12. May 2010

HBPO Project SOLID: Harmonized Processes and Systems

Automotive supplier merges SAP systems across countries

A central North American SAP system ensures the comparability and transparency of business processes at HBPO GmbH, a joint venture between Hella, Behr, and Plastic Omnium.

As a supplier for the automotive industry, HBPO produces approximately 2.8 million front-end modules annually. To do this, the company maintains numerous just-insequence (JIS) manufacturing plants in Germany, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Spain, England, Mexico, the US, Canada, and Korea.

Organic Infrastructure

As to be expected in a globally distributed manufacturer like HBPO, a range of SAP systems have become established over the years. For historical reasons, two different SAP systems with different releases were used in the US and Mexico – making operation and support both expensive and time-consuming. In addition, the Mexican system was based on old technology and needed to be upgraded to a newer release.

Shared Services

Furthermore, company management wanted to uniformly control the activities in the NAFTA countries (Canada, the US, and Mexico) and introduce shared service functions.

The processes and structures previously used at these locations were all different – making consistent control of business processes and the use of shared services very complex.

This motivated HBPO to launch a project to merge the Mexican and central North American SAP systems.

SHC-Framework

“We chose cbs Corporate Business Solutions as our consulting and implementation partner. We were impressed by the holistic methodological approach adopted by cbs experts, which enabled them to quickly identify and manage complexities at process, system, and data level.

They have already applied this approach successfully to all the strategic planning aspects of the project”, explains Bjorn Bammens, CIO at HBPO, justifying the selection of the Heidelberg-based restructuring specialists for SAP systems.

Furthermore, cbs has vast expertise in standardizing processes for international businesses and was already working with a proven tool to support the technical system consolidation – namely their own standard software, SHC Framework...

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HBPO Success Story (PDF, 220 KB)