Landscape Transformation
Schenck Process is an international technology company headquartered in Darmstadt, Germany. The project aim was to optimize the organizational structure in the United States. Schenck Process has five plants in North America. These were assigned to three company codes and three purchasing and sales organizations. The company wanted to bring the plants under one company code. They also wanted to harmonize around 1,300 duplicate customer records and 800 duplicate supplier records in the SAP system, improve data quality, and make the system easier to operate. All linked master and transaction data also had to be harmonized. The challenging transformation was completed with the support of cbs Corporate Business Solutions in just five months. The go-live took place over one weekend. The implementation involved use of the cbs Enterprise Transformer tool in addition to standardized transformation approaches. Now that the project has been completed successfully, management has faster access to reliable real-time data from all divisions and is able to use the meaningful key figures for strategic planning.
The technical transformation was completed within 24 hours during the weekend, meaning that system downtime was reduced to a minimum, without interrupting day-to-day operations. “We are delighted with the entire project. The migration went smoothly right from the first test run,” reports Stephanie Hanl, CIO at Schenck Process.
Since the restructuring, Schenck Process in the U.S. now uses a single company code and single purchasing and sales organization instead of three separate ones for each. The entire transformation was completed in just five months. Stephanie Hanl explains: “Since the transformation, we have benefited from higher data quality and greater consistency in the system and are able to run better reports on customer and supplier data.” Additional benefits include much simpler system operation for the end user as well as valuable economies of scale in purchasing, which can be passed directly to the customers of Schenck Process.