Southern Pump & Tank Company (SPATCO)

SPATCO uses SAP Service Management to track equipment at its customers sites, receive incoming service calls, dispatch and complete work, and track labor and materials for billing. Using mySAP All-in-One, SPATCO lowered inventory by 28%, and reduced slow and nonmoving items by 70%; reduced the days from job completion to invoice generation from 8 to 3; and compressed the financial close from 20-plus days to 5.

Southern Pump & Tank Company (SPATCO) , headquartered in Charlotte, N.C., is a $60 million value-added distributor specializing in liquid handling equipment for the petroleum and industrial marketplaces. The company implemented a mySAP All-in-One solution quickly, in only 16 weeks, to support a customer-driven culture at the company.

Our main business is distribution buying from manufacturers and reselling to end users but we also install and service all the equipment we sell, says Charlie Tew, CEO of SPATCO. If their equipment is down, customers are not generating revenue. The biggest difference between us and our competitors is the service that we give our customers. We use mySAP All-in-One to take care of our customers at a higher level of service than our competitors do.

As a small and midsize business (SMB), SPATCO licensed the solution from SAP business partner Osprey, the SAP division of NIIT Technologies. Osprey drove the solution rollout, leveraging a rapid implementation methodology and its SMB solutions expertise to achieve the 16-week implementation.

It was very important to be able to license mySAP All-in-One, and get implementation assistance, from a company focused on our size business, Tew says. We have all the same business processes as a large corporation, but we dont have the same resources. The Osprey implementation team had breadth of knowledge about mySAP All-in-One and was able to implement quickly. This allowed us to limit the internal business and IT resources we had to dedicate to the project.

That meant SPATCO could get applications like SAP Service Management up and running quickly, to keep it ahead of the competition. SPATCO uses SAP Service Management to track equipment at the customer site, receive incoming service calls, dispatch and complete jobs, and track labor and materials for billing. SPATCO also uses SAP Service Management to review site and equipment histories, as well as track the profitability of individual service vans.

mySAP All-in-One closed any holes that we had from a serviceissue perspective, Tew says. We have always been customer-driven, but this has given us the tools we need to improve.
Charlie Tew, CEO of SPATCO

That improvement extends to overall operations, where SPATCO uses their mySAP All-in-One solution to integrate equipmentinstallation project quoting and sales through component purchasing, installation execution, progress and final billing, and follow-on equipment tracking for 5,000 customers across seven states, placing 4,500 orders per month.

We lowered inventory by 28%, and reduced slow and nonmoving items by 70%, says John Force, vice president of technology at SPATCO. On the service side, we reduced the days from job completion to invoice generation from 8 to 3, increasing cash flow. And we compressed the monthly financial close from 20- plus days to 5.