To keep your business growing profitably in a market defined by tight production schedules, compliance mandates, and customer demand for quality at the lowest price, you've got to focus on efficiency and sustainable growth – differentiating your company through innovation and building economies of scale.

Driving efficiency and sustaining growth in an uncertain market means you need to:

• Increase visibility to ensure manufacturing throughput; improve decision making from shop floor to top floor, and effectively monitor schedule attainment
• Balance inventory and production plans against multiple customer demands and requirements
• Implement lean initiatives to reduce waste and add customer value
• Consolidate and standardize business processes across the company to reduce cost and drive efficiencies
• Divest, merge, or acquire new companies, manufacturing sites, and product lines when the time is right
• Identify new business opportunities, and enter new markets quickly and affordably

SAP solutions give businesses like yours the visibility, integration, and process support required to fine-tune production lines, gain operational efficiencies – and grow and sustain profits. In fact, over 1,600 automotive companies run SAP solutions. And it may interest you to know that 65% of SAP customers are midsize companies.

SAP can help you:

• Monitor, measure, and control demand variability and, ultimately, schedule attainment – with decisions based on real-time information and key performance indicators
• Achieve a more responsive production and distribution plan, with a consolidated view across all plants
• Enable a streamlined and synchronous material flow to ensure delivery with precision
• Reduce inventory based on pull-based replenishment with alerts in place at specified inventory levels
• Support mixed-mode manufacturing, including repetitive, MTO, lean, flow, and forecast-driven processes
• Support a 'zero defects' level of quality
• Address a full range of reporting requirements, including Sarbanes-Oxley and Basel II; global trade and customs rules; and environment, health, and safety regulations (IMDS)
• Track detailed data for compliance with product, manufacturing, and industry standards, including ISO/TS 16949, MMOG, and TREAD
• Identify emerging market opportunities
• Quickly assimilate acquired operations, including people, processes, and information
• Adopt and deploy back-office processes – through departments such as shared service centers – to support growth

Read about our customers:

Learn more about how SAP solutions have made a real difference to midsize companies in the automotive industry. Read some of our customer references.