Application Management Services

Freudenberg Home and Cleaning Solutions (FHCS) is a leading international branded goods company for cleaning products and systems as well as laundry care products. The products are known under the brand names Vileda, O-Cedar, Gala, Wettex and Marigold, among others. In the area of business intelligence, cbs has been providing comprehensive support for both the operation and further development of BI solutions for several years. This involves not only analyzing and solving incidents and problems, but also making adjustments and changes. Successful 2nd and 3rd level support has also been established at Freudenberg Home and Cleaning Solutions in recent years: Comprehensive support from system monitoring and incident management to change requests and projects - all from a single source.

Freudenberg Home and Cleaning also decided to work with cbs because it was looking for an AMS provider with a holistic service offering that went beyond pure BI topics. The comprehensive consulting and service portfolio matched the company's expectations and a long-term collaboration was initiated.

The handover of the existing documentation and several workshops to clarify the service organization and service processes set the course for the collaboration. The cbs internal consulting team is made up of seven colleagues from Germany and Croatia and is integrated into the customer's team structure. Freudenberg Home and Cleaning now also uses the Application Management Service for other SAP topics that go beyond Business Intelligence. The cbs experts have provided comprehensive support for the further development of the BI landscape at Freudenberg in recent years.

Service quality

The major goals of the project were successfully achieved: Freudenberg Home and Cleaning Solutions' internal IT department was relieved of some of its workload, services were made even more professional and service quality was improved. In addition to advising on business intelligence issues, the consultants also supported Freudenberg Home and Cleaning Solutions with the implementation of the SAP Analytics Cloud.

In addition, various release changes were carried out in the volatile BI world. Important collaboration goals were achieved by forwarding 2nd and 3rd level tickets and change requests to the service partner. The specialist departments expect to be able to rely on the data quality of the BI reports. Monitoring the process chains ensures that they have been processed successfully and without errors. Or that, if necessary, errors have been rectified and processing has been restarted.

The collaboration between FHCS and cbs has been ongoing since the contract was extended. The service contract has also been extended to other business areas, such as Integrated Business Planning (IBP) and the SAP Financials system in ERP. "Additional extensions are currently being considered," reports Andreas Szlatki, Global IT Manager Analytics Processes at Freudenberg Home and Cleaning Solutions. "The most important benefits for the company are: better service quality, better availability and more flexible short-term resource allocation during peak loads," he explains.

"By using Application Management Services, we can significantly reduce the workload on our own IT and use our resources for higher-priority tasks. Our end users really appreciate the services. Thanks to the broad and deep SAP expertise of our AMS colleagues, particularly in innovative areas, we can also involve these experts in challenging projects and thus bring these projects to a successful conclusion much more quickly," continues analytics expert Szlatki.