How Stanley Black & Decker Accelerated Its Digital Transformation

A closer look at how enosix enables SAP customers to innovate with SAP ECC and SAP S/4HANA

Digital transformation will be a key part of many companies’ roadmaps over the next few years as they seek to migrate to SAP S/4HANA and deliver a superior customer experience. The complexity involved in doing so, however, is so immense that it discourages enterprises from completing the transformation they desperately need to stay competitive and relevant.

Leveraging a modern approach to integration can create a clear path forward that allows for innovation. Some of the world’s leading brands are choosing this approach and using premium integration solutions to overcome some of the barriers to digital transformation.

Barriers to digital transformation

The size and needs of a business will inevitably create unique obstacles over time that have to be tackled to move forward. There are, however, several common barriers that most enterprises face when it comes to integration solutions and moving to S/4HANA:

• Siloed technology and processes

It is very common for different elements of a business to operate in silos using separate platforms and technologies to accomplish their tasks. Consider a typical company’s sales, marketing, accounting, and operations departments and all of the processes they have to fulfill. Now, consider the programs and technology they need to make all of those things happen. It’s very likely that there is a significant amount of redundancy and a staggering lack of integration throughout the operation.

When individual lines of an enterprise are separated functionally, it impacts every element of the business, including the customer experience. Digital transformation includes creating or renovating business processes to span and connect these silos.

• Digital transformation and heterogeneity

As companies grow and expand, tech stacks become more complex. Every transformation or upgrade is exponentially more complicated as a result. For example, many companies are working to transform and streamline processes such as variant configuration while incorporating a number of platforms such as SAP and Salesforce. Integrating these two platforms alone is often done with a mess of middleware and a long implementation process.

• Timing

Implementation time is a serious consideration, especially when it comes to a monumental project like moving to S/4HANA. Depending on the method, this migration can take years to complete. Many companies simply don’t have the time or manpower to dedicate to such a large project, which results in delays.

• Complexity of digital transformation

Each SAP system has unique business logic and customizations that are built up over years. Quotes, for example, seem rather simple on the surface, but they include customer-specific pricing, custom workflows, currency conversion, geography-specific pricing, tax calculations, and inventory status. And that is just a small piece of an overall business operation.

Every added application and functionality creates a spaghetti code that tries to integrate every specific data point rather than the system as a whole. Traditional integration approaches are complex for this very reason, plus they aren’t manageable, portable, or real-time functional.

Integrating business processes

It’s not just about integrating individual data points, it’s about integrating the entire business process and triggering certain activities in back end systems based on customer actions. This brings an element of speed to the solution that lets businesses help customers as quickly as possible with real-time information that moves at the speed of the customer.

How do you keep up with innovation without redeveloping things over and over again? This is the question companies are facing as they contemplate how to transform layered and complex systems over the next few years.

Integration for innovation: Stanley Black & Decker case study

Stanley Black & Decker (SBD) is a global leader in industrial solutions, specializing in tools and storage as well as security services. Such a large company has a diversified portfolio of applications spanning the entire customer journey. With an “innovation everywhere” mindset, SBD’s Salesforce CRM and SAP ERP teams set out to answer the following questions:

• How do we get data into the right places?
• How do we unify data?
• How do we work in SAP through Salesforce?
• How do we make it so that these barriers to digital transformation don’t matter?

Enter enosix. The real-time bi-directional integration between SAP and Salesforce that enosix enables allows the SBD team to work exclusively in the front-end system with a unified experience that they can pass onto the customer.

Complicated security and industrial products call for extensive variant configuration needs. enosix pulls real-time variant data, specific customer pricing structures, and inventory status to enable customer-facing employees with information to provide a great experience.

The savings on cost and implementation time were also big difference-makers for SBD. According to Stephen Driggs, Head of CRM at SBD, “Every project we do leverages a variety of technologies, especially SAP, that need to be seamlessly integrated. To achieve this, 30+% could be spent in integration work, team members, and time. Extensive data harmonization or seamless SAP experiences can take up to a year to complete with several teams involved. enosix provides this virtually out of the box.”

enosix allows Stanley Black & Decker to utilize SAP data as a master data source without daily loads, mass deletion of data, or Salesforce data model hacks.

Plan for the future with enosix

enosix is the solution to siloed processes and spaghetti code. You can use enosix’s modernized integration approach with SAP ECC and move over to S/4HANA with only minor adjustments. There is no longer a need to postpone upgrades years down the road. You have insurance with a portable and standardized integration solution.

Watch the full webinar on this topic by clicking here. To see if the Stanley Black & Decker integration approach may work for you, schedule a demo with us today.