SAP Customer Success Story | Industrial Machinery and Components | Kaeser Kompressoren

Kaeser Kompressoren: SAP® Application Visualization Revolutionizes Business Process Development

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SAP Customer Success Story | Industrial Machinery and Components | Kaeser Kompressoren

CompanyKaeser Kompressoren AG

HeadquartersCoburg, Germany

Industry, products, and servicesIndustrial machinery and components – air compressors and consulting services

Web sitewww.kaeser.com

SAP® solutions and servicesSAP® Application Visualization software by iRise and SAP Consulting

Street dreams, beer streams – compressed air everywhereA chic woman perched on a low concrete wall lunches on a hot dog and a soda. A man in a custom-painted auto with a case of beer in the trunk cruises by. What do they have in common? Oddly enough, Kaeser air compressors. From auto paint ovens and beer carbonation to meat packaging and concrete, Kaeser air compressors figure in a huge range of products. And Kaeser Kompressoren AG meets its own high-pressure business needs with solutions from SAP.

In automotive paint bays, a supply of clean, dry air is mandatory when applying finishes that won’t crackle or flake away over time. Kaeser is the sup-plier of choice. In the food and beverage sector, in-dustrial gases such as nitrogen are used to ensure contamination-free packaging, along with the thick, creamy head that some brewers promote. Kaeser air compressors supply the gas. In fact, Kaeser air compressors are found virtually everywhere, from mundane concrete production to extraordinary winery wastewater treatment and recycling.

Kaeser’s ability to provide reliable and efficient compressed air products and complete automated control systems relies on something as arcane as master data governance (MDG). To customize its MDG solution, Kaeser first created an interactive, high-fidelity visualization of the application using the SAP® Application Visualization software by iRise. The results blew new life into the MDG process – and higher quality into Kaeser com-pressors industry-wide.

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SAP Customer Success Story | Industrial Machinery and Components | Kaeser Kompressoren

A transparent new process of master data governanceA global enterprise, Kaeser Kompressoren is one of the world’s premier suppliers of compressed air products and related services. Headquartered in Coburg, Germany, it employs approximately 4,500 people.

In the process of running its business, Kaeser runs almost the complete set of SAP Business Suite ap-plications. The company has been using the software long enough to recognize that some applications need customization. “There are areas like finance or human resources where you can use SAP software in a more or less standard way,” says Falko Lameter, CIO of Kaeser. “When it comes to customization, then you would concentrate on the most important core processes of the company. For us, these are sales and service.”

In that regard, one of the processes Kaeser needed to address was master data governance. With opera-tions virtually worldwide, master data governance is a critical function of the business with important implications for customer service.

“Master data governance is huge because it covers the complete enterprise,” says Lameter. “So it’s es-sential that your approach be a good one before you attempt to apply it to the complete enterprise. The purpose of this project was to implement a solution that supported a new and very transparent approach to master data governance.”

“With our master data governance project, we are developing a solution that could prove to be a foundation for a general IT governance process.”Falko Lameter, CIO, Kaeser Kompressoren AG

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SAP Customer Success Story | Industrial Machinery and Components | Kaeser Kompressoren

Visualization that looks and acts like the desired solution“In the past, software customization projects have always involved lots of changes and accompanying budget overruns,” recalls Jewgeni Kravets of SAP Consulting. “So I recommended to the Kaeser IT people that they look at SAP Application Visualiza-tion software by iRise as an alternative approach to project design and specification.” This project would then point the way toward Kaeser’s future custom-ization undertakings.

SAP Application Visualization enables users to rap-idly create an integrated, interactive view of an entire solution design, or parts of it, depending upon their needs. These visualizations help illustrate to stake-holders how standard and nonstandard elements of SAP and partner software would look and interact in supporting a new process. This working preview,

which can be completed in a matter of hours, en-compasses integrated workflows, interfaces to existing solutions, and custom requirements. The visualization looks and behaves exactly like the de-sired solution so that stakeholders can “test-drive” and fully experience the proposed vision for the application design and provide feedback before any expensive coding takes place.

The end result is a complete “picture” of require-ments that anyone can understand and that helps ensure both business and IT are fully aligned around what’s needed and how to execute on it. In most cases, business analysts and functional experts can learn and master the software functionality in less than a day.

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SAP Customer Success Story | Industrial Machinery and Components | Kaeser Kompressoren

Fast implementation, short training periodAccording to Kravets, Kaeser was uncertain about implementing the visualization software at the out-set. Initially, the plan was for only a few licenses, just to get a sense of the software and help safeguard one specific project. But Kaeser very quickly added several more seats, ultimately licensing the software for all in-house business analysts and application owners who collaborate with business departments.

The software was installed in just a few hours with remote support from SAP. Training took another day and a half. “Within just three months, we identified our business requirements and launched the first visual prototype of our MDG solution,” says Lameter. All relevant in-house business analysts and applica-tion owners were trained on the software to create the high-fidelity visualizations. The actual business users themselves, however, needed no training to work with the visualizations, “test-drive” the planned application, and validate the business requirements and user interfaces.

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3 monthsTime to application

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SAP Customer Success Story | Industrial Machinery and Components | Kaeser Kompressoren

Support for clearly defined roles and responsibilitiesKaeser used the SAP Application Visualization soft-ware to envision the entire master data governance solution prior to establishing it as a company stan-dard. IT developers and business analysts worked with the business departments to establish each role required, along with the fields needed to meet each role’s responsibilities. With the elimination up front of a continuing parade of change requests, the

project developers were able to establish a fixed price for the project.

“I think the users like it,” says Lameter. “They im-mediately started using it. There was no critical com-ment, and this is very important; usually when you implement an application, you have some critical feedback.”

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SAP Customer Success Story | Industrial Machinery and Components | Kaeser Kompressoren

Substantial time saved and huge costs avoidedWorking with SAP Application Visualization, it be-came clear that the solution implementation would benefit by waiting one month for a new enhance-ment package, which included a more flexible SAP user interface. By opting for the new enhancement package over the existing one, Kaeser cut develop-ment time by approximately 50%. It also avoided the expense of deploying two enhancement packages instead of one.

Substantial time was also saved in the specification of the new solution. In addition, there was an end to the enormous expenses that come with repeated specification change requests associated with the recognition of new roles and new field require-ments. “With SAP Application Visualization software, communication between IT and the business was certainly much easier,” says Lameter. “Because the business department could now see how the appli-cation works and could, let us say, feel and smell it.”

The result was a more harmonious – and certainly faster and less costly – development of processes and associated software within the company. The problem of communication between IT and business – and the arduous translation of those communications into actual processes and software programs – has been solved.

There is, however, occasional confusion. “We have to take care to inform the business people that while the visualization of the solution preview looks like a real application, it isn’t one,” says Kravets. “You can’t go live with this, it’s just a spec.”

50%Process development

time avoided

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More process improvements aheadAccording to Lameter, Kaeser’s master data gover-nance project will ultimately improve the quality of all its product- and customer-related processes. What’s more, he sees the potential for SAP Applica-tion Visualization to be applied in other SAP and non-SAP software development projects aimed at improving business processes across the entire Kaeser organization and beyond.

Lameter believes such projects will help Kaeser to better serve its customers. “High-quality information about our products and business partners helps us provide our customers with compressed air supplies at the low costs and high availability they need to run efficient manufacturing processes,” he says.

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Why SAP

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