Destination:
Increased Operational Efficiency
Airgas is always moving fast to anticipate customer needs and stay ahead of the competition. At every level, we're working smarter and making intelligent investments to achieve greater efficiencies and realize a seamless flow of products and information through our company and to our customers.
Running on SAP
In fiscal 2014, SAP went from being a project to being a tool that we are now using to run our business better. For the first time in our company history, our entire distribution business is on the same, shared information platform. With SAP, associates have increased access to real-time product and customer data, and we have significantly improved our order tracking, reporting, data mining and transactional processing capabilities.
Business support Centers
Airgas now has four SAP-enabled Business Support Centers—located in our North, South, Central and West divisions—that handle most of the back office functions for the regions in each division. With SAP now in place, these support centers are streamlining the accounts receivable, accounts payable, and other administrative processes that we expect will make us much more efficient and free up our field associates to focus more energy on serving customers.
Vertical Integration
One of the keys to Airgas' operational efficiency is our ability to internally produce a significant portion of our gas needs, complemented by our external supply sources. Today, we have 16 air separation units—and a few more on the way—where we produce oxygen, nitrogen and argon, as well as 8 liquid CO2 plants. On the road ahead, we'll continue to focus on the long-term security of gas supply and make investments in production that best position Airgas for growth in key customers segments and geographies.
enhanced Distribution
In the past year, we continued to increase the number of products stocked at our six national distribution centers to support our expanding telesales channel, Airgas Total Access, and to enable increased direct shipping to customers. This eliminates the extra step of shipping to our branches for forwarding to the end customers. We are also increasing the use of dynamic routing and telemetry systems to optimize our delivery routes and scheduling.