Soucy Implements SAP S/4HANA Public Cloud, a First in The Canadian Manufacturing Sector!

Eager to remain at the cutting edge of technology, Soucy Techno, specialized in rubber compounds, just started its Digital Transformation by implementing SAP S/4HANA Public Cloud, a first in the Canadian manufacturing sector!

Soucy, a vertically integrated company founded in 1967, needed to rapidly implement an integrated enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, to standardize its processes and gain agility and speed of execution. The goal was to implement an operational ERP for all business aspects of the company, sales, planning, production, logistics, procurement and finances, all while decommissioning parts of the current systems (AS400, Syteline, in-house application).

Generally speaking, Soucy favours cloud computing tools that will allow them to streamline their processes, simplify IT system updates, reduce maintenance costs, and to become more agile in implementing new functionalities. The SAP S/4HANA Cloud solution being SaaS-based, the choice was therefore self-evident.

“Humans are allowed growing old, but a company is not. One of the pros of this system is that it will automatically update itself. It will allow us to concentrate on our work, which is to make high-performance rubber compounds.” 

François Bédard, General Manager, Soucy Techno

Indeed, the Soucy Techno subsidiary develops, blends and preforms rubber, polyethylene-based black concentrates and Kevlar-based rubber components. Those rubbers can be found in a variety of sectors, notably in the making of hockey pucks used by the National Hockey League. With SAP S/4HANA Cloud, a state-of-the-art solution, some of the repetitive manual tasks are now automated, allowing employees to concentrate on their area of expertise.

François Bédard is convinced that the decompartmentalization of the various services and departments thanks to an integrated system such as SAP S/4HANA Cloud, was required to support the strong growth of the past years, a 30% increase in sales. 

“We live in an era in which change is exponentially going faster. We must support our employees and processes with simple, agile and quickly evolving systems! It is a critical to our digital transitioning.”

René Thériault, Corporate Director of IT, Soucy

Furthermore, because their production is structured around verticalized industries, Soucy needed to streamline and standardize their processes and IT systems for their entire network to take advantage of these new opportunities. Thanks to the SAP S/4HANA Cloud solution, which is easier to implement and allows native integration and deployment for all the group’s subsidiaries, the entire company now benefits from sharing the same databases and operational processes all the while remaining agile.

“We were able to establish a relationship based on mutual trust with Soucy’s stakeholders in order to implement SAP S/4HANA Cloud within specified budget and deadlines. Fiori’s applications are really intuitive, which made it really easy for the users to adopt the solution.
That project has been the perfect opportunity for Soucy to benefit from the most recent SAP functionalities while ensuring best business practices compliance.”

Olivier Bourneau, Project Manager, SAP Business Solutions, Createch