Couple looking at new cars

JM Family Enterprises: Driving streamlined operations with unified, automated procurement processes

Improving the procurement process and supply chain visibility

The principal operations of JM Family Enterprises focus on vehicle distribution and processing, finance and insurance, retail vehicle sales, and home-improvement specialty franchises. It chose SAP Ariba solutions and SAP Business Network to drive improvements in its indirect spending source-to-pay process and to improve its ability to manage its supplier base.

IndustryRegionCompany Size
AutomotiveDeerfield Beach, Florida>5,000 employees
We believe SAP Ariba solutions position us to achieve our mission while making things easier and more streamlined for our associates, who are our greatest asset.
Larry Williams
Director of Process Innovation and Strategy for Enterprise Services, JM Family Enterprises
IndustryRegionCompany Size
AutomotiveDeerfield Beach, Florida>5,000 employees
We believe SAP Ariba solutions position us to achieve our mission while making things easier and more streamlined for our associates, who are our greatest asset.
Larry Williams
Director of Process Innovation and Strategy for Enterprise Services, JM Family Enterprises

Centralizing data and automating manual procurement processes

JM Family Enterprises is the southeast distributor for Toyota vehicles in Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Florida. Founded in 1968, the company believes that partnership is at the core of everything it does.

 

JM Family Enterprises was using a niche platform. This caused its sourcing, buying, and contracting processes to be disconnected and limited access to comprehensive procurement data. Associates were bogged down by manual processes, and management lacked visibility.

 

The company needed a comprehensive solution that could help provide a cohesive experience from sourcing to contracting to buying.

With SAP Ariba solutions, we’re able to ask more-effective questions relative to the supply chain. This includes which suppliers we’re going to qualify, prefer, and really drive spend to.
Larry Williams
Director of Process Innovation and Strategy for Enterprise Services, JM Family Enterprises

Implementing a unified technology solution for critical business processes

SAP Ariba solutions allow JM Family Enterprises to integrate its sources of spend across sourcing, buying, and contracting. Unifying these processes on SAP Ariba will automate the purchasing lifecycle, provide visibility into the supplier network, and surface new insights through more robust data. In addition, JM Family Enterprises chose SAP Business Network to enable a centralized business network to connect its trading partners.

 

To enhance solution capabilities and achieve faster solution adoption, the company uses the SAP Preferred Success service for SAP Ariba solutions, expanded edition. While JM Family Enterprises has a very technical team at its core, staff did not have prior SAP Ariba solution expertise. Through targeted cloud adoption strategies and personalized engagements, SAP Preferred Success helps empower users with the confidence and expertise they need to navigate SAP Ariba solutions with ease and get work done faster. The introduction to the service became a turning point, serving as an invaluable resource hub of knowledge, experience, and insights that allowed the technical team to move at an unprecedented pace.

The SAP Preferred Success service for SAP Ariba solutions, expanded edition helps us reach a different level of performance. It’s like having an SAP expert embedded within our team, guiding us with best practices, helping ensure we’re on track every step of the way, and allowing us to complete tasks 50% faster than before. It isn’t just a service—it’s a catalyst for growth, enabling us to achieve more than we ever thought possible.
Larry Williams
Director of Process Innovation and Strategy for Enterprise Services, JM Family Enterprises

Managing spend centrally while creating deeper partnerships with suppliers

SAP Ariba solutions support JM Family Enterprises’ indirect spend across the enterprise. Armed with new data, the company now has greater visibility into the supply chain and can manage its procurement operations and supplier relationships more effectively. This includes onboarding and enabling suppliers, getting insights into how suppliers can better serve the company, and managing suppliers through SAP Business Network.

 

On the user side, once-manual and cumbersome processes are now guided and automated within the system, and the supplier experience is more standardized. Suppliers also see the benefits. JM Family Enterprise is leveraging SAP Ariba solutions to become a more capable and knowledgeable buying organization by managing the supply chain, improving its management of catalogs, and detecting and resolving issues earlier.

 

Using SAP Ariba, the company is able to better understand the level of its partnerships and the effectiveness of those partnerships, and it will be able to better support the business’s strategy to manage those relationships over time. Having access to purchase order data by supplier provides great insight into how to manage and qualify relationships.

We believe that data should help drive and inform our operations. Now that we have data relative to our procurement process, including sourcing, buying, and contracting, as well as new insights on supplier performance through SAP Business Network, we’re able to make better business decisions.
Larry Williams
Director of Process Innovation and Strategy for Enterprise Services, JM Family Enterprises

Perfecting contract compliance and spend visibility

As JM Family Enterprises works to become a more mature procurement organization, contract compliance is its next big stepping stone. The company plans to implement contract compliance functionality in SAP Ariba solutions to enable a new level of visibility around spend on contracts. It also plans to continue using SAP Preferred Success to support its progress in this area.