Consolidated sales processes
Wacker Chemie has subsidiaries and sales offices in 52 countries. cbs supported the chemical group in the technical integration of the end-to-end processes with their SAP ERP system. Central to the architecture is SAP Cloud Integration, which was used for integration between Salesforce, SAP and CPQ (Configure Price Quote). Uniform structures were created at all company locations around the globe. The integration is part of the global Salesforce rollout at the long-established company, which ensures uniform structures at all locations worldwide.
Wacker Chemie, headquartered in Munich, Germany, is the global market leader in diversified chemical companies, such as polysilicon and silicone. The Group operates 23 production sites in Europe, America and Asia and sells its products in around 100 countries. In 2020, Wacker Chemie generated sales of EUR 4.69 billion with around 14,300 employees.
Wacker Chemie products are used in many high-growth end-user markets, such as automotive, electronics, construction, pharmaceuticals and food. These highly developed specialty chemical products can be found in countless everyday items. They range from cosmetic powder to breathing masks and airbags to solar cells.
Due to the grown structures at the international locations, all information in the sales process was only stored locally in the past. Processes were not coordinated. The result was inconsistent data. A central view of the processes was not possible at Wacker. This lack of transparency impaired the ability to strategically plan ahead, quickly identify sales opportunities and make the right decisions.
Wacker Chemie therefore decided to map, harmonize and integrate its global sales processes on the basis of the Salesforce platform. To this end, a pilot implementation was carried out in the first phase for the quotation process without connecting third-party systems. The goal of the second project phase was to implement the complete sales process in Salesforce. This involved integrating various applications for product information, pricing and logistics processes.
This included SAP ERP with regard to customer master data, orders and delivery information, while the existing SAP CRM system had to be connected for contacts. Product information and product catalogs were supplied from SAP Hybris. PROS' CPQ (Configure Price Quote) system was used for price determination. This is a software solution that supports sales staff in the configuration of products and simplifies the high manual effort involved in creating quotations.
SAP Cloud Integration was introduced as the integration platform to guarantee future security and the necessary flexibility. In close cooperation with the Salesforce development team, the decision was finally made in the project workshops to implement the interfaces on the basis of self-developed Apex web services. This approach enabled a targeted integration of the required data as well as the technical processes. In addition, this meant that no third-party Salesforce adapter was required in the CPI. The handling of the Salesforce Session ID was also developed in the CPI itself in order to be able to provide a valid Session ID to all processes involved at all times.
The SAP backend systems ERP and CRM were connected via the CPI with already existing IDoc and web services. In the event of an error in the interface, central error handling is triggered on the integration platform, which sends e-mails with a meaningful message and, in the case of an SAP IDoc sender system, sends back a corresponding status IDoc. Through this approach, the respective status of the transfer is visible in the ERP. The integration of product data from Hybris to PROS-CPQ posed a particular challenge, as very large amounts of data have to be sent to the target system in one transfer. The processing is done via an iterative fetch of smaller data packages (pagination logic) from Hybris, which are then collected, prepared and transferred.
