The Client

Based in Heiligenhaus, Germany, Kiekert AG is the global leader for automotive locking systems. The company, founded in 1857, employs over 4,000 people worldwide. Its range of products includes door and latch modules, system latches, central locking, remote control and electronic control locking. Kiekert is a system partner to all the renowned automobile producers. With long-term development and supply agreements, Kiekert also has access to a major new sales potential worldwide. As a competent partner in the new development of automobile locking systems, Kiekert provides considerably advanced services in its development work.

The Challenge

Because of its many years of positive experience with the R/2 System, Kiekert AG did not consider introducing R/3 to integrate existing and planned new production sites. However, new expansion and globalization plans meant that the time had come to replace the SAP R/2 5.0H System that they had been using since 1989. The changeover from R/2 to R/3 and the relevant functional system changes were supported by the pre-configured system for the automotive supplier industry. The migration was prompted by the disproportionately high operational and maintenance costs for hardware and the desire to integrate new sites, in the course of expansion and globalization, within a long-term system and application landscape.

The Solution

After just 14 months, the project team, made up of 50 team members from the area of Organization and Data Processing (OD), user departments and BearingPoint consultants, announced a successfully completed mission. In this short time, they introduced almost all logistics modules and financial accounting modules as well as HR in several sites both in Germany and the rest of Europe. In addition, the scope of the processes that were supported in R/2 was extended to include an additional range of functions in R/3. This included, for example, the introduction of an ongoing solution for manufacturing planning and execution, as well as material staging. Kiekert's requirements for the new system included:

• Reduction of stock levels during production
• Prompt confirmation of manufactured quantities
• Backflush entry of material consumption
• Management of open pallets
• Actual cost entry and variance determination
• More effective use of production resources

BearingPoint, SAP's development partner in the early days of the pre-configured system (PCS) for the automotive supplier industry - which today forms a major part of SAP Best Practices for Automotive - also relied entirely on the PCS for migration support. At the start of the migration project at Kiekert, the BearingPoint team installed the pre-configured system as a separate R/3 client in the development system (Release 4.0B) in just one day. The project team thus had an infrastructure that it could use for demonstration and test purposes from the very start of the migration.

The Benefits

The value chains in the pre-configured system helped Kiekert to visualize entire scenarios of process chains, from the first contract release order via EDI, to requirements and production planning, production, material replenishment control, quality assurance, packaging and finally shipping and billing. Many of the preconfigured processes in the PCS led to further ideas as the project proceeded. For example, the configuration data was used as the basis for ESP processing and MAIS processing, or for material replenishment control with KANBAN in connection with external procurement. A spontaneous decision was made to use a special PCS function in the Kiekert project which has become a source of considerable improvement and savings potential for their inter-company business: In order to show the complex EDI communication relationships typical for the automotive industry within the framework of the pre-configured system, both automobile manufacturers and component suppliers were modeled in the industry client. Forecast and JIT delivery schedules are sent from the manufacturer via EDI using procurement scheduling agreements, and are then integrated in R/3 SD scheduling agreements of the component supplier in the same system or client.