Transforming decentralized SME’s to an European enterprise

The Story

The client is a long-established family company and is numbered among Europe’s leading manufacturers of solar shading. The products delivered are measured and manufactured individually for each specific order. Historically, the client has grown from different European SME’s over decades. From an organisational perspective the SME’s have been highly autonomous in their operations. From a technical perspective each SME employed their own business software for sales and production – highly isolated solutions without any integration. Handling orders spanning different SME’s in different countries has therefore been a big hurdle. Transparency on flows of goods and financial flows has been a big challenge. Furthermore, the business software used in Switzerland had been declared end-of life adding significant pressure on the group management. PROCOMM consulted the client on this challenge and successfully implemented a group-level solution which is now rolled-out in 4 countries.

The Solution

The solution consists of a large-scale project spanning the following business domains on group-level:

• Finance & Controlling
• HR
• Sales
• Production & Logistics
• Service
• IT

Organisationally, the following new internal teams have been ramped up:

• Internal ERP team
• Internal Software-Development team
• Internal Business Rules team

Technically, the following key building blocks have been designed and introduced:

• ERP for the quote to cash process across all SME’s (Dynamics AX 2012 R2)
• Product Configurator containing 60’000 business rules for sales and prodution
• Contact Center software for call center agents
• Mobile App for field service technicians
• Appointment Planner for service managers
• Print-Engine for materialization of production instructions
• Analytics & Business Intelligence for Finance and HR
• Legacy Workflow System integration
• KABA attendance recorder integration
• Mobile-based attendance recording integration
• Invoice approval process automation
• Local payroll integrations

The Result

The solution has been successfully rolled-out in Switzerland, France, Italy and Austria. Some of the major achievements are listed below:

• Platform: A common platform at group-level has been established.
• Synergies: Manual work accross SME’s has been reduced in sales and production.
• Intercompany-Trade: Orders are routed and invoiced automatically across SME’s.
• Reporting: Financial reporting on level of group, legal entity and project.
• Lifecycle: Phase-out of mission-critical business softwaree that has been end-of-life.
• Operational costs: Application portfolio and related costs have been reduced.