How Duracell Saves $50K+ on Parts Inventory Costs with MaintainX and SAP

Overview

Duracell, a global leader in the consumer battery industry, embarked on a new Industry 4.0 initiative to drive cost savings and adapt to a changing workforce. Part of this “culture shift” meant giving frontline teams the opportunity to pilot new systems at individual sites and find better ways of working.

"Budgets are getting tight,” explained Jarrod Kipp, Duracell's North America Product Supply Process Transformation Manager. “So, the operations team said, ‘Okay, we need cost savings, and we need to do it through digitization’.”

The message from maintenance technicians was clear: major efficiencies could be achieved by making it easier to record maintenance work and track which parts are in stock. And that’s what led them to MaintainX, a mobile-first solution that made it easier than ever to manage inventory, assets, and work orders.

"They came to us and said, we want to digitize,” Kipp said, referring to the maintenance team at Fairburn in Georgia. “We need to streamline what we're doing.”

One thing that would not be changing for Duracell, however, would be the use of SAP as its master system of record. And this is where MaintainX’s integration was able to streamline processes for both technicians on the shop floor and finance teams using SAP.

This case study explains how Duracell reduced stock variability to save an estimated $50,000 a year by synchronizing parts inventory data automatically between MaintainX and SAP.

Challenges

With budgets tightening worldwide and continued supply chain challenges, Duracell’s frontline teams also were experiencing challenges maintaining its parts inventories.

Frontline teams needed to be able to search for parts, get up-to-date stock information, and access inventory data on mobile while in the field.

“There was no easy way to pull up the stock on a phone or tablet,” said Kipp. “You’d have to walk all the way back to the store room to find out the stock of that part. And that inaccessibility wasted time and effort finding what we needed.”

In addition, Duracell was unable to easily access information that it needed to report on regularly.

So using a purpose-built maintenance platform like MaintainX, with high-quality shop floor data capture and specific reports on maintenance costs and performance, would unlock new cost-saving insights for the team. But integrating new solutions using middleware had not always been a smooth process for Duracell.

“There are pain points anytime we integrate new tools,” explained Kipp. “A lot of times, in the middleware layer, we’ve had technical difficulties in which messages would get lost.”

"For the maintenance technicians, MaintainX is all flowers and sunshine."
^{—Jarrod Kipp, Duracell's North America Product Supply Process Transformation Manager}

Solutions

The first phase of transformation for Duracell was to implement MaintainX to make it easier for technicians to perform and record maintenance work. The second step was to connect MaintainX’s parts inventory module to SAP, giving technicians up-to-date inventory records and helping finance teams know where costs should be allocated.

Not surprisingly, usability was one of the main reasons Duracell chose MaintainX to handle maintenance. "We went with MaintainX because of its user interface and how we can use the platform directly from the shop and warehouse floor. This is one of the tremendous values of MaintainX."

Integrating MaintainX with SAP has already made Duracell’s maintenance teams more productive by enabling them to access accurate parts information instantly, right from their mobile devices.

Duracell selected Fairburn as the first location of many to begin rolling out the MaintainX + SAP integration. The ease of implementation and usability immediately drew in the team. The Duracell employees "started the trial and fell in love," Kipp recalled.

This was reason #1 for Kipp choosing MaintainX. Reason #2 was MaintainX’s built-in reports, which Kipp said had made it easy to track costs using data from MaintainX and SAP.

Kipp noted. “We now have what we need with the click of a button.”

“For root cause analysis, we can ask maintenance managers to look at process or system inefficiencies,” said Kipp. “With Reporting, we're letting the results speak for themselves. MaintainX allows the maintenance team to do analysis and start asking questions very quickly."

"MaintainX Reporting was probably the ultimate driver. More streamlined reporting gave us instant visualization."
^{—Jarrod Kipp, Duracell's North America Product Supply Process Transformation Manager}

Integrating MaintainX with SAP has allowed Duracell to leverage the strengths of both platforms, creating a more efficient and user-friendly workflow and generating more accurate data and insights from frontline operations through to C-Suite.

Results

Duracell is now accurately tracking parts used in around 1,000 work orders per month at each site. With more than 8,000 part SKUs, MaintainX has enriched the quality of the data in SAP.

And Kipp said the integration process had been refreshingly straightforward.

"Moving to MaintainX was one of the smoothest integrations I've ever seen in my career," Kipp recalled. "SAP’s API requires certain fields to be documented, filled out, and defined. If any of these are missing—primary fields, for example—it can be inflexible. But that is where MaintainX shone, as it was able to adapt to these challenges very quickly."

"Moving to MaintainX was one of the smoothest integrations I've ever seen in my career."
^{—Jarrod Kipp, Duracell's North America Product Supply Process Transformation Manager}

“The MaintainX technical team could get fields populated quickly and retest right away,” Kipp added. “So that really helped with the business testing and the technical testing as well.”

With MaintainX, Duracell techs can now better evaluate parts and equipment, leading to reduced stock variability. It has also streamlined the way that finance teams allocate maintenance work to specific cost centers. Kipp expects immediate cost savings to be $50,000 per site on parts inventory savings alone.

Kipp also appreciated that MaintainX wasn’t attempting to replace SAP. “We were very clear, SAP is the master. SAP’s got our financials and core functions, so we wanted to design a process that complemented SAP, and MaintainX really understood exactly how to fit in.”

Duracell looked at other CMMS besides MaintainX, but the “MaintainX interface is cleaner. It just looks better. Our Fairburn team fell in love.” And, in the end, "It just worked for the maintenance techs."

Spotlight on the Customer

As the world's top consumer battery company by market share, Duracell makes high-performance alkaline batteries, specialty cells, and rechargeables. Since its founding in the early 1920s, the brand has become a global consumer icon known for its commitment to quality, reliability, and innovation.

Before the acquisition by Berkshire Hathaway in 2016, Procter & Gamble (Duracell's previous owner) built a company-specific technology environment separate from the larger organization's shared structure. With P&G brands like Crest and Scope using one instance of SAP to run the business, the newly spun-off Duracell brand couldn't "take the current system with it."