World market leader for home appliances is getting closer to its goal NEXT ONE Global Enterprise Solution
BSH Hausgeräte GmbH (15.6 billion euros in annual sales) is one of the world market leaders in the home appliances sector. Since the Munich-based group places great emphasis on innovation, it was important for the company, as a pioneer in the industry, to replace SAP R/3 ECC and instead map its processes in the new SAP S/4HANA environment. Therefore, they launched an extensive, global Digital Core project. BSH’s goal was not to make any further investments in legacy software solutions, but rather to quickly leverage the maximum of new technologies. They wanted to take the opportunity to proactively respond to new state-of-the-art solutions from SAP and to use the opportunities and possibilities of S/4HANA to build an “Intelligent ERP” throughout the group in the long term.
Agile approach – fast rollout
Tobias Steiner, project manager for the SAP S/4HANA switch at BSH, sums up: “The collaboration with cbs was very cooperative. The cbs consultants were always there one hundred percent with excellent technical know-how and ensured a stable team. This was a crucial success factor, as BSH employees were not always fully available for the S/4 project. In addition, S/4 was still completely new territory for us. The entire Digital Core project benefited greatly from this.”
A total of 17 countries are live so far, including Switzerland, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Thailand and Indonesia. The first factory rollout succeeded in Traunreut, Bavaria. The next challenge is to roll out the standard template widely. Further S/4 template rollouts are planned in the coming months, for example at various German sites as well as in Poland (six factories at three locations: Lodz, Wroclaw, Rzeszów) as well as in Spain, Mexico and Egypt. BSH is already benefiting from the new end-to-end process landscapes in the individual companies.
“It was complex to convince all employees and stakeholders involved of the agile method. But in the long run, this path has clearly proven to be the right one. The results so far are impressive. If you look at the dimensions, it is certainly one of the largest IT restructurings in the industry worldwide that has been implemented using agile working methods,” sums up project manager Steiner.
(Photo: BSH Hausgeräte GmbH)