Community Short Facts - April 2023

Flender relies on adaptable add-on

The Flender company, which has been in existence for 120 years and focuses on mechanical and electrical drive technology in raw materials extraction, has over 8700 employees in 33 countries worldwide. Flender supplies gearboxes, couplings, generators and components which, in addition to wind turbines, are also used in numerous areas of industry, such as cement and paper factories, raw materials processing or the chemical industry. Industrial gear units are developed, manufactured and assembled at the site in Penig.

They are used, for example, in conveyor belts for coal mining in the region. Work scheduling at the Penig plant is carried out in SAP. Excel-based time calculations for production operations are prone to errors. If the calculated time value is then transferred manually to SAP, there is an additional lack of transparency: the basis of the calculation is no longer comprehensible. Machine builder Flender relies on a software solution at its Penig site that enables largely automated determination of the standard time directly in SAP. In this way, Flender has optimized the quality of its time specifications and reduced the delta between target and actual times.  

Rev-Trac and Turnkey against SAP cyberattacks

Rev-Trac, an SAP change management and DevOps orchestration company, announced that it has partnered with Turnkey Consulting, a risk management consulting firm, to address the ever-growing threat of cyberattacks on the SAP application layer. Under the agreement, Turnkey will be able to offer its customer Rev-Trac Platinum, an automated SAP change control platform. The platform enables organizations to significantly reduce risk from changes. The partnership comes at a time when the ERP industry is undergoing massive change.

The rapid acceleration of digital and cloud technologies is forcing organizations to rethink their approach to cybersecurity, unauthorized access and other vulnerabilities. SAP systems are being integrated into more departments, leading to an increase in ransomware and phishing attacks and increasing the potential attack surface, with integrations often requiring custom programming to work. With the recent increase and sophistication of cyberattacks, security practices must be integrated into the development process to prevent code vulnerabilities from moving into production.

Red Hat expands collaboration with Nvidia 

Red Hat, a provider of open source solutions, and Nvidia, a developer of GPUs and chipsets, are collaborating on RAN(Radio Access Network) deployment on industry-standard servers in hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Red Hat OpenShift's support for the Nvidia Aerial SDK and Nvidia's software-defined accelerators aims to accelerate the development of RAN, edge, AI and private 5G solutions. Red Hat OpenShift, an enterprise Kubernetes platform, now supports Nvidia's converged accelerators, the Nvidia Aerial SDK for software-defined 5G vRANs (Virtual Radio Access Networks) and AI applications - all in private data centers, multiple public clouds or at the network edge.

This gives users a composable infrastructure that can optimally meet the data requirements of compute-intensive applications in edge computing, private 5G, or AI, combined with greater flexibility, interoperability, and risk mitigation, as well as a faster return on investment. Nvidia's GPUs, DPUs and converged accelerators can offload traditional CPUs by disaggregating compute, memory and network resources. By isolating infrastructure-heavy areas, tasks can run faster and with greater confidence.

Fressnapf extends partnership with q.beyond until 2026

Fressnapf, a pet supplies company, has extended its existing framework agreement with IT service provider q.beyond and the partnership around the company's digital development by four years until the end of 2026. The contract covers numerous services, from consulting to application and IT infrastructure services. The components include, for example, the provision of SAP systems in the Hana Enterprise Cloud via Microsoft Azure, the associated application management services and comprehensive support for Fressnapf's current digitalization offensive. In the SAP environment, q.beyond will also support key future developments over and above its previous services, primarily through consulting services. This relates, for example, to the changeover to Rise or, in the future, the migration to S/4 Hana.

Fressnapf is also relying on q.beyond's consulting and application management services for the transfer of further applications to Microsoft Azure. q.beyond will continue to provide incident and application management services for the GK Software checkout systems in use at all Fressnapf stores throughout Europe. This covers the approximately 1800 Fressnapf stores in eleven European countries. In addition, q.beyond will provide the user helpdesk in six languages for the entire application landscape in all stores. For IT cloud operations, Fressnapf will continue to rely on services from q.beyond's certified high-security data centers in the coming years in order to have stable and highly available resources where data is guaranteed to remain in Germany. 

New costing software: Project controlling for product development

With the newly developed classmate Costpilot software, Simus Systems, a consulting partner for solutions for data management and cost calculation of manufacturing processes, is now expanding its offering for industrial companies. The tool calculates the costs of new products such as machines or plants already during their development on the basis of even the most extensive parts list structures. The quality of information can be improved in the course of the project from estimates to fixed prices. Project managers keep an eye on target costs, calculate product variants, document project statuses and analyze deviations.

Thanks to software tools such as CAD, PLM and simulation, almost all development projects in mechanical and plant engineering achieve their goals in terms of functionality and quality. But they often miss the cost targets. With the software, this can be changed. The software obtains the relevant data from the prevailing systems in procurement, product development and manufacturing. Along the flexible bill of materials structure, project managers and controllers can specify, allocate and monitor costs. In the event of price changes in the ERP system, for example, data can be updated automatically. In this way, the accuracy and resilience of the data grows with the progress of the project, even if one starts with incomplete and estimated values. 

Berndorf Band completes SAP conversion 

Berndorf Band, a supplier of steel strips and strip processing lines, has converted its entire ERP system to the new SAP generation S/4 Hana. The partner was the Viennese SAP consultancy CNT Management Consulting, which implemented the weighty part of the five-year digitization program within eleven months with a total of 13 consultants. The conversion was carried out in several phases based on CNT's proven step-by-step project methodology. In 2019, CNT was commissioned with a pre-study as a basis for the S/4 conversion.

With the transformation, Berndorf Band is creating the conditions for a modern digitized process environment and a solid basis for future innovation projects to optimize existing business processes. The transformation was carried out with a focus on stable business operations in order to set up innovation projects later without additional risks. Berndorf Band has been working with an ERP system from SAP for decades. The goal of the conversion, which has now been finalized, was to efficiently convert the existing system to S/4 Hana.

Fluctuation rate in Germany at 15.2 percent

The fluctuation rate in Germany and the number of job changes via recruiters continue to rise. In 2022, 5.2 million employees subject to social security contributions in Germany changed companies (15.2 percent). This is an increase of 2.7 percentage points compared to the pre-Corona year 2019. Recruitment agencies were involved in 30.3 percent of job changes - equivalent to 1.59 million placements in 2022. The number of people who are dissatisfied with their job and want to change employer continues to rise.

One-third of professionals have entered into or are actively considering a new employment relationship in 2022. This equates to 11.5 million professionals who are open to a new direction. More than half of the professionals (55.6 percent) are aiming for a management position with the job change. More room to maneuver is almost as important as a higher salary. By contrast, increased inflation and economic uncertainties played only a minor role in 2022: Only a minority (23.6 percent) said they were more open to changing jobs because of the current situation. More than half of the professionals said they were less open to a new employer as a result.

FIS and Medienwerft are SAP CX Expert

FIS Informationssysteme und Consulting and Medienwerft - Agentur für digitale Medien und Kommunikation jointly received SAP CX Expert status at the beginning of the year. It shows companies the way to find the right consulting and implementation partner for their business challenges in the cloud. CX Expert Status is the highest partner status in SAP's Customer Experience (CX) world and part of the new Competency Framework for Cloud Business. FIS and Medienwerft have received it as a group because the two complement each other perfectly.

FIS specializes in consulting and implementing SAP projects for retail and industry, while Medienwerft develops e-commerce applications and digital communication concepts for brands. Both bring around 30 years of expertise to the table and offer their customers an end-to-end view. Together, they cover the complete range of SAP Customer Experience topics: from strategy and technological implementation to integration into corporate processes.

Eissmann launches Lojistix in the Czech Republic 

Eissmann Automotive has implemented WSW Software's Lojistix JIS and logistics platform at its plant in Bor, Czech Republic, and is using it to handle JIS processes smoothly, stably and securely with a customer that is a Tier 1 supplier to BMW. Eissmann laminates and assembles around 600 seat back shells per day in Bor for the new BMW 7 series and delivers them in sequence to the assembly lines of a Czech plant of this Tier 1 supplier. The modular client-server application from WSW Software provides numerous preconfigured process modules and can be flexibly adapted to individual JIS requirements. 

In this way, Eissmann can map the JIS processes outside the SAP ERP system (SAP ECC 6.0) autonomously in a highly available JIS solution and continue to supply customers just in sequence in the event of a failure of the ERP solution. Another advantage is that WSW Software has a standard connector in its portfolio, the SAP ERP Integration Package, via which Lojistix can be linked to SAP ERP and which enables data exchange between the applications. The solution also offers future security after a switch to S/4 Hana, which Eissmann is planning at a later date, and important requirements are also met from a technical perspective.

SNP Glue 2211 certified by SAP for integration

Heidelberg-based software and consulting company SNP Schneider-Neureither & Partner SE, a provider of software for digital transformation, automated data migration and data management in the SAP environment, announced that its SNP Glue 2211 software product has been certified as integrated with Rise with S/4 Hana. SNP Glue is a software solution that connects confidential data sources to any innovation platform in real time, empowering customers to make critical decisions quickly. SNP Glue supports connectivity with cloud platforms and enables the democratization of data through enterprise-grade data extraction that does not require direct database access.

It is a modular software that can be implemented directly into an SAP source system and connected to cloud data platforms. The software supports replication of data from a wide range of SAP data sources in near real-time via powerful, enterprise-optimized change data capture. It also supports all major cloud providers and technologies, including specific integration with Snowflake and Google Cortex. This enables enterprises to synchronize critical SAP data with their cloud-based application.

Partnerships and innovations

SAP announced key innovations and partnerships that enable customers to access business-critical data. As a result, they gain key insights faster and can make better decisions. SAP is introducing the Datasphere solution, the next generation of its data management portfolio. It enables customers to easily access ready-to-use data across the entire data landscape. It also announced strategic partnerships with industry-leading data and AI companies Collibra, Confluent, Databricks and DataRobot. The partnerships extend Datasphere and allow companies to build a unified data architecture that securely brings together SAP software and third-party data.