Community Short Facts - February 2023

Round of awards

The Austrian SAP consulting company CNT experienced a veritable awards show at the SAP Quality Award Ceremony 2022 in Vienna. Three of the twelve award-winning showcase projects for the digitization of business processes were accompanied by CNT, and two of them were named Grand Winners. The award ceremony took place in mid-November last year at the Grand Hotel Bristol on Vienna's Ringstrasse. The Tyrolean wood processor Pfeifer Holding secured the Grand Winner Award in the Business Transformation category. The Upper Austrian fire department supplier Rosenbauer won the category Rapid Time to Value as Grand Winner. In addition, CNT's consulting team with project manager Tina Tichy received a Quality Award in the Rapid Time to Value category together with the listed real estate developer UBM Development. UBM scored points for significantly accelerating its business transformation with the S/4 platform.

Brownfield Migration

SAP partner Syntax supported the Franz Schabmüller group of companies in its switch to SAP S/4: With the successful brownfield conversion, the automotive group laid the foundation for technological sustainability. The upgrade to the new version became necessary because various functions for ECC 6.0 were no longer being developed and the system was increasingly proving to be a brake on innovation and performance. Due to the successful changeover, the group of companies has a lean standard platform that can be controlled with little effort and is able to use synergies, benefit from further developments as well as standard functions in S/4 and implement new functionalities itself.

The desired introduction of Fiori has also been successful and corresponding apps are continuously being created. First and foremost, the Automotive Group was concerned with laying a stable foundation for the future with S/4. The project began with a kick-off and the subsequent construction of the sandbox system. The IT team brought the business departments on board for the extensive testing as part of the changeover and S/4 brownfield conversion. And even interim hurdles such as a system move to a new IP network and incompatible plug-ins as well as third-party software could not throw the partners off course. Following the successful S/4 transformation, the Franz Schabmüller Group is now focusing on exploiting the potential of the new platform and Fiori.

SAP partner Swan grows

Swan can look back on a successful year. Despite the economic as well as political challenges, the project house for SAP logistics expects a 13 percent increase in sales compared to the previous year by the end of the year. Important milestones towards this goal were the successful completion of the integration of the SAP division of the SSI Schäfer Group into the company, which began in 2021, the expansion of the Swan management team and the founding of Swan AT in Graz.

In addition to the successful project business in the area of SAP EWM in the automotive, food and beverages, pharmaceuticals, and fashion industries, the company focused on the consistent expansion of the SAP Transportation Management (SAP TM) division in 2022. For 2023, the project house is also aiming to further sharpen its product portfolio and corporate values. As in 2022, high investments in employee training and development are again on the agenda.

One-Click SAP Security Patch

New SAP Security Platform Patch Management Solution Automatically Identifies Security Patches and Enables Their Installation at the Click of a Mouse. SAP security provider SecurityBridge unveiled a new feature of its security platform: One-Click SAP Security Patch Automation provides instant visibility into missing security patches to identify the ones needed, without tedious filtering of false positives. With the latest enhancement, existing SAP customers can automate patch management procedures with a single click. Every second Tuesday of the month, SAP releases security updates to customers.

Immediately after the vulnerabilities are announced, criminals set about finding vulnerable systems and developing toolkits to exploit them. Many companies lack the skilled personnel to identify among the new patches the ones relevant to their systems and therefore often postpone this time-consuming task. The One-Click SAP Security Patch therefore automatically identifies the relevant security patches, ranks them by severity and enables their installation with one click. In addition, SAP user companies automatically receive notifications about particularly serious security vulnerabilities so that they can quickly secure business-critical systems.

SAP Private Cloud

The Fischer Group from Baden, a supplier of longitudinally welded stainless steel tubes and components, is harmonizing its global system landscape and is relying on a homogeneous solution from the private cloud of Rise. In 2021, the more than 2800 employees worldwide had a turnover of around 750 million euros. In order to equip the company for future challenges in terms of systems technology, the Fischer Group is currently modernizing its global IT landscape from the ground up and consistently moving all systems to the cloud with the Rise with SAP solution. This is because the SAP cloud is not only scalable as required, but also guarantees the necessary high availability and reliability. And it does so around the clock, 365 days a year.

In the future, Rise in the Private Cloud Edition will form the basis for business processes, the integration of all companies and maximum transparency at the Fischer Group. In the coming years, the Fischer Group intends to replace all stand-alone systems with SAP software and thus establish a homogeneous system landscape from the SAP cloud worldwide. For example, in the future, foreign trade processes will be controlled via the SAP Global Trade Services, Edition for Hana application, electronic data will be archived via content servers at the touch of a button, and group-wide reporting will be professionalized via the SAP Analytics Cloud solution.

Accelerators for Data Integration

SAP inventory customers can use real-time data delivery and transformation for order to cash, financial analytics and inventory management to improve their cloud analytics with AWS, Databricks or Snowflake and increase the value and impact of SAP data. Qlik announced that its suite of SAP accelerators is now available on Cloud Data Integration, an Enterprise Integration Platform as a Service (eiPaaS). From real-time integration and automated transformation to delivering analytics-ready data and BI dashboards in the cloud, these pre-configured solution templates address the entire data supply chain for SAP data.

The Accelerators are now fully available in the Qlik Cloud. They help customers reduce cost, risk and time to value for SAP data in popular solutions such as Order to Cash, Financial Analytics and Inventory Management. Whether Amazon Web Services (AWS), Databricks or Snowflake, customers can feed their cloud platforms of choice with SAP data from the cloud. Qlik's long experience in transforming and delivering SAP data, combined with its SaaS services offering, makes it possible to use the most important SAP-related data for decision-making directly in the cloud.

Rosenbauer deletes SAP requirements

Austrian fire equipment supplier Rosenbauer has converted its international procurement, manufacturing and sales systems to S/4 Hana. Following the successful rollout in Switzerland, the next implementation stage is planned at the production site in Slovenia. The project partner for this major project is the Viennese SAP consultancy CNT. As a fire equipment supplier, the global group supplies almost all international markets and produces for them at 16 locations and on three continents. After the successful blueprint phase, the next step was the implementation and rollout of the Rosenbauer service and sales location in Switzerland. Here, vehicles built at other locations are completed for the local market in accordance with individual customer requirements.

The Swiss CNT project management had the task of mapping the sales and procurement processes in SAP and integrating logistics into the existing finance and controlling processes. Gregor Graf, the responsible Rosenbauer project manager, is very satisfied with the result: "With S/4 Hana, we now map all sales, service, and external procurement processes as well as manufacturing processes in one system. Materials management and intercompany processes are also directly integrated into the logistics system of the other companies. The Swiss site is thus fully connected to the central Rosenbauer system. This simplifies many processes and increases transparency."

SAP existing customer Rosenbauer from Austria is a leading global manufacturer of vehicles for firefighting operations and now also an S/4 user.

Milkman in SAP Store

Milkman announced that its Last Mile platform is available on SAP Store, the online marketplace for SAP and partner offerings. Through integration with SAP Transport Management and SAP Commerce Cloud, the Milkman Last Mile platform provides real-time information on delivery status and rescheduling options. "I am both proud and flattered that our platform is in the SAP store," said Antonio Perini, CEO of Milkman. "We are right at the intersection of a sustainable consumer experience and the digital supply chain.

The complexity of today's omnichannel fulfillment networks is the most exciting challenge of all." The Milkman Last Mile platform connects the needs of recipients and businesses, enabling logistics and retail companies to make greener deliveries through fewer miles driven and lower CO₂ emissions thanks to advanced route optimization algorithms, combined with efficient delivery processes for successful first delivery attempts.

Coop Danmark with S/4

It is one of the world's largest transformation programs with SAP in the food retail industry: The Danish retail group Coop Danmark has replaced existing host solutions with a completely new back-end IT infrastructure with S/4 Hana. KPS provided support for the implementation. As a result, Coop benefits from numerous advantages such as more efficient workflows, lower working capital, better supplier management, optimized product range availability and faster time to market for IT innovations. As part of its digitization strategy, Coop wanted to modernize and future-proof its outdated logistics systems.

To achieve this, Coop needed end-to-end transparency along the entire value chain. A completely new backend IT infrastructure with S/4 was to serve as the technological basis for this. The seamless integration of the Coop app, the existing warehouses, the checkout systems, and the e-commerce web store was also part of the project. KPS focused on a high degree of standardization and an SAP landscape that conforms as closely as possible to the standards in order to be able to implement enhancements agilely and easily in a short time and to be able to import SAP updates promptly at any time.

AI Service Center Berlin-Brandenburg

The Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI) will be the location for the AI Service Center Berlin-Brandenburg. This was approved by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) on November 1 last year. Over the next three years, it will fund the establishment and operation of a high-performance AI service center as part of its AI strategy. The aim of the AI service centers is to establish an IT infrastructure for high-performance AI computing centers in Germany that is open to AI users from science, industry and society and offers sufficient computing power capacity. "With the Berlin-Brandenburg AI Service Center, we are addressing in particular those interested in machine learning, one of the key AI technologies, who have already taken the first step and are now faced with the question of how to move from an initial trial of ML to productive use.

So, for example, the question must be decided whether ML should be operated by cloud resources or on own resources. And if the latter, how should such an infrastructure be configured and operated, depending on the application at hand? We offer all interested parties a heterogeneous experimental environment, including consulting," says HPI Professor Holger Karl, who is in charge of setting up the AI Service Center and the Department of Internet Technologies and Softwareization.

SAP planning tools

South Tyrolean SAP inventory customer Intercable has put its inventory and production planning on a new footing. Thanks to the addition of the PP/DS (Production Planning and Detailed Scheduling) component to the existing SAP S/4 system, the company is now able to plan its manufacturing processes in a forward-looking and resource-efficient manner, explains Intercable CIO Christian Feichter. The new SAP solution enables the detailed planning of around 250 workstations, over 4500 production resources/tools and over 26,000 alternative sequences, including 60,000 production resource/tool assignments. Capacity and shift planning is carried out in SAP Fiori design, which also ensures user-friendliness.

Particularly convenient for planning: the visual display of order types, status changes, setup groups, setup-dependent setup times and production progress. The Intercable Group originally comes from the toolmaking sector, but is now a European automotive supplier for hybrid and e-vehicles and a developer of plant and grounding technology for the energy and rail sectors. The CNT team was able to merge all relevant master data and planning components within two months in such a way that high lead times and unnecessary inventories will be a thing of the past in the future.

Archive Interface Certification

Aveniq is the first Swiss company and the second SAP partner worldwide to achieve certification for the CMIS archive interface in the S/4 Cloud in combination with the cloud-based archiving solution AdActa. Although SAP archive interfaces (Archive Link) have been around for 15 years, the CMIS interface within the highly available and secure S/4 Cloud is new. The Active-CMIS interface provided by AdActa in the Microsoft Azure cloud bridges the gap between the SAP and Microsoft worlds by connecting to Microsoft 365. For example, it grants access to documents that started with a process in SAP but should end up in the familiar Office 365 environment.

The interface enables audit-compliant storage in the cloud for cloud- and non-cloud-based solutions and end-to-end documentation of business processes to ensure compliance across systems. Through the SAP metadata attribution, all filters are available for searching within MS SharePoint due to the CMIS interface. Finding the right text passage in a document is thus no longer a full-text gamble in the future. The categorization of archived documents from an SAP Enterprise structure is supported, as is the merging of ERP and Office documents in a file plan to increase productivity and transparency.

Automation of SAP operations

Avantra, an AIOps platform for automating SAP operations, announced the launch of version 23. The upgrade provides automated SAP security analytics through workflow automation templates for SAP system updates. Research from Deloitte shows that 55 percent of IT budgets are spent on maintaining operations and only 19 percent on building innovative new capabilities. John Appleby, CEO of Avantra, explains, "There is so much to do in enterprise IT operations, but not enough people to do it.

So we need to look at these people as automators, not users. That's the talent shift that needs to happen in our industry." The automation engine provides updated and customizable workflow templates. With the ability to automate SAP system updates, operations teams have more time to focus on higher value-added projects. The system update also supports Oracle and Sybase databases, currently a key migration project for many customers in addition to Hana.