Commitment to Innovation with SAP Industry Solution / All for One Midmarket AG and WITTENSTEIN AG
Filderstadt, 24 April 2010 – Flagship companies within the German machinery and equipment manufacturing industry, which witnessed an unprecedented decline in business in 2009, are now increasingly turning to innovations and investing ahead of the economic recovery. One example is the comprehensive framework agreement signed between WITTENSTEIN AG, Igersheim, and All for One Midmarket AG. This agreement calls for this SAP full-service provider to implement its SAP Business All in One industry solution All for Machine within the globally operating corporate group that specialises in mechatronic drive systems. WITTENSTEIN AG’s current application landscape – Baan 4 and satellite systems – will be replaced successively. The contract is valued at about EUR 1.8 million.
Klaus Spitzley, the Chief Financial Officer of WITTENSTEIN AG: »Despite our tremendous pace of innovation, we never want to find ourselves in the position of having outgrown our enterprise software. This is precisely the reason why our selection process was anything but easy and involved a year and a half of carefully exploring and comparing options before finally choosing All for One’s SAP industry solution.«
Dr. Erwin Schuster, Head of Information Management at WITTENSTEIN AG, added: »We decided on SAP and the All for Machine solution from All for One after conducting extensive preliminary investigations and a detailed business case analysis. Behind all this is an ambitious business-value strategy: Our future IT must support global supply chain management processes and open the way for new business models. We are already well advanced conceptually in this respect and now want to put the ideas into action together with All for One.«
The framework agreement between WITTENSTEIN and All for One goes beyond the classic ERP functional areas and includes the SAP SCM components »Extended Manufacturing« (for production sites) and »Demand Planning« (for sales-oriented locations). Together, the two will offer improved planning and control options in the production and logistics networks that span WITTENSTEIN’s worldwide manufacturing locations and even include its partners. With the help of its specialised forecast tools, »Demand Planning« will enable future needs to be more accurately predicted across the entire supply chain.
Standard Instead of Customised Programming
All for One Midmarket AG’s extensive industry experience means that it thoroughly understands machinery and equipment manufacturers’ core requirements, processes and business models. The SAP Business All in One industry solution All for Machine will form the basis and standard environment for the new SAP application at the WITTENSTEIN Group. Microsoft SQL will be used as the database and the Microsoft Windows Server 2008 was chosen as operating system. The rollout project will follow the »active prototyping« implementation methodology as developed by All for One. This methodology allows the SAP installation to be made in larger midmarket companies that place extremely extensive demands on their new enterprise software, and mostly without the need for additional customised programming. The delta analyses between All for Machine’s ready-made processes on the one side and a given project’s target requirements on the other side normally reveal a high degree of standard coverage, which greatly simplifies the implementation project as a whole. For All for One CEO Lars Landwehrkamp this agreement with the flagship company WITTENSTEIN AG has a real signalling effect: »The machinery and equipment manufacturing industry is back«.