Global Industrial Automation Leader Achieves 140% ROI with Supplier Lifecycle Management Industrial Automation Company leverages E7 for a 140% ROI

Overview

Our client, a global leader in digital transformation and industrial automation, is dedicated to making its customers more productive and the world more sustainable. To advance its mission, the company sought to modernize its systems and processes for managing supply chain escalations to reduce manual effort, accelerate resolution, and enable proactive risk management.

Our Impact

E7’s supplier lifecycle management solution revolutionized supply chain response and escalation within the organization, which in turn has accelerated vendor deliveries and production needs. Altogether, by leveraging Jira Service Management as a unification layer and ITSM best practices to standardize and automate processes across the supplier lifecycle, our client realized an estimated three-year ROI of 140%. 

Highlights

• Unified data from SAP ERP and ServiceNow into a single, centralized platform (Jira Service Management) to provide real-time visibility, powerful automations, and accelerated resolution
• Replaced time-consuming, error-prone manual workflows for onboarding suppliers and tracking POs with automated, ITSM-driven processes
• Accelerated escalation resolution with real-time visibility and automated alerting into critical supplier issues
• Enabled proactive risk management with timely insights into supplier performance, compliance trends, and active escalations

A global industrial automation leader managing thousands of suppliers across multiple plants, struggled with disconnected systems, fragmented processes, and limited visibility into supplier performance and critical escalations. With over 2,000 purchase orders (POs) processed each week and no streamlined method for managing supplier escalations, the company’s Production Control Analysts (PCAs) were burdened with time-consuming manual processes that slowed production and increased risk.

E7 Solutions partnered with the manufacturer to deliver a Supplier Lifecycle Management solution — part of E7’s broader Supply Chain Unification (SCU) framework — unifying supplier data, standardizing and automating escalation processes, and providing real-time visibility across the supplier lifecycle.

Supply chain disruptions require greater agility and resilience–but agility is impossible when data, teams and workflows are disconnected.

Our client’s supplier management processes were scattered across an SAP ERP for purchase orders and supplier master data, SharePoint spreadsheets for tracking PO statuses and issues, ServiceNow for IT-driven incident management, and Jira Service Management (JSM) for some service requests, but with limited process consistency.

Without a centralized system for managing supplier performance and escalations, the company’s Production Control Analysts (PCAs) had the herculean task of manually updating PO statuses in spreadsheets every week. The sheer effort required was exhausting and error-prone, forcing a weekly review cadence and resulting in significant delays in the escalation process.

In the face of rising volatility, supply chain leaders needed real-time visibility into emerging issues, automated workflows to eliminate manual bottlenecks, and a unified platform for consolidating supplier data and tracking performance.

E7 Solutions unified the company’s supplier lifecycle management by combining Jira Service Management (JSM) as the unification layer and leveraging E7’s ITSM expertise to establish standardized, automated processes across the supplier lifecycle.

A central component of the solution was process transformation. We worked together with stakeholders to gain a clear understanding of the underlying issues and identify an ideal business process for the future. We then translated these business rules and needs into a highly customized, yet manageable, workflow within Jira Service Management (JSM), streamlining the escalation of supply issues up the global organization's hierarchy and providing visibility across all business teams and levels.

The redesigned workflow seamlessly integrates data points on purchase orders from the client’s internal database, with Assets in the Jira Service Management instance. This integration ensured that teams had all the necessary data at their fingertips within one single tool in JSM. By leveraging and customizing Jira Service Management, Assets, workflows, dashboards, and automation, E7 has empowered the manufacturer to maximize its operational efficiency.

An integral part of this solution is that virtually all data in the JSM tickets are being populated from existing systems. Even the escalation tickets themselves are being created via an API integration setup by E7 – which drastically cuts down any manual work the team would need to perform to kick off the workflow in JSM.

Custom dashboards and reporting further allow multiple audiences to quickly and easily access the information that matters most to them. This means spending less time switching between various systems and poring through emails allowing the team to spend more time for their most meaningful work.

Key Components of the Solution

Unified Supplier Data & Process Visibility
E7 built a central supplier portal within JSM, consolidating supplier data, PO status, and escalation workflows in one place. This provided PCAs and leadership with a single source of truth for supplier performance and issue tracking.

Standardized Escalation Management
E7 implemented ITSM-based escalation workflows to ensure that supplier issues were identified, tracked, and resolved according to standard processes with clear SLAs. Escalations could now be triggered automatically from PO updates or supplier non-compliance events, ensuring no critical issues fell through the cracks.

Process Automation & Real-Time Notifications
Manual data entry and updates were replaced with automated workflows, reducing the reliance on spreadsheets and manual reconciliation. Real-time notifications were triggered for critical supplier issues, ensuring the right stakeholders were notified immediately.

Real-Time Supplier Performance Dashboards
E7 configured real-time dashboards and reports, giving leadership instant visibility into supplier performance, compliance metrics, and open escalations across plants and product lines. This eliminated the need for manual reporting and provided a proactive view into supplier risk.

By bringing together disparate systems, automating critical processes, and delivering real-time visibility into supplier performance, E7 helped the client achieve a proactive, data-driven supplier management process — essential for resilient, agile supply chain operations. The company estimates that the time saved from manual workflows, accelerated escalation resolution, and increased decision velocity will provide a 140% three-year ROI, in addition to increasing organizational resilience and agility in the face of increasing supply chain volatility.