About the Customer

RS Components reduces downtime and enables aggressive IT rollout strategy to support business growth

How one of the world’s leading distributors of electronics and maintenance products implemented technology for SAP that improved critical product data update times by 75% to enable IT to keep up with business expansion.

32 countries of operation and

distributors in a further

37 marketsRS Components (RS) is the trading brand of Electrocomponents plc, the global distributor for engineers.

As the world’s leading high service distributor of electronics and maintenance products, RS has a wide and varied supplier base, with hundreds of thousands of products. RS relies on an SAP Retail solution to deliver on their customer service promises.

About the Customer

About the Customer

Genuine parts from 2,500 trusted global brands 1m

customers globally

founded in

193744,000 parcels shipped daily

500,000 products in stock globally

16 distribution centres across the globe

The Challenge

The Challenge

When RS introduces a new system or roll out to a new business unit, they need to load a new set of product data into their “Assortment List”; their master data list of the different components and products, which feeds various subsystems including warehousing and planning systems as well as their website.

To avoid any negative impact on the business, RS only works on the Assortment List in pre-defined cross-over periods, in very limited windows of downtime. Their commitment to customer service and same-day order despatch turnaround times means they simply can’t afford to have long systems outages.

new product data

warehouse planning website

Assortment List

The Challenge

Because of their vast product range, maintaining this process was becoming increasingly difficult. RS had to work 24 hours a day for a number of days in preparation, to be able to get the data loaded within the allotted downtime window.

RS had a business objective to roll out their Back Office solution to a set number of additional business units, but had reached a point where they simply couldn’t fit in the volume of work required into the available downtime window to reach this target.

Put simply, there was no way of achieving

their rollout strategy unless the length of the update process, and therefore the downtime

window, could be reduced.

The Solution

How did RS overcome this obstacle?

The Solution

RS selected a trusted technology partner to help accelerate and streamline the Assortment List update process.

The solution implemented enabled RS to tackle rollouts that would otherwise be beyond the technical reach of RS.

The new-found efficiency means that Assortment List updates are no longer a bottleneck and RS is now able to reach their business unit rollout targets.

The Solution

“We’ve got operations in 32 countries and ship more than 44,000 parcels every business day. Orders placed with us can be ready for despatch within the hour. It’s all about speed of delivery; there’s no way we can afford an outage during the week. That’s why it was so important to reduce the system downtime.”

Matthew LingBack Office Functional Team Lead, RS Components

What were the benefits?

What were the benefits?

The time taken for the RS SAP system to process the Assortment List has been cut by 75%.

processing time reduced by 75%

What were the benefits?

Processes that were taking upwards of 7-8 hours now take less than 3, allowing RS to easily fit critical data updates into planned windows of downtime.

3 hours

What were the benefits?

RS is able to deliver on their core values of single-day order turnarounds while still growing their product base.

What were the benefits?

RS no longer needs to see adding product lines or additional business units as an inhibitor to growth and can now continue their strong business growth plans.

How did RS achieve such a huge process efficiency improvement?

How did RS achieve such a huge process efficiency improvement?

RS implemented a Business Performance App – Articlus.

Articlus runs on Basis Technologies’ Diffuser architecture – enabling ABAP code to process large data volumes many times faster without additional hardware.

“We were already a client of Basis Technologies, using the Transport Expresso solution. We needed technology that would allow us to do things faster. An App built on their Diffuser technology was suggested as a possible solution.” Matthew Ling Back Office Functional Team Lead, RS Components

“Diffuser does exactly what it’s meant to do. We’ve found it helps maximize the usage of our infrastructure. I’ve been blown away with the results from Diffuser – they were even better than I expected. I thought we might perhaps see a 20% performance improvement, which I would have been happy with. We’ve hit 75% reduction in the time taken to roll out which means we can now carry out our cut over processes well within the required timeframes. It’s allowed us to do rollouts that otherwise we’d have really struggled to do.”

Matthew LingBack Office Functional Team Lead, RS Components

How did RS achieve such a huge process efficiency improvement?

How did RS achieve such a huge process efficiency improvement?

“We’re soon looking to start using Diffuser on a day-to-day basis with another of our programs. Based on the fact that we’ve been using it successfully, we’ll be looking to utilize Diffuser to support new product introductions. With such high new product targets to meet, we’re confident that Diffuser will help.”

Matthew LingBack Office Functional Team Lead, RS Components

And it doesn’t stop here with RS and Diffuser

“Basis Technologies are great. I’ve dealt with them before in the past. The technology offered and the consultants are great, and the company is easy to work with. Diffuser is a solid technology.”

Matthew LingBack Office Functional Team Lead, RS Components

How did RS achieve such a huge process efficiency improvement?

About the Customer

Articlusa BDi App built with Diffuser

basistechnologies.com