In the last 12 months, elec­tric vehi­cle design­er and man­u­fac­tur­er, Elec­traMec­ca­ni­ca, pro­duced and deliv­ered its ini­tial prod­uct to con­sumers and fleet buy­ers. Addi­tion­al­ly, Elec­traMec­ca­ni­ca extend­ed its Chi­na-based man­u­fac­tur­ing oper­a­tions; broke ground for a new U.S. plant; increased its trade show test-dri­ve and pop-up pres­ence; and launched a ser­vice repair net­work pilot with Bosch. 

And if that wasn’t enough, last Octo­ber, the Van­cou­ver, British Colum­bia – based com­pa­ny cut over the first of a mul­ti-wave RISE with SAP instal­la­tion that uses SAP S/4HANA and AWS Cloud. This instal­la­tion enables Elec­traMec­ca­ni­ca to con­nect and increas­ing­ly inte­grate and auto­mate its glob­al busi­ness sys­tems and oper­a­tions from sup­pli­er to buyer.

“We start­ed out with a search. We knew we were going to scale as a com­pa­ny. We knew we had to have the right ERP [and] MRP sys­tems in place to han­dle the scal­ing. We’ve start­ed out glob­al, as [a] com­pa­ny. We did an exten­sive review. The one that went to the top was SAP S/4HANA in the cloud. This would real­ly serve our needs,” said Kevin Pavlov, Elec­traMec­ca­ni­ca CEO. 

Aggres­sive Growth and Oppor­tu­ni­ties in EV

“We’ve got an aggres­sive growth path and we need­ed to make sure we had the right tech­nol­o­gy foun­da­tion,” added Bal Bhullar, CFO. ​“The rea­son we chose SAP was because we want­ed an off-the-shelf and min­i­mal cus­tomiza­tion, to sup­port our cur­rent growth and future needs. Based on all the met­rics we put togeth­er, [work­ing] with our con­sult­ing part­ner PWC, SAP over­all was the win­ner for what it could do for our business.”

Now that it has moved beyond the devel­op­ment stage to full-fledged oper­a­tions, Elec­traMec­ca­ni­ca plans to build out its port­fo­lio from the ini­tial well-reviewed Solo, a one-seat, three-wheel, all-elec­tric mod­el designed for indi­vid­ual com­mutes and ser­vice fleet use. The com­pa­ny will add the Solo 02 con­vert­ible and spe­cial­ty versions.

Addi­tion­al man­u­fac­tur­ing capac­i­ty means not only main­tain­ing and improv­ing on a large­ly Asian region sup­ply chain, but also cre­at­ing a sup­ply chain for the new U.S. plant. This means new logis­tics sup­pli­ers with new sys­tems — many with exist­ing SAP instal­la­tions — locat­ed across the Amer­i­c­as. Pub­licly trad­ed ElectraMeccanica’s expan­sion includes increas­ing pro­duc­tion capac­i­ty from 20,000 to 40,000 vehi­cles annually. 

Lack of Lega­cy Systems

Bhullar under­scored the val­ue evi­dent in RISE with SAP and SAP S/4HANA for account­ing, finance, con­trols, audit trails, and in the company’s Sales­force and Deal­er­Track sys­tems inte­gra­tion, adding that — to ElectraMeccanica’s advan­tage — few ​“true lega­cy sys­tems” and tra­di­tion­al soft­ware infra­struc­tures exist.

“That made it a lot eas­i­er [over­all] and eas­i­er to adjust in trans­fer­ring the data over, espe­cial­ly [on] the account­ing and finance side, and in the oth­er depart­ments,” she said.

Pavlov, mean­while, empha­sized the impor­tance of SAP S/4HANA in ElectraMeccanica’s parts and inven­to­ry man­age­ment, qual­i­ty sys­tems, man­u­fac­tur­ing, and pro­duc­tion — down to data rout­ing, access, and avail­abil­i­ty at spe­cif­ic times. 

These sys­tems, and the SAP S/4HANA – enabled data and appli­ca­tion inte­gra­tion, are all essen­tial to the unique ​“birth cer­tifi­cate” shipped with each Solo. Pavlov said that Elec­traMec­ca­ni­ca tracks and records ​“every sin­gle part, every sin­gle lot, exact­ly who we brought it from” in the cer­tifi­cate for each vehi­cle. The cer­tifi­cate also records soft­ware updates, own­er­ship changes, main­te­nance, and more.

EV Life Cycle View

“SAP pro­vides all that data. We know and can man­age the data for the entire life cycle of the vehi­cle, from birth to retire­ment, and pos­si­bly beyond for bat­tery reuse,” Pavlov explained.

Yet, as ener­gized as lead­er­ship ini­tial­ly was with the SAP ERP and MRP foun­da­tion, the imple­men­ta­tion team has expe­ri­enced its fair share of chal­lenges. API and data inte­gra­tion issues sur­faced, includ­ing across the company’s hand-held appli­ca­tions, web-based con­sumer por­tal, and fleet sales. Cash trans­ac­tion man­age­ment, par­tic­u­lar­ly the kind involv­ing mul­ti­ple cur­ren­cies, exchange rates, and tax­es, didn’t always flow smoothly.

Because of the project’s scale and scope, defin­ing and redefin­ing process­es and pro­ce­dures, plan­ning, and imple­men­ta­tion have required a sig­nif­i­cant invest­ment of time, tal­ent, and peo­ple resources to plan, con­fig­ure, and deploy. 

“We had to have a lot of our folks real­ly involved,” Pavlov said, from lead­er­ship to every­day teams and staff. ​“Our peo­ple would have to let go of their cur­rent dai­ly work, only to go to meet­ings to describe their dai­ly work. It was very tax­ing and dif­fi­cult, but we told every­one how impor­tant it was.”

Ear­ly RISE with SAP Returns

Bhullar believes that employ­ees are already begin­ning to rec­og­nize the impor­tant ear­ly results and fore­see the impor­tant effects of RISE with SAP and SAP S/4HANA.

“Indi­vid­u­als are still learn­ing,” she said. ​“Once they’ve got it under their belt, they see [the] fruits of why ERP sys­tems like SAP are so supe­ri­or. We see the details we were look­ing for, the report­ing, infor­ma­tion on sup­ply chain, the bill of mate­ri­als costs — all the data we’ll be able to retrieve” and analyze.

Just a year into the SAP rela­tion­ship and months into imple­men­ta­tion, Pavlov read­i­ly shares visions of busi­ness and oper­a­tions man­age­ment improve­ments. These include inven­to­ry man­age­ment for plants; reports and ana­lyt­ics to sup­port real-time order pro­cess­ing; effi­cient, clean, and vet­ted finan­cial report­ing; cost con­trols; and pur­chase tracking.

“It’s quite an advan­tage for us,” he concluded.