Spotlight on: Floor Walking

We spoke to functional consultant, James Ross-Myring, to get his perspective on floor walking and how he’s seen it benefit many of our customers.

“I have several years of experience in providing floorwalking services across many industries including food and beverage, manufacturing and automotive. Whether its two weeks or two years after an SAP go-live, I’ve seen users experiencing a variety of challenges including lack of confidence in the new system, trying to revert to the way they previously completed tasks, error messages in SAP, the system not behaving as expected and a delay between contacting the support team and the issue being resolved.

“Coming in as a floor walker allows me to act as an immediate go-to resource for any SAP-related process issues, there for as long as the customer requires, based permanently on the warehouse floor alongside the end users, empowering them to make the best use of their SAP system.

“Activities I would typically get involved with include investigating and resolving any issues or errors, providing user training and support, recommending more efficient ways of operating, advising on how best to allocate resources to warehouse tasks and identifying gaps in processes.

“Any module that interacts with the supply chain such as SAP Extended Warehouse Management (EWM), Warehouse Management (WM) and Inventory Management (IM) are all in my scope to support, but definitely not restrictive as I have also successfully worked with Production Planning (PP), Quality Management (QM), Yard Management (YM), Transport Management (TM), Plant Maintenance (PM) and Sales and Distribution (SD).

“I love working closely with our customers’ internal teams and key stakeholders and developing a rapport with them, seeing the benefits of the work we do up close and in person. I also enjoy the perspective I gain on what is happening on both the warehouse floor and the management and operations levels of the business.

“From my experience, floor walking benefits customers in many ways. While working virtually with customers is effective in many cases, often nothing beats the personal touch of being there among the end-users to resolve issues as they arise with minimal downtime, pinpoint where operations can be streamlined to increase productivity and provide training and support to improve engagement with the SAP system.”

For more information on floor walking or any of our other SAP consultancy or support services, get in touch with our SAP supply chain experts today.