Lucid has gone live with SAP S/4HANA Transportation Management for inbound domestic freight at its Arizona plant, the consultancy that delivered the project announced on Thursday.
Westernacher Consulting Americas disclosed the go-live on LinkedIn on Thursday, saying that Lucid‘s plant — known as AMP-1 — now combines three SAP products: S/4HANA Transportation Management, SAP Business Network for Logistics and SAP Global Track and Trace.
Lucid has not announced the project itself, and the details available come from the systems integrator rather than the company.
What Went Live
The three components handle different layers of the same process.
Transportation Management plans freight and settles it.
Inbound shipments from suppliers become freight units that the system assigns to carriers and capacities against cost and constraint models, then generates settlement documents that flow into the ERP to create accruals, purchase orders and service entry sheets for invoice verification.
Business Network for Logistics is the collaboration layer where carriers and suppliers accept work and confirm execution.
Global Track and Trace, the successor to SAP’s older Event Management product, supplies shipment visibility.
Westernacher listed five outcomes: more accurate and flexible inbound planning to improve on-time delivery, real-time shipment visibility, streamlined collaboration with suppliers and carriers through portals, automated freight calculation and settlement, and a base for onboarding further carriers.
Those are the integrator’s claims. None has been quantified or confirmed by Lucid.
Why the Timing Matters
The go-live lands in the middle of the most aggressive cost programme in the company’s history.
Chief Executive Silvio Napoli has set a target of roughly $1.4 billion in cash-flow improvement this year, of which $600 million to $800 million is meant to come from inventory reduction.
Inventory stood at $1,378.7 million at the end of the second quarter, down from $1,468.9 million three months earlier but more than triple the level of two years ago.
Management cut roughly a fifth of the workforce and eliminated the second shift at the Arizona plant in June, changes it valued at about $158 million in annualised savings.
Both the workforce cut and the departure of the COO and former interim CEO Marc Winterhoff were first reported by EV.
Napoli told analysts on the August 4 earnings call that the company had disappointed for far too long, listing missed commitments, products launched before they were ready, underinvestment in service, slow responses to quality issues and complexity that delayed decisions.
Before Napoli was appointed, the EV maker was forced to stop deliveries of its Gravity model for about four weeks.
Gravity deliveries were halted for 29 days in February after an unauthorised change by a seat supplier produced improperly welded seatbelt anchors, leading to a recall of 4,476 vehicles.
Who Delivered It
Headquartered in Heidelberg with around 250 staff across roughly a dozen locations, Westernacher claims to have been first to implement embedded Transportation Management in S/4HANA.
The company’s Global Chief Solution Architect for the product, Bernd Lauterbach, co-wrote the standard reference works on it with SAP’s own developers.
Lauterbach previously ran solution architecture for SAP’s travel and transport industry unit.
Ram Vaidyanathan, Westernacher’s Senior Partner and Regional Chief Executive for the Americas since January and a twelve-year veteran of the firm, shared the post on LinkedIn.
The AMP-1 programme now runs on a transportation backbone built for visibility, agility and scale, Vaidyanathan wrote, adding that the project was not just a system implementation but a foundation for how connected logistics should work in next-generation automotive manufacturing.
He tagged SAP’s General Manager and Chief Product Officer for Supply Chain Management, Devesh Mishra, who joined the software company from Amazon in the summer.
On the client side, the named lead is Doug Maulbetsch, Lucid‘s Director of SAP Applications, whose career includes a directorship at SAP itself covering automotive supply chain, and the SAP practices at Atos North America and DXC Technology.
