Mastervolt improves processes with Cloud ERP

Implementation with 6 weeks | Fundation for future innovations

The business of Mastervolt - Brunswick company

Mastervolt, now a subsidiary of the American Brunswick Corporation, offers high-quality autonomous energy solutions worldwide for, among other things, shipping and mobile transport.

Mastervolt specializes in the management, conversion and storage of electrical energy and carries an extensive product portfolio with a power range from 300 Watt to 40,000 Watt. These electrical solutions are applied worldwide in demanding markets such as marine, mobile, offshore, industrial, solar autonomous and infrastructure.

In addition to producing and delivering a complete (worldwide) product range, Mastervolt offers expertise and support to customers and partners, wherever they are located in the world. With the implementation of Cloud ERP - SAP Business ByDesign, Mastervolt has fundamentally lifted business operations to a higher level and reduced IT costs.

Involved Project Members:

Diederik van Dijk – CFO Mastervolt, responsible for the effective deployment of Cloud ERP - SAP Business ByDesign;

Ferry Bogaards - Managing Partner Scheer Nederland.

Mastervolt - Power to be independent

Mastervolt is the EMEA part of the Power Products, LLC business unit, and is part of the Marine, Mobile & Industrial department together with other leading brands. Mastervolt, Ancor, BEP, Blue Sea Systems, CZone, Lenco, Marinco and ProMariner have been active for decades as independent providers of innovative electrical solutions and have now joined forces. Together they offer the largest and most complete electrical assortment, for every conceivable application to have electricity completely independently.

Product development takes place in three highly advanced Research & Development centers in Amsterdam (NL), Auckland (NZ) and Wisconsin (US). Mastervolt is responsible for the development, sales and logistics of the mentioned brands in EMEA.

Following the acquisition by Brunswick, Mastervolt was forced to adjust the tax calendar. This necessity also provided opportunities to take another critical look at the processes and to improve the underlying structure.

Simplification of business operations

Mastervolt opted for a new implementation with the initial expected benefits primarily in terms of simplification within Finance and the organizational structure. In short: "How can Mastervolt make business operations simple?" But at the same time it was also important to create a solid foundation for continuous process innovation and adjustments in the business.

In an earlier implementation Mastervolt chose to implement the ERP system including customizations tio adapt the existing working methods. This new implementation explicitly looked at how SAP Best Practices can be deployed, so that we can say goodbye to customization. Analyzing the processes was quite a challenge for the organization, but it soon became clear that the standard processes could be applied. The cost of ownership was immediately reduced due to the absence of customization maintenance.

Scheer was asked to take a critical look at how Mastervolt is actually organized and the underlying idea of this. A new set-up of the financial administration with a much clearer basic structure has been defined. These structure changes have immediately improved real-time insight into the business. The new structure has shifted the executive tasks to manage the exceptions.

Diederik van Dijk emphasizes: Scheer’s expertise has been crucial in focusing on the vision how end-to-end works and to be very critical towards ourselves where we thought we were “special” in terms of end-to-end processing.

Approach with focus on end-to-ends

The implementation was carried out with a focus on the fundamental elements that guarantee flexibility for the future. Much attention has been paid to the design of the following components:

The organizational structure
The structure of cost centers and profit centers
The ledger account schedule
The Accounting Principles

The Best Practice processes were discussed on the basis of these updated structures and a master data migration took place.

Ferry Bogaards explains: With an aggressive Go-Live of 6 weeks, business opportunities are only included if these opportunities were realistic and crucial to the Go-Live. Other identified business improvements are noted to be picked up immediately after Go-Live.

Result immediately visible

After the Go-Live, the following results were immediately visible:

Use of built-in analysis tools to identify bottlenecks in the processes;

Shortening the financial closure from 4 to 2 ½ days;

Having real-time KPIs dashboards available to track the business performance of sales, purchasing, logistics and customer care every moment of the day;

Clean System: No more customization.

SAP Business ByDesign provides a simple method of combining transaction data with analytical data, which provides additional insight to achieve a strong improvement in business operations.

Diederik van Dijk states that Scheer has really proved to be a partner during this implementation. Aspects that stood out are:

A very clear coordinating role in the implementation

Very clear vision on how end-to-end works and being able to communicate this well at all levels in our organization

In-depth knowledge of SAP Business ByDesign.

Mastervolt can now continue to work step by step on the identified improvements on this foundation.

Process improvements that will now be worked on are:

MRP optimization with transfers between different stock locations

Implement Demand Planning of inventory items

Working on a project basis at Research & Development;

Handling Customer Returns

Repairs in conjunction with an SLA and guarantees

Enter Workflows

Scan and book invoices.

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