Transparency in Notification and Delivery: CropEnergies Relies on myleo / dsc
Industry: Renewable energies
Employees: 450 (as of February 2020)
Annual Revenue: 1.08 billion euros (2021)
Subsidiaries: Mannheim (headquarters), Zeitz, Wanze (Belgium), Wilton (United Kingdom), Loon-Plage (France).
Sustainable, renewable products from biomass - that’s what CropEnergies AG stands for. Founded in Mannheim in 2006, the member of the Südzucker Group is the leading European producer of renewable ethanol.
As part of an IT harmonization, CropEnergies AG’s dispatching was to be converted to the standard SAP construct of contracts, scheduling agreements, and delivery schedule lines. This was taken as an opportunity to rely on a provider that also understands the SAP side for the integration of suppliers. In this context, the existing legacy system for inbound management was replaced by myleo / dsc with its supplier platform and time slot management. CropEnergies is also interested in using other solution components of myleo / dsc in the future - such as yard management or track-and-trace functionalities.
CropEnergies produces renewable ethanol, food and animal feed and purchases feed grain from around 150 different suppliers for this purpose. After the disposition of the required weekly quantities has taken place in SAP, they are transferred to myleo / dsc using SAP CPI middleware, where they are available to the suppliers for notification. After the latter has taken place on the supplier platform, the corresponding inbound delivery is created in SAP and the delivery number is transmitted back to myleo / dsc.
Subsequently, the supplier can book a suitable time slot, taking cut-off times into account. This means that it is only possible to book up to the afternoon of the previous day in order to ensure planning reliability in the inbound delivery. In the course of the time slot booking, the supplier is requested to store further data on this inbound delivery - in particular information on sustainability as well as further billing-relevant details.
Increased Efficiency in Grain Delivery
CropEnergies currently uses the supply management and appointment scheduling systems of myleo / dsc. Various sets of rules are used for locating and validating sustainability data in order to be able to guarantee delivery in compliance with the law. And that’s not all: the introduction of the new solution has also noticeably accelerated the delivery and unloading processes.
Thanks to myleo / dsc, both our employees and our suppliers benefit from greater transparency and faster processes,” says Bernhard Dahmen, CropEnergies AG.
The solution at a glance
Many requirements were already covered by the myleo / dsc standard version – after a four-month development phase, intensive tests were carried out before the system was put into productive use at the first site. The findings from the pilot go-live were then used to transfer the sites in Belgium and the UK to productive use. Key factors in this process were:
- More reliability in the capture of certificates through master data transfer from SAP.
- More reliability in the collection of billing data through transfer from SAP
- The storage of rules on dependencies of sustainability data (e.g. if the country of cultivation is Germany, then the NUTS2 region may also only be in Germany)
- Restriction of maximum time slots per day
- The inclusion of wagon data for rail deliveries
There was one special feature at a site in Great Britain. There, the handling of the above-mentioned process is carried out entirely in myleo / dsc. In this context, leogistics GmbH developed the contract handling of the cloud platform, which allows users to create contracts, sub-contracts and delivery schedules. The time slot booking information is also processed here via the middleware and made available to the non-SAP system.
The entire project process was characterized by partnership - across all participants, i.e. CropEnergies, cbs and leogistics. As a result, any obstacles were quickly cleared out of the way. Further adjustments are currently being developed in order to adapt the system even better to the needs of CropEnergies. With the creation of notifications and time slot bookings, the foundation has now been laid for using other myleo / dsc functions, creating more transparency and thus further increasing efficiency in grain delivery.
Better planning for employees and suppliers
Today, more than 1,000 notifications are created at CropEnergies every week and a time slot is booked via myleo / dsc in each case. Thanks to the integration with the SAP system, both CropEnergies employees and suppliers can track the status of deliveries in real time and see all the necessary evaluations of the laboratory values of the deliveries in myleo / dsc. In addition, the suppliers are automatically notified by e-mail if a delivery does not meet the quality requirements, so that a subsequent delivery can be scheduled directly - also via myleo / dsc, of course.