Hana in logistics
The family-owned company Kaeser is one of the world's leading manufacturers and suppliers of products and services in the field of compressed air.
The company is an SAP reference customer. It has been using SAP since 1993 and the logistics processes of the industrial company were also implemented via the SAP system at an early stage.
The SAP reference user has been gaining experience with the conversion to SAP Business Suite on Hana for more than a year.
"The logistics processes have benefited greatly from the switch to Hana. We have much improved evaluation options and significant increases in performance.
Processing in incoming goods has become 20 percent faster, we have 40 percent more picks and are now twice as fast in packaging"
reports Peter Schmidt from Kaeser's IT organization.
Connection transport service provider
When the central database is migrated to Hana, the add-ons such as "M.TransportCommunicator" are also migrated to Hana. Peter Schmidt explains why Kaeser attaches great importance to the SAP extension.
Mercoline's M.TransportCommunicator was introduced to handle shipping orders to freight forwarders as well as courier, express and parcel (CEP) services directly from SAP.
M.TransportCommunicator is an add-on for SAP ERP based on SAP standard structures that does not need to be updated separately, even during an SAP version upgrade.
The add-on provides the CEP interfaces to all relevant transport service providers that are otherwise missing from SAP.
"We didn't want to clarify the data interfaces with each transport service provider individually and set them up in the SAP system. This is now in one hand with Mercoline and we only have one partner to coordinate with. That is a great advantage"
says the IT organizer at Kaeser.
The industrial company processes the shipping orders in SAP EWM and creates all shipping orders for CEPs and freight forwarders in SAP ERP. Once the order is complete, the finished label is printed.
The shipping label is generated individually for the respective CEP or freight forwarder. Subsequently, the electronic data exchange with the CEPs and forwarders, e.g. of manifest or tracking data, also takes place directly from the SAP ERP system.
Kaeser has clear requirements for its service providers. The add-ons must also function perfectly under Hana and the service provider must have the Hana know-how to transform all links and interlocks from the old to the new system without errors.
"Migrating a historically grown system to Hana and on to S/4 Hana is not a no-brainer and should be prepared and implemented very carefully"
is how Peter Schmidt describes the challenge.
"However, the integration of the M.TransportCommunicator under Hana was unproblematic and was implemented without delays. For the employees in packaging, the applications run in the background.
You will continue to automatically receive the correct label for each shipper to affix."
The actual performance advantage of the add-on can be seen in the system dialogs and evaluations.
"This is where we have performance gains under Hana."
Peter Schmidt summarizes the experience.
Next Step S/4 Hana Migration
The next step to S/4 Hana is in preparation at Kaeser and the S/4 Hana version of M.TransportCommunicator is already available.
Mercoline has already carried out the necessary tests and adjustments to the new ERP generation. Here, the IT organizer expects further improvements once again.
