Hallstar

As Hallstar started experiencing rapid growth and business evolution, its 18-year-old ERP system could no longer keep up with its expansion.

“We wanted one ERP solution globally that could handle all the financial capabilities we needed,” said Chuck Redpath, director of IT at Hallstar. “We were on an 18-year-old system— just a black screen and green writing.”

The company faced currency issues around conversion and consolidation, processing issues due to everything taking place outside the system and a complete lack of mobile functionality. Hallstar also needed the ability to tap into advanced analytics and web-based services, integrate with third-party packages and ultimately remove siloes from its workflows. By July 2017, Hallstar took a critical first step toward resolving those problems: it turned to Navisite to modernize its legacy ERP software by implementing SAP S/4HANA. With this deployment, Hallstar gained a global footprint of S/4HANA to drive its business—including core processes like finances, materials management, production, sales and distribution, logistics execution and quality management.

Following the deployment of S/4HANA, the company set its sights even higher—Hallstar wanted to find a better solution to connect and analyze reams of disparate business data. To make this happen, Hallstar once again partnered with Navisite to build on its S/4HANA foundation by implementing SAP Analytics Cloud. This would ultimately give the company an intuitive and modern mobile component (which was previously nonexistent) that could facilitate real-time data and up-to-date dashboard replication, bringing its massive amounts of financial and manufacturing data into alignment.

“We had all this data, but we couldn’t get to it in the cloud,” said Redpath. “The idea of having business intelligence in the cloud became incredibly compelling, and the capabilities of SAP Analytics Cloud were tremendous.”

The benefits of implementing SAP Analytics Cloud on top of S/4HANA throughout Hallstar’s business are myriad. Within its personal care business unit, for example, Hallstar had recently opened a new facility with a new customer service team. Early in its operation, the team hit a low point regarding its on-time rates. However, using SAP Analytics Cloud, they put a plan in place to monitor real-time data, identify problems and take decisive action. This ultimately led to a rapid increase of its on-time percentage, which is now maintained above the 95% industry standard.

Some other benefits Hallstar realized include:

• Greater insight into on-time rates, open customer orders, shipments, freight spending and inventory levels for supply chain teams
• Improved reporting on daily, monthly and yearly production rates, cycle time variances, production pace and equipment utilization
• Real-time sales numbers showing daily business unit performance against budget broken down by finished goods and regional categories
• Clearer visibility into revenue, gross profit performance and trends, SGA reporting, operating cashflow and capital expense spending in all business units

“As our company became more global, we needed a tool that could provide a holistic view of our business. With our fresh deployment of SAP S/4HANA on a global scale and the promise of real-time replication and reporting of data through SAP Analytics Cloud, we felt this would be the perfect way to give our decision makers the information they needed—quicker than ever before—to run the business,” Redpath added.

“When we started our transformation, we laid out very explicitly what we needed to gain, what we needed to maintain, and what we’d love to do along the way,” said Justin Bill, senior enterprise program manager at Hallstar. “Navisite then served as our guiding light, and they were there every step of the way.”

From the beginning of the partnership, Bill said there were clear distinctions between Navisite’s operating principles and those of the standard “technology consultant.” Navisite’s goal was to ensure Hallstar had the tools, support and resources needed to not only maximize its investment in SAP, but to also harness its full power to drive true digital transformation.

“Navisite was very decisive about whether they had the right people in the right place at the right time,” he said. “And if they didn’t—they wouldn’t bloviate; they would change it. For me, that was kind of a novel concept in working with a partner.”

Throughout both implementations, Redpath added that Navisite impressed as a partner that always knew how to keep moving forward, utilize high-level SAP expertise and make a real, human connection.

“You feel like you’re dealing with an extension of your own team and organization,” Redpath said. “You feel like you’re dealing with a team that truly understands you. You feel like you’re dealing with friends.”