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Streamlining SAP Inventory Management Application

Founded in 1983, Mobile Mini Inc. is the world’s leading provider of portable storage solutions, committed to providing customers with superior services and access to a high-quality and diverse fleet. They are the leading provider of specialty containment solutions in the U.S. and aim to become the provider of choice for tank and pump products across the country.

As of the March 2020, their network included 139 locations in the U.S., 15 locations in the U.K., and 2 locations in Canada. Their international presence and diverse fleet enable them to meet customers’ storage and tank-and-pump rental requirements whenever and wherever they need. The company went public in 1994 and now tradeed on NASDAQ under the symbol MINI. They are part of the Russell 2000® and 3000® Indexes and the S&P Small Cap Index.

Inventory management across multiple SAP systems

Tracking storage assets across finance, logistics, and operations is critical to the bottom and top lines at Mobile Mini- leading to their investment in SAP ECC as their core system. Over the last 35+ years however, Mobile Mini has grown largely through acquisition - creating many disparate systems across inventory management.

Even after deploying SAP as the core system, there were a lot of manual and paper driven workflows that were cumbersome and didn’t give visibility to the tracking of equipment in real time. Theft and lost assets was a major challenge associated with this lack of visibility.

Mobile Mini initially considered building custom applications and business processes within SAP but needed a mobile solution that was device agnostic and worked in areas where connectivity was not ubiquitous because of the nature of their business and where their inventory sits. They considered SAP Fiori with its great templates, but Mobile Mini needed to build customized and advance offline management tools across inventory, job site tools and logistics— SAP Integration, device and connectivity agnosticism were key, while trying to custom development within their SAP system was also critical.

Challenge: manual process, lack of visibility, inconsistent process

  • Lengthy manual paper process for physical inventory validation leading to higher operational costs.
  • Lack of real-time visibility into company’s core assets leading to theft and asset loss.
  • Core ERP (SAP) processes were hampered due to inconsistent integrations.
  • Low field adoption for past mobile apps because of user experience for certain functions.

Modern mobile-native SAP integrated low-code app

  • Designed and built a custom online/offline app with a user-centric, customized experience that tightly integrates to SAP, based on roles and authorizations with bar code scanning and inventory identification on any device.
  • Seamless deployment to global locations and users through integration to existing MDM solution.
  • Hosted on Pillir’s EdgeReady Cloud, with no infrastructure or operational over head added to Mobile Mini’s plate - a simple user based pricing model for a fully customized enterprise scale application.
  • Trained Mobile Mini team on the use of Pillir’s EdgeReady Cloud for additional application development projects moving forward.

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Cecilia Santis

Cecilia Santis

Cecilia is a Digital Marketing Specialist at Pillir and loves to write about emerging technologies.