Executive Summary
One of the world's leading specialist manufacturers that offers a complete spectrum of automation and digitization services needed to ensure it meets Industry 4.0 demands effectively. With harmonized business functions and processes – and real-time data leveraging – the company is now positioned for the automated future.
Supporting international customers quickly requires harmonized functions
Our client was aiming to position itself for future trends, such as IoT and Industry 4.0, by meeting its customers’ increasingly complex requirements at the same time as addressing growing competition in its core business.
With established operations in more than 20 regions worldwide, the company needed to harmonize all of its functions, processes, and IT systems globally. The client's legacy and complex application architecture had to be fully transformed, enabling the company to have real-time transparency on project costs across the entire organization and to improve time-to-market.
Combining the right technologies and knowledge to improve efficiency
BearingPoint supported the client within a large-scale efficiency program to harmonize and optimize 465 end-to-end business processes across the organization, including: product and service development, customer-specific solution engineering, and customer service. This resulted in three main implementation initiatives: a central customer management, a central ERP solution, and a common HR system.
The business process organization (BPO) was defined and set-up for sustainable process governance. It established data ownership and governance in order to leverage data as a corporate asset.
Finally, BearingPoint was involved in the implementation of SAP S/4HANA, Salesforce, PLM TeamCenter, Enterprise Content Management (ECM), ePurchasing, and the warehouse-management system. This enabled a more flexible and scalable architecture for fast-solution roll-outs and future integration of new acquisitions.
Transparency across all processes and response to customer demands in real-time
The client’s business processes and IT systems have been harmonized and optimized globally. This enabled the company to develop Industry 4.0-driven service offerings and to sharpen their competitive edge.
The client is better prepared to deliver efficiently in a highly complex environment by gaining real-time visibility across a project timeline and knowing how the customer’s products can be impacted by any change. The company can address challenges quickly, based on a single point-of-truth for all data, centralizing information about modified customer requirements, supplier and product issues, and process dependencies. Data quality and accuracy improved, enabling flexible adjustments of the customer-centric organization reporting requirements to be implemented.
The new IT system landscape allows for the rapid integration of new acquisitions to support the client’s growth strategy. This also reduces costs and maintenance efforts by decreasing the number of peripheral systems and interfaces.
