Groupe Pilote: “Process Runner has become one of the IT department’s essential tools”
Groupe Pilote has run SAP as its main management system since 2009. Christophe Herlin, IT Director of Groupe Pilote, explains how automating SAP processes with Process Runner accelerated projects and improved the productivity of business users.
Could you introduce Groupe Pilote?
Christophe Herlin: Groupe Pilote is a French manufacturer on the European leisure vehicle market. It is a family business, historically based at La Limouzinière, south of Nantes. It employs 1,100 people across three main production sites, two in France and one in Germany. We build, fit out and sell vehicles ranging from camper vans to large motorhomes, under brands such as Pilote, Bavaria, Frankia, Le Voyageur, Hanroad, and more recently Joa Camp.
What did you need to automate?
Many of our SAP business users had to carry out repetitive tasks with no added value. Sales Administration, for instance, regularly had to go back into vehicle orders to update them, and the only way was to run the update transaction manually, once per order. That was one case among many: Purchasing used the SAP standard to carry supplier price changes into the purchasing info records, and we also had data loading needs when a new plant was created in SAP. All of this led us to look for a way to automate SAP transactions.
How did the project go?
After presenting Process Runner, Mycène immediately suggested a one month trial on a first use case. We were quickly convinced. We bought our first licences and wrote our first scripts after a short training session given by Mycène. We are autonomous today, but it is reassuring to know that their teams remain available to point us to the right information or to unblock a situation. Their relationship with the publisher means we always get an answer, even on the most complex questions.
What benefits have you seen?
The IT team at Groupe Pilote is made up of functional profiles. We are not developers. Process Runner is simple enough for us to write our own automation scripts in one or two hours, where the alternative would be to commission specific developments from an external provider for each use case. For the IT department, that saves project time and budget. For the business teams, the time saved is considerable: hours of low value work replaced by running a script.
What comes next?
Process Runner is now part of the tools we use regularly. The next step is to involve the business teams more directly: IT will keep writing, testing and approving the scripts, but we would like the business to run them itself. We will also keep training to deepen our technical skills. I think we only use about 60 per cent of what the tool can do, so there is still a great deal to explore.
