Nipon realized how complex omni-channel operations could be, and how costly losing control over stocks could be for a distribution company.

On top of that, SAP Business One imposed many limitations to the warehouse employees. Manual operations prevailed over automation, causing inefficiencies across the distribution process and costly data entry errors. The company wanted to improve the level of customer service, but labor intensive steps involved in preparing orders, as well as many manual operations made this challenge tough.

As if that were not enough, Nipon suffered from high employee turnover coupled with a time-consuming and expensive training process. Employees were trained every day for a whole month to acknowledge the warehouse’s complexity and become fully efficient employees.

An Extensive Research

Nipon’s team finally figured out that most challenges they were facing were part of the same puzzle, a puzzle that could not be solved without a robust warehouse management system. After extensive research on WMS solutions available on the market, Nipon finally decided to implement LISA WMS in 2012, mainly for LISA’s seamless Integration and proven track record.

After the implantation, Nipon immediately started to run better:

• Improving inventory precision by 80% – by eliminating errors caused by manual entries.
• Increasing the order shipment speed by 9x – by implementing barcode scanning.
• Decreased training time for new employees dramatically – from one month to half a day.
• Increased sales by 15% – due to a streamlined omni-channel process, and accurate stock levels across multiple locations.

Additionally, Nipon is now able to make smarter strategic decisions based on LISA’s dashboards. The dashboards display accurate inventory information for each location and measure the performance of each operator involved in different tasks across the warehouses.

Continuous improvement

In January 2016, striving for better performance, Nipon decided to migrate SAP Business One to HANA in memory database. With the help of N’ware Technologies’ experts, Nipon was able to plan the transition for SAP Business One and LISA WMS. “A single day was enough to migrate to LISA WMS and Business One, the experts within N’ware Technologies were ready to support us for a smooth and easy transition,” said Williams, IT Director.

Contact us to discuss your specific business challenges or learn more about our WMS solution for SAP Business One and SAP Business ByDesign.