Centillion increases business flexibility and reduces expenses by utilizing "RISE with SAP”
Centillion is an official representative of a world leader in cochlear implant systems, as well as a world-class manufacturer in the fields of medicine, avionics, and precision industrial engineering
Established in 1998, Centillion is a world-class manufacturer of products for a variety of industries. Among them are medicine, avionics and aerospace, vision, control, monitoring systems, and precision industrial equipment. The company is also an official representative of a leading manufacturer of active implantable hearing devices.
Since its establishment, Centillion has been committed to constant growth through the modernization of its production facilities, the digitalization of its processes, and the continuous development of its team of highly skilled professionals and innovators. Centillion's mission is to provide reliable electronic devices and improve people’s lives through innovation.
Today, the enterprise has its own modern, energy-efficient, and eco-friendly production facilities, spanning an area of 7,800 square meters. These facilities feature an automated building management system (BMS) that monitors more than 3,000 control points in real-time, ensuring controlled production conditions and a comfortable working environment.
Challenges
Operating in a highly competitive and regulated industry, Centillion has to deal with frequently changing compliance standards and customers that often need solutions in the matter of hours.
Therefore, the company realized it had to develop a long-term strategy for digitalization, allowing everyone at the company to make smart data-driven decisions - fast.
“I knew we needed to be able to track all of our business processes - supply chain, procurement and warehousing, production planning and management, quality management, sales and customer service, machinery and equipment maintenance, accounting and financial management”, Nikolay Kirov, General Manager of Centillion explains further.
The reduction of the administrative burden is also important from the perspective of allowing Centillion employees to focus their efforts on their main areas of expertise - manufacturing.
Solution
By using RISE with SAP, all business units within Centillion can now collaborate more efficiently and have a single source of information.
As Jan Skvaril, Partner Client Success at Next Consult says: “Nowadays, it’s the quick companies beating the slow ones - not the big overwhelming the small.”
By digitizing its processes, the Centillion team gets to have accurate and up-to-date information at any time - no matter whether it’s requirements, regulations, or project statuses. “Having all the facts available gives us confidence to make fact-based decisions more quickly,” says Kirov.
RISE with SAP was selected mainly because of SAP’s large and connected ecosystem. This way Centillion can seamlessly integrate additional products and end-to-end software solutions that communicate with each other.
Process
Looking for a way to optimize its business operations and become entirely paperless, Centillion realized they’d need support from external consultants with experience in implementing digitalization solutions to help them find the one that works best for the company. That’s why they decided to partner with Next Consult, a leading consultant and integration partner with vast experience and a deep understanding of business management, process optimization, and IT.
Next Consult’s professionals did a thorough analysis of the company, its business processes, and its business goals and needs and defined the future system’s scope and requirements. Proving its business management and IT expertise, Next Consult has been selected by Centillion as its SAP implementation partner as well.
Both Next Consult and Centillion highlight the initial implementation planning as the most important part of the project. During this period, the parties agreed that integrating the new systems should be done step by step, carefully adding elements and capabilities to get the best out of SAP’s solutions. Using this approach, both companies monitored the process to achieve the best results and were able to apply changes quickly when necessary.
“During these initial phases, it was important that we avoid over-customization because an over-customized system comes with higher risk, costs, and complexity,” shares Skvaril.
Impact
“We can already see some very important results from using SAP. Based on all the data we gather from clients, we created a 2-year forecast for the development of our business, of our clients and how we should structure our internal processes to fit our needs”,
General Manager of Centillion
For their outstanding work and partnership, Next Consult and Centillion were awarded for the Fastest RISE Implementation at the SAP Winning Tomorrow conference in 2022. To add to that, what was very important, especially in the current economic climate, was following the initially defined budget.
The digitalization strategy implemented by Centillion is built on three key pillars: electronic document management, Manufacturing Execution System (MES), and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). The digitalization of documents is very important in the heavily regulated industries the manufacturer operates in, and the company is close to allowing employees to sign and store documents virtually. Implementing the MES system will make work with subcontractors easier and more effective, as it will allow the tracking of orders from clients, delivery of materials, warehousing, and more.
All this is expected to result in increased business flexibility, reduced expenses, and faster response times to meet customer demands.
