PRÜFTECHNIK is an innovative German company with more than 600 employees working in its corporate divisions, and subsidiaries worldwide. With extensive R&D operations PRÜFTECHNIK offers innovative solutions to customers in machine alignment, condition monitoring, and nondestructive testing. Established in 1972 by Dieter Busch, PRÜFTECHNIK is a family-owned business now under the second-generation stewardship of Dr. Sebastian Busch and serves over 70 countries.
Challenges
PRÜFTECHNIK applications range from condition monitoring, geometrical alignment over nondestructive testing to turbine alignment and vibration analysis in over a dozen industries, ranging from automotive, chemical and food & beverage, to wind and marine. The company uses SAP daily for logistics such as production planning, financials, and sales and distribution to manage the global business. Business divisions operate independently and benefit from central services of the holding company. This streamlined organizational structure allows the organization to operate efficiently in the world market. It’s also how PRÜFTECHNIK’s data management is structured.
Solution
Migration to S/4HANA: The Big Move
Many companies are anxious to migrate to S/4HANA to take advantage of the digital world. PRÜFTECHNIK wanted to get there as well, so they planned a complete conversion of the existing SAP Business Suite system to SAP S/4HANA. To successfully implement S/4HANA on-premises edition and reap the benefits of the efficiencies, Dr. H.-J. Schwieger and his team were interested in how to do this the very best way. Questions they had in planning included: Can we gain new efficiencies across our organization with this migration to S/4HANA? Could we reengineer our master data in Excel as we uploaded the data universes into S/4HANA by using Process Runner? Could we mass reassign new numbers to all material master data with this migration? The answer in every case was a resounding ‘yes’.
Schwieger described the migration to S/4HANA as a process in which what could or should have been very complex was relatively simple with Process Runner. “When we began using Process Runner to migrate to S/4HANA we had one repeated scenario that was applied to each process. It was reengineering data with our migration to S/4HANA. First, we would download the master data from SAP ERP by Process Runner. Then, using Excel, we would make the customizations and upload the new changes. For example, material master data was augmented with the MRP Process and Product Planning information. Then we’d upload the Excel tables with the re-engineered master data to S/4HANA by Process Runner through assigning new numbers to the new material master data. It’s been that simple for us,” remarks Dr. Schwieger. “Process Runner is fast, so changes occur in seconds.”
PRÜFTECHNIK works with a highly sophisticated SAP Solution for PP/SD Variant Conguration. Before they started the migration, they took time to disaggregate all business processes, about 40 in total. They migrated the master data for each Variant Conguration Model separately to fully understand how it worked. The reengineering process is clearly arranged and comprehensible for everyone. Schwieger said he’s glad he took the extra time upfront to improve the processes and data. It’s made such a great difference in PRÜFTECHNIK’s business already.
“PRÜFTECHNIK did this same simple routine for around 40 common processes within our SAP team. This remarkable accomplishment within a migration process widely improved operation at PRÜFTECHNIK,” Schwieger deduced. PRÜFTECHNIK accomplished the goal set out to get the best practices and an improved reengineered set of processes. By taking this disaggregate approach and putting Process Runner at the center of new data management processes on SAP S/4HANA made it all possible.
